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Google Puts the Brakes On Saving the World
An anonymous reader sends along a sharp and snarky article that takes Google to task for taking longer than expected to award $10M in its competition to find and fund world-bettering ideas. The submitter comments, "After using its tenth birthday as occasion to solicit philanthropic ideas from Web users through its Project 10^100, Google appears to have backed off from its commitment to provide $10 million in funding to the winner. While the company was supposed to reveal the Project 10^100 winner in February, Google has since delayed the vote once and now suspended it indefinitely, due to the overwhelming response — Google says it received 150,000 entries. A Google spokeswoman wouldn't commit to a new date, saying only it would be delayed 'for a while longer.' She further apologized for the company's 'over optimistic assumptions about how quickly we could analyze all the ideas that we've received.'"
If you needed work, I don't think you would consider yourself "rabid". They are doing what they have to do.
Not to be an apologist, just stating facts...
Interestingly, Bill Gates solicited submissions similar to the ones the Google contest was intended to solicit, back in the mid 1990s, prior to completing his book "The Road Ahead". This was right around the time he founded "the William H. Gates Foundation", which was later renamed to "the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_%26_Melinda_Gates_Foundation
He did this with an initial $94 million stock gift.
Now, while he's technically not identical to Microsoft... he's probably close enough.
-- Terry