Google Tries Not To Be a Black Hole of Brilliance

theodp writes "Google says it's declined to pursue awesome job prospects to avoid an over-concentration of brilliance at the search giant. Speaking at the Supernova conference, Google VP Bradley Horowitz said the company intentionally leaves some brainpower outside its walls: 'I recently had a discussion with an engineer at Google and I pointed out a handful of people that I thought were fruitful in the industry and I proposed that we should hire these people,' said Horowitz. 'But [the engineer] stopped me and said: "These people are actually important to have outside of Google. They're very Google people that have the right philosophies around these things, and it's important that we not hire these guys. It's better for the ecosystem to have an honest industry, as opposed to aggregating all this talent at Google."'"

Comments

Re:Google's not the only one...

[mcrbids]

Unfortunately, you have to be very, very careful with trademarks. Once it's gone, it's gone.

Red Hat was *forced* by law, in order to protect shareholder interests, to preserve its trademark. I don't begrudge them this, because in every other way, they've been just wonderful.

But go ahead and put this idea to the test! Make your own search engine! Make it a wrapper for google searches, call it "Gaggle". Be up front about the fact that you are doing Google searches, and see just how long it takes for Google's legal department to get in touch with you. Because it's the law, and they *have to* in order to preserve their brand name.

That's why Apple Computer's had such a hard time (legally) getting into the music business, because of Apple Records! Feel free to search to see just how much trouble Apple has had dealing with this little technicality...