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Google Preparing To Launch G-Town
theodp writes "The Mercury News reports that Google's aggressive online growth increasingly has a counterpart in bricks and mortar, with the company's Mountain View HQ mushrooming in the past four years to occupy more than 4 million square feet. And that's just for starters. On Silicon Valley's NASA Ames base, Google is preparing to build a new corporate campus with fitness and day care facilities and — in a first in the valley — employee housing, adding 1.2 million sqare feet to Google's real estate holdings. 'I don't want to say it's the new company town,' said commercial real estate VP Gregory M. Davies of Google's role, 'but it's not far from it.' Presumably, no anti-suicide nets will be needed for this one."
Why start your own country when you can buy (representatives of) existing countries?
Considering the cost of home ownership(and rentals for that matter) in the Bay area/San Jose area, this is pretty obvious. They attract a lot of people out of college who simply can't afford to live within any reasonable distance of the facility. So they rent/buy in places like Tracy, which are 90+minutes away. It would be nice if more companies did this.
http://simpsons.wikia.com/wiki/Cypress_Creek
Hah! Poverty in Google Town, that's a good one!
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I don't think I could live in a town that will probably stay in beta forever.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Timothy hit it on the head on this one. Google probably owns the "souls" (online personalities) of its employees more than any country in the world. To own their physical lives too seems like a consolidation of too much power.
I worked in Colorado for a company headquartered in Sunnyvale. They used to fly us out from CO and we'd work in silicon valley for Colorado wages, staying in corporate housing. I loved it because I sublet my apartment in CO out so I was essentially staying for free. Top that off with all the overtime I was working in a place that I didn't technically live (yet) and thus didn't have many friends to go out partying with.
Then they wanted to bring some of us out to CA to live permanently, but didn't want to give us the cost of living adjustments. In order to pacify us they let us stay in the company housing with less than cost-of-living raises, making less than we should but compensating the low pay by covering the housing cost. It worked out really well for a while and was a great start. I had to quit the company when I wanted to move out though because they wouldn't budge on giving any of us raises if we moved out.
The living wasn't bad, I had some interesting room mates that were smart people, but some were crazy or just odd characters. They were bringing in Taiwanese engineers that couldn't speak just about any english and urinated all over the bathroom in the middle of the night. Thankfully we had housekeeping three times a week. I also had these two drunk party-crazy room mates that would tear the place apart. One of them came home drunk and drank a half a bottle of hydrogen peroxide and went blind for like a day or two. Another one would get drunk and go steal fruit off the trees in people's yards. One time they got in a flour fight and when I woke up it was like a ghost had walked all over my apartment. Another one went crazy on drugs, lost a rental car, got sent back to CO but never made it because he got arrested on his Phoenix layover for trying to disassemble a metal detector or something (though he wasn't technically my room mate.)
Ah, the good old days of technology, per diem, overtime cash and partying with other nerds in Man Jose. Can't say they weren't interesting, but I'm glad they're over.
History is full of stories of very powerful companies (Standard Oil, IBM, etc.) that exerted great influence in their time. However, over their life, their influence was either diluted by regulations or the company changed completely. An example would be IBM -- they had a complete lock on the mainframe, a huge advantage in the "business machines" side of the business, but almost lost their place in the 90s by not reacting fast enough to the changeover to PCs and lower-end servers. Now they're a powerful consulting company and STILL have their lock on the mainframe, so they're still OK. Another example would be AT&T -- total monopoly on phone service, had enough money and leeway to support a complete basic research lab (Bell Labs) and had to totally reinvent itself to bexome a wireless carrier on a much smaller scale. (Yes, I know ATT handles all the iPhone contracts in the US, but that's a far cry from dictating the phone service standards for the world.)
I wonder if Google will even have to adapt. At their heart, they're just an advertising agency that happens to serve search results to millions of users every day. For all the neat stuff they "give away" for "free", I don't know if people realize that all their usage data for these tools are being used to improve the core advertising business. If the Web 2.0 no-privacy thing proves to be the new way of the world and not just a fad, Google could concievably keep its lock on the advertising market as long as "common users" never have to pay for anything.
Looking at some of the current Google news stories such as the Street View flap, and how underwhelmed most people were about it, I really think they could continue collecting any information they want without being challenged. I'm not super-old, but I really am amazed about the difference in generational attitudes about privacy. I'm not a tinfoil hat guy, but I really wonder about some of the implications of one company controlling a lot of the advertising market and having a pretty accurate profile about you to share with its customers. Advertising is annoying, but take it a step further and think about life insurers, potential employers, etc. etc... A little far fetched, but I wouldn't totally rule it out.
Last time I was there (to scope it out for a potential scout event), I believe that all I had to show was a valid ID, such as a driver's license, to get through the main gate and onto the Moffet field campus.
Well, I would hope that certain buildings have a much higher security check than that, but even still, giving people free access to get close enough to certain buildings without a deterrent in the way is kind of foolish in my eyes. Especially, to get onto NASA and a military instillation.
I launched sixteen droids and what do I get? A cubicle bedroom and deeper in debt.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
It seems that its on Moffett Field, not actually at Ames itself. Moffett is the old air base that plays host to Ames as well as other facilities. In order to get into Moffett, I believe that only a picture ID is required.
However, even if it were on Ames itself, Pete Worden is a unique administrator and if anyone could find a way to make it work, its him.
My experience in Silicon Valley -- when a company announces that it is going to build a new corporate headquarters, then short the stock. This has an amazingly positive correlation. When executives are fusing about the house, they are not ruthlessly plotting to eviscerate their competition, enslave their workers, screw their stockholders, and take over the world. They are nesting. Now they are going to face the City Council, who are going to want 3,618 EPA, economic, and tax reports -- that is just for starters. Then, they are going to face 20,000 local residents who are going to hate any idea Google has just because Google is successful and lives on the side of the freeway that produces tons of tax revenue that cannot be shared with the rest of the city. This is called a morass. It is not what nimble companies like to kill time managing. Eric Schmidt would have more success fucking a tar baby.
Why are you using a url shortener in a non-twitter-like environment? You could have just copied the URL, just like any other URL instead of passing it through Google, so they'd get click tracking.
Better than being unemployed and asking, "Brother, can you spare an IPv4 address?"
Yes, but you probably had the ability to choose whether you would attend that university, live in that dorm, or leave campus.
Indeed the corporation now wields greater power than the nation-state. I saw an article the other day that Vienna, traditional, old stomping ground of national spies, has lost some of it's importance in that world. Although many of the national-spies now have the company of their new industrial espionage overlords. So indeed corporations now buy nation-state leaders. Presidents and politicians plead for time on the media, who makes them or breaks them. Lobbyists and their money and "favors" exert greater influence on congressmen than voters. Corporations often have greater effect on jobs than government policies. That is the state of the game today. But nothing lasts forever. The global economy teeters ever more often now, and corporations plead for rescue from who? Guess what, one of these days, the answer will be no - you corporate master, you go broke, we people buy your assets, and we own you now.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
Does that make the local nightclub the G-Spot?
call me when Google starts making work a contracted requirement for basic living necessities or builds unmaintained, dilapidated tenements, then there'll be something worrisome.
I have been seeing a scarry trend in employers like Google trying to run the lives of their employees. It goes something like this:
You get a student out of University where the University was like their parent (provided their housing, food, rules, activities, goals to achieve, etc) and you recreate that in coporate life so they don't have to adjust to being an adult. You provide their food, their housing, their banking (through your own employee credit union), their healthcare and their activities/goals. It is almost like a cult.
In the end, it makes it difficult to distinguish your personal life and your personal space from your work and it makes it that much harder to leave that job because you'd also need to find a place to live, a new bank, a new health plan/provider and all of the rest of living in the real world as part of the process.
Just driving down the street Google managed to compromise everyone's privacy. Imagine what they'd do if they built your house!
And now they're going to build an arcology.
Foxconn has about half a million employees.
The USA has a suicide rate of about 10-14 per 100k: http://www.suicide.org/suicide-statistics.html
If you have 500000 employees, one shouldn't be so surprised if 50 of them kill themselves every year.
Google, Inc requires the services of a sheriff for its new company town.
1) Fast paced and dynamic environment.
2) Unmatched benefits.
3) Accomodation in a nuclear bunker.
4) Occasional travel in time and to other dimensions.
Pleas click the 'Apply Now' button below.
C. Northcote Parkinson described this in his landmark work "Parkinson's Law." He noticed that British bureaucracies were most effective when young, dynamic, focused, and invariably housed in makeshift quarters.
As these bureaucracies matured, they arranged better housing for themselves, and the completion of a grand edifice, complete with statuary, limousine parking, &etc. they had invariably achieved institutional senility, becoming utterly ineffective.
While dated, Parkinson's Law (1958) is still relevant today; it's simultaneously too funny to be true, yet too true to be dismissed as humor.
gawbl
Employers in most places can pay in whatever way both they and the employee agree on.
. Define sqrt(x) as something really evil like (x / rand()), and bury it deep. Watch your coworkers go nuts.
More proof, as if yet more was needed that NASA is just a public front. It showcases ingenius uses of old tech that people are told is the cutting edge. The real cutting edge is classified and reserved for military use and eventually trickles down to public use once it is made obsolete. So yeah, the military contrary to what many believe is NOT stupid, in fact they're damned good at what they do. If they seem to ignore safeguarding NASA it's because the things they want to safeguard are not part of NASA.
Honestly though, much of the stuff they use at NASA is still "cutting edge", not because we couldn't build something better if we really wanted to, but rather because we haven' t needed to yet.
Take for example their Vertical Gun Range it's from the Apollo era, but it is still one of the most developed and advanced light gas guns in existence. Why? Because we haven't needed a bigger and more advanced one so far, and because the thing still generates the data you need to do impact physics.
This is the case with much of our "old" technology; if you will allow me a small digression. I was watching one of those conspiracy theory shows (for the same reasons people watch bad movies, everything they say is hilariously wrong), and because they were apparently running out of ideas they decided to beat the dead horse that is Area 51.
At some point they showed pictures of the SR-71 and said something like "We built this in 1964, do They expect us to believe we haven't built something much more advanced?". Well yeah "They" expect you to believe that because we actually haven't built anything that does what the SR-71 does (go really, really fast with an air-breathing engine) any better than the already SR-71 does it. And incidentally beyond the OMGsocool!-factor the SR-71 was and still is outperformed by the U-2.
Anyhow pardon my digression.
My point still stands, none of what NASA has on display are some watered down version of stuff the military already has more advanced versions of, the old stuff they're displaying as "cutting edge" actually is just that, mainly because no-one cared to make never versions of it.
Admit nothing. Deny Everything. Make Counter-accusations.
I'd like a job where I can my dog to work. He's clean, doesn't shed and quiet and I'd be more likely to stay much later so let's see companies start offering dog facilities. Plus lunch time will be much more fun.
That was the theme of the Heinlein novel "Friday". Well, that and a bit of genetic engineering, but it was another bit of Heinlein forecast that came through. I wonder how much else he's got hidden ...
Honestly, love him or hate him, reading through Heinlein's novels is sometimes a bit like reading a more coherent Nostradamus, one who studied logic instead of funny mushrooms.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear