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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Dude, this is Slashdot. You just sent thousands of geeks to wikipedia to try to find out what a 'g-spot' is...
Social Engineering Expert: Because there is no patch for stupidity.
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
Does that make the local nightclub the G-Spot?
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.
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.
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
Isnt g-spot is that red spot found on Thinkpad just below the 'G' key?