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Google Loses Up to 250 Bikes a Week (siliconbeat.com)
What's happening to Google's 1,100 Gbikes? The Mercury News reports:
Last summer, it emerged that some of the company's bikes -- intended to help Googlers move quickly and in environmentally friendly fashion around the company's sprawling campus and surrounding areas -- were sleeping with the fishes in Stevens Creek. And now, a new report has revealed that 100 to 250 Google bikes go missing every week, on average. "The disappearances often aren't the work of ordinary thieves, however. Many residents of Mountain View, a city of 80,000 that has effectively become Google's company town, see the employee perk as a community service," the Wall Street Journal reported.
And for the company, here's one Google bike use case that's got to burn a little: 68-year-old Sharon Veach told the newspaper that she sometimes uses one of the bicycles as part of her commute: to the offices of Google's arch foe, Oracle... Mountain View Mayor Ken Rosenberg even admitted to helping himself to a Google bike to go to a movie after a meeting at the company's campus, according to the WSJ.
One Silicon Valley resident reportedly told a neighbor that "I've got a whole garage full of them," while Veach describes the bikes as "a reward for having to deal with the buses" that carry Google employees. Google has already hired 30 contractors to prowl the city in five vans looking for lost or stolen bikes -- only a third of which have GPS trackers -- and they eventually recover about two-thirds of the missing bikes.
They've discovered them as far away as Mexico, Alaska, and the Burning Man festival in Nevada.
And for the company, here's one Google bike use case that's got to burn a little: 68-year-old Sharon Veach told the newspaper that she sometimes uses one of the bicycles as part of her commute: to the offices of Google's arch foe, Oracle... Mountain View Mayor Ken Rosenberg even admitted to helping himself to a Google bike to go to a movie after a meeting at the company's campus, according to the WSJ.
One Silicon Valley resident reportedly told a neighbor that "I've got a whole garage full of them," while Veach describes the bikes as "a reward for having to deal with the buses" that carry Google employees. Google has already hired 30 contractors to prowl the city in five vans looking for lost or stolen bikes -- only a third of which have GPS trackers -- and they eventually recover about two-thirds of the missing bikes.
They've discovered them as far away as Mexico, Alaska, and the Burning Man festival in Nevada.
Those 1,100 Gbikes are actually 1,024 Gbikes after formatting. It's in the fine print.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Social justice leads to entitlement, entitlement leads to theft, and theft leads to big corporations that back social justice losing their bikes and bitching about it.
The force balances itself.
Hmm, sounds like a challenge.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
There is a small rider fee, charged to your WeChat Wallet, which covers losses as well as providing a profit that pays for expanding the system to more outlying areas.
So you are saying after you are done using the bike, you get the Shanghai Bill?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
If only the company had some sort of general search function.