Well, today saw my long anticipated visit to the Googleplex close to the edge of San Francisco Bay in downtown Mountain View. It's the wackiest work-place you're ever likely to visit and, although I got to see some of the inside, I can only show you the outside. Oh well, we'll start there.
The Google complex (Googleplex) consists of lots of buildings spread across a campus maybe a kilometer in diameter. It has the feel of a university and most of the workers (?) looked like recent university graduates. The demographic is incredibly young ... and multinational. The campus is so spread out that the company provides hundreds of free bikes to get from A to B quickly. Just hop on and ride away. There's even a conference bike (CoBi) seating 7 in a circle, which might save a deal of time if you want a brief discussion and keep fit at the same time.
The campus seems to swarm with eating places, some indoors and others outdoors. Employees like Greg can have 3 free meals a day: breakfast, lunch and dinner, and even visitors like us were treated to a free feed. Nor was it any old food. There was a huge choice of hot and cold foods, fruit, and drinks, many imaginative and sourced from many cultures. Give that 6,000 people work on the campus, Google might have to serve up to 15,000 free meals a day. The cafes, large and small also run a perpetual coffee and tea service. We were walking around one of the visitor access areas and just grabbed bottles out of a fridge when we fancied them.
Emily and I saw quite a few people with dogs, which seemed odd. Not so. Employees can bring their dogs to work and I presume they lie next to their owners until taken for a run at lunch-time or whenever they want a break. Google pays for creativity, which is not the same as how long you're sitting at a desk. Taking this a little further, I saw graffiti walls and a volley-ball court, and we heard of one building with a bowling alley incorporated. There are other diversions also like a multiscreen facility reproducing 3-dimensional Google-Earth. We also creased with laughter when we saw a large mobile barber's truck parked in a prominent location.
The grounds themselves had a variety of aesthetic interests like a sculpture park, a herb garden, and a T-Rex to scare the pants off slackers.
In one of the main buildings we even saw a full-side replica of Richard Bransom's space-craft chasing the prize for the first commercial vehicle taking passengers to the edge of space. The original is in the Smithsonian. Many of the buildings were also interesting pieces of architecture in a modernist style.
So there you have it. We were not allowed in most of the internal areas for security reasons, but could see large numbers of open-plan workstations and conference rooms amidst the coffee shops. The former were all shapes and size, with some looking like tents out of the Arabian Nights. And down in the basement I spied my dream car hitched to a power-point in the wall - a Tesla. Look that up on the web! Tomorrow is shaping up as fun!
AS
3 comments:
Did you discover what they actually DO there? I thought that Google was simply a search engine! So what do all those thousands of people actually do? Also where does the money come from that pays for it all? Richard.
Richard, I have a fair idea. To start with, Google is a highly profitable company, and a couple of years ago was running ahead of just about every IT company in the world including Microsoft, Appple, Intel, Cisco, Adobe, and so on. However, this is open to debate depending on what aspects of companies one includes.
In terms of income, Google is an advertising company. Those ads you see in various places cost money. However, functionally it's all about developing the web as an effective information source or a conduit for business transactions, or a means for governments to (mis)inform their subjects, or for social networking. The net can also be used as a research tool, because it enables data mining. For example, health authorities can now tell about impending epidemics faster by trawling through sites people visit to discover info about diseases and remedies faster than doctors can send in reports on patient visits.
Uses of the net are expanding fast (and with it revenue), and Google is interested in testing these opportunities and making use of the internet as secure as possible. It buy up companies with useful products like YouTube to expand its reach. And with additional companies come additional employees.
For me as a social scientist, I'm interested in new ways of accessing reliable data and the web is beginning to show up as a good prospect. I have used an on-line system called surveymonkey to conduct a survey of businesses. And, just recently, I and some colleagues wondered if we could survey the unemployed through their facebook accounts!
Does this help? We're entering uncharted waters at an incredible rate of knots. Twenty years from now, whole new industries are going to spring up providing services we didn't know existed or we needed and in imaginative new ways. This is very big business.
By the way, I forgot to mention that Google is also developing operating systems like Windows. It already has 'Chrome' and 'Android'. The last-named is an increasingly big player in the mobile phone and tablet market. Since laptops and those devices are increasingly converging, Google might be well placed to take on Microsoft.
Which brings me to the fact that I'm going to invest in one of the tablet devices, probably Amazon's kindle, to download books in electronic form, along with my daily paper. Newsagents are likely to becoming an endangered species in coming years!
Sorry for the long response, but you raised some interesting questions.
AS
It is a very good answer and it explains a lot. It would be fun if we could look into the future and see how things had developed in 100 years time. One problem that needs to be addressed more seriously is the problem of hacking and viruses, both of which are a real threat to on-line financial transactions;especially where the culprits are abroad in places like Nigeria.Richard
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