You can take the startup out of the garage…
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Written By Kate Zimmermann | October 2, 2006 | Share This
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…but you can’t take the garage out of the startup. Especially not when its market cap is riding around $122 Billion
Although it’s been blogged to death today, we thought we’d be remiss if we didn’t note the fact that Google went and bought itself a little belated birthday present.
And what do you get the company that has everything? The Menlo Park home where it was founded.
With the purchase, Google joins the ranks of proud Silicon Valley garage-owners as HP and Apple Computers. While Google wouldn’t comment on how much it paid, we’re guessing that the property’s value has skyrocketed since the Stanford grads first rented it for $1,700 a month.
Among the house’s amenities: A hot tub, and a fridge that Page and Brin raided early and often. Huh. Not half bad for a startup office, right? Our first office had a couple of broken chairs and a lingering, unpleasant smell that we never quite found the source of.
While Google is embracing some aspects of their famed garage-band culture, they’re also backpedaling on others. Take Eric Schmidt’s 70-20-10 philosophy. We’ve all heard this ethos cited hundreds of times in articles about the company. Specifically:
Spend 70 percent of your time on the core business, 20 percent on related projects, and 10 percent on unrelated new businesses.
The process was heralded as one of the big reasons why Google was innovating new services at such a lightning-fast clip. G-mail, GoogleBase, Google Maps, Froogle and all the other Labs graduates were credited as results of the tech team spending 10% of their time on whatever they wanted to.
One problem: by their own admission, Google was apparently having some problems focusing on… well… search.
Under increased pressure from Yahoo!, Ask and some little company in Redmond, Google admits that they’ve had to pare down their project list and focus on what done brung ‘em to the dance. Search. The impact of this philosophy shift is probably going to be most evident in the laundry list of products that Google’s rolled out over the last year. According to Google spokesperson Melissa Mayer:
“Users aren’t going to remember our 50-plus products. They’ll remember three to five. We need more features and fewer products,”
If you ask me, this is the right move for Google. It’s surprising that Google’s managed not to make any major missteps thus far based solely on the sheer number of completely unrelated projects they seem to be developing at the same time. People don’t come to Google.com because of their feed readers, their shopping results, their free spreadsheets or even their video search. They continue to use the site because it’s simple, fast and helps them make sense of the Web.
Finally, while Google’s approach to work may be getting a bit more straightlaced, it’s nice to see that their offices are still staying Googly. Here are some cameraphone pics ClickZ editors took of Google’s new office in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. (Hey neighbors!)
Topics: Google |