NYT: “On Day Care, Google Makes a Rare Fumble”
Posted by Nirav | Filed under Google
Got this once in my inbox (from my boss) and three times in my feed reader (from Hacker News) this morning, so I figured it was worth posting about. It’s a New York Times article entitled “On Day Care, Google Makes a Rare Fumble”.
Excerpt:
When a stock was rising as fast as Google’s once was, it was easy to buy the view that there was something truly special about Google. But when the stock is falling, overlooked problems start to loom large. Having discovered that Google is not, in fact, the promised land, a number of Googlers have left recently to join start-ups, hotter companies like Facebook — and even Microsoft.
“There are many things about Google that are not great, and merit improvement,” blogged Sergey Solyanik, who recently returned to Microsoft after a stint at Google. “There are plenty of silly politics, underperformance, inefficiencies and ineffectiveness, and things that are plain stupid.” Starting, it would appear, with day care.
I’m hearing a lot of this kind of talk these days. It would seem that while Google’s ad-serving and web services scale excellently, the company itself hasn’t done so well in its radical growth, ironically enough.
Google’s executives have long believed that they can run a company better than anyone else. However, as Joe Nocera writes, the key difference between playing around with free drinks, food, and massages and playing around with day care is that the latter is very close to parents’ hearts, and honestly shouldn’t be toyed with.
The result of Google’s new day care initiative is a price much higher than market value, unaffordable for all but the millionaires among their ranks. Perhaps not coincidentally, one of those millionaires, Susan Wojcicki, is one of the biggest advocates of the change: apparently, “Parents who know her point out that the company’s day care approach is very much aligned with her views…”, although the big G denies it. And, not to be sensationalist, but she’s also Sergey Brin’s sister-in-law.
I hope for the sake of my preferred search engine, my email client, and my feed reader that this isn’t how things are progressing at Google, but as time goes on, it seems more and more that all isn’t quite right in paradise.