Thursday, May 18, 2006

Google in German Stern

Stern, a weekly German magazine (the same one that “found” the Hitler diaries in the ’80s) had relatively little new info to offer on Google in their Google cover story, but there were some interesting bits still. According to Stern:

• Google is worth three times as much as car maker BMW on the stock market, but has only 10% of BMW’s profits.
• Marissa Mayer says she’d even be going to work if she wouldn’t be paid for it, because she considers Google such an important job serving so many people (I guess she has some savings on her bank account to be able to say that).
• Marissa “commands” 700 people.
• Google has “Thank God It’s Friday Parties” where employees have a beer and question the three big bosses about everything, including new coffee machines.
• If Googlers are caught checking the daily Google stock value, they are made to pay a penalty the height of that day’s stock value (’cause money’s not everything).
• It happens that Sergey Brin enters a meeting, reviews a presentation on how to make an additional 80 million bucks with ads, and then concludes: “Do our users benefit from this? No. And don’t we already make enough money as is? There you go.”
• Googlers can spend 10% of their free time on projects of their own liking. Now either Google downgraded their “side projects” time, or Stern messed this one up.
• When CEO Eric Schmidt interviewed for joining Google he found the meeting room to be a total mess – from coffee stains on the floor to litter everywhere.
• Eric Schmidt only learned about Google Trends days before its public release.

Google in German Stern by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (10)

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