http://midmarket.eweek.com/article/Google+to+Hire+Thousands+in+EU/216111_1.aspx?kc=EWKNLMMS092807STR1

Nelson Mattos, the software giant's new head of engineering in Europe, himself a pick up from rival IBM, told the Financial Times of London Sept. 26 that he intends to hire thousands of engineers to make Google's European operations equivalent in size to those in the United States. European engineers account for just 500 of Google 7,000 worldwide. Google employs more than 13,000 people in all.

Mattos said he hoped that EU engineers would be more attuned to the issues important in Europe and many speculate that it may be a measure taken to staunch criticism that Google is another aggressive U.S. multinational.

"We are not seen correctly in Europe," Mattos told the FT. "My impression is that Google is seen as a big U.S. company that is here to make money."

my comments: the above could be looked on as a stepping stone to the Google OS , primarily because of the sheer number of open source software projects based in Europe

some examples:

Trolltech – makers of QT and Qtopia – Oslo , Norway
KDE desktop – Germany
Suse distro – Germany
Ubuntu – London (Canonical)
Skype/Joost – Estonia
Mandriva – Paris

> "We are not seen correctly in Europe," Mattos told the
> FT. "My impression is that Google is seen as a big U.S.
> company that is here to make money."

So, they're *not* a big US company trying to make money? :)

I guess not Philipp :-)
We were misled by dark forces (read Microsoft) into thinking hat Google might be evil.

By the way, Steve Ballmer is giving us a lecture tomorrow evening. Any questions you'd like to ask ?

"Will Microsoft in the future allow Office applications to run in the browser (without any Internet Explorer-specific plug-ins)?"

Today I heard of http://www.officelive.com – the new Microsoft Office Live Workspace – but if I understood it right it's not yet the answer to Google Docs...

Oh and Adobe also joins the game of online word processors it seems, by acquiring a Flash-based editor named "Buzzword" (closed invite-only at the moment):
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/09/30/adobe-raises-the-stakes-for-web-documents-with-buzzword-and-share/

mister scruff:
skype/joost is an open source project ? would like to see the source code for it ;)

oops – sorry . my mistake.
of course skype/joost is closed source.
but still – the development of that is happening in Europe.

Google can't really tap into European engineering talent if it's located primarily physically in the U.S. i would guess that eventually Google Europe (and indeed Google China and Google India)will be as big as Google USA.

another big open source project in Europe – MySQL
based in Sweden.