KBTV

KBTV::Google and Its Je Ne Said Quoi

I arrived from New York last night around 10 p.m. and am just now – ten hours later –trying to get back into the swing of things.

It’s really hot, and YouTube is kicking back my videos – again. Harrumph. The company is launching in France today, so my hope for the Parisians is that YouTube.fr will have that Je ne said quoi! and actually load every now and then.

What a whirlwind weekend! I flew to Philadelphia on Friday for a wedding on Saturday in Horse Country, PA (hence, why I have not written my blog!). My favorite cousin, Johnny, married a beautiful girl named Jen at their farm 28 miles from Boeing, where they are both engineers.

On Sunday I traveled to New York, and on Monday I walked over to the Meatpacking District in lower Chelsea to have lunch at the Google offices. What struck me first and struck me hard is that Google, perhaps the best-branded company in the world, has no sign out front. There are no logos on or near the building. In a world where Google has become increasingly omnipresent – not only Google, but now YouTube is a verb – this corporate satellite headquarters, that looked to me like a small city, was virtually incognito.

Until I walked inside. Then it’s all Google, all the time. All seemingly punctuated with the blue, yellow and red “prime” colorful beanbag chairs. The campus-like workspace is antithetical to the office culture of most New York businesses. It’s a vision of an office-quarters, to invent a moniker, that is an implicit utopia as conjured up by prosperous, infantile, free spirits in Silicon Valley, yet now transplanted to Manhattan.

There is the much-touted free food, and plenty of it, including a sushi bar and espresso stations. There are private phone booths for personal calls and showers and lockers for anyone running or biking to work. All of these Go-Google! perks have been described in great detail umpteen times in the press. So all of that came as no surprise (except the “free” part; I had forgotten that Google is a cash-free workplace; no wonder all new employees gain 15 pounds!).

At one point, I glanced outside a wall of floor-to-ceiling plate-glass windows to see what looked like a café on the water at a prestigious University somewhere on the coast of Connecticut. Employees donning sunglasses – not the students as I would have expected – munching on spa food and chatting amiably while pushing their windswept bangs into place, readying themselves for that next big slurp of chocolate frozen yogurt.

What really struck me was that it felt like no one ever leaves. The infamous Manhattan work vibe of ducking out of the office to network over lunch or an evening cocktail party wasn’t expressed in how people looked, what they wore and mostly in their laid back, I-don’t-have-anywhere-to-go attitudes.

I’m not saying that the employees appeared somehow forced or even encouraged not to break out – that there is some sinister “indentured servitude” mindset at work (no pun intended) – it just seemed that no one had that Manhattan-frenzied-I’ve-got-to-get-out-of-here-or-else-I’ll-lose-that-account pulse attitude.

Not only did I not once see anyone checking their watch or frantically glancing up at a clock (as a matter of fact, I didn’t even see a clock), no one seemed to have anywhere to go. It felt a little like a casino without toxicity. No sense of time, but also no sense of loss. Everyone – and I mean everyone – appeared to be very, very content. And for me, that felt a little weird.

To be continued …

posted by INSIDE FAU @ 5:31 PM