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August 24, 2005

12:48 pm | 0 recommendations | 3 comments

Blame Google

| posted by Scott Kirsner

Gary Rivlin has a great piece on the front page of today's NY Times, the premise of which is that Google is becoming as much of an establishment company in Silicon Valley as Microsoft has been since the 1980s.

"...[M]any in Silicon Valley are skittish about its size and power," writes Rivlin. "They fret that the very strengths that made Google a search-engine phenomenon are distancing it from the entrepreneurial culture that produced it - and even transforming it into a threat."

But what struck me (and the friend at EMC who called the quote to my attention) was the griping about salary inflation.

    "Google is doing more damage to innovation in the Valley right now than Microsoft ever did," said Reid Hoffman, the founder of two Internet ventures, including LinkedIn, a business networking Web site popular among Silicon Valley's digerati. "It's largely that they're hiring up so many talented people, and the fact they're working on so many different things. It's harder for start-ups to do interesting stuff right now."

    Google, Mr. Hoffman said, has caused "across the board a 25 to 50 percent salary inflation for engineers in Silicon Valley" - or at least those in a position to weigh competing offers. A sought-after computer programmer can now expect to make more than $150,000 a year.


I'd say that things are improving in the Valley when people are back to their whining about good engineers being expensive and hard-to-find.

Tags: Technology, internet + web
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Recent Comments | 3 Total

August 24, 2005 at 3:25pm

Jeff De Cagna
I agree. Everyone wants to dump on Google, in part for sport and in part out of envy. But it's also because Google painted a big red bullseye on itself by declaring "don't be evil." Now everyone wants to brand Google as evil for every strategic choice it makes, often without good cause. It's mostly crap in my view. Stop whining and deal.
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August 25, 2005 at 2:11am

Marc Brazeau
It's obviously crap if you read to the end. (quote)Microsoft, of course, has its hold on the Windows world - and a market capitalization almost four times Google's. By contrast, switching to a new search engine is as easy as calling up another Web page - if a new company is able to do to Google what Google did to some of the earliest leaders of search, including AltaVista and Excite. For the moment, at least, Google is aiming for that most coveted position in technology: a platform that, like Microsoft's operating system, is so popular that outside software developers write programs, and Web developers build new Google-related services, that render the Google home page indispensable to the personal computer ecosystem. (end quote) (hey, how about a little html?) Of course, Google is going to grow up. But just because it's getting harder for other companies to innovate doesn't mean that Google's current ability to innovate doesn't make up for that. The bottom line however is that Google doesn't have a monopoly on anything YET and therefore is the Evil Empire that MSoft is, though they may want to be, or can't help but want to be. Nevertheless the article is forcing stories into a narrative that doesn't exist, YET.
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August 25, 2005 at 2:13am

Marc Brazeau
should read "is NOT the evil empire Micosoft is"
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