It shouldn’t be much longer before the name “Mountain View” becomes absolutely synonymous with the term “Googleplex” – a new report indicates that Google is going to lease a fresh 310,000 square feet of space.
Melanie Carroll of the Palo Alto Daily News reports, “Google, which already occupies 900,000 square feet on top of city-owned land, will use a portion of nearby office space to house research and development facilities, according to Mountain View’s newly-passed 2007-08 budget.” So that’s a 34 percent increase – one has to wonder what Google plans to do with all that room.
Company reps weren’t able to talk about that, however (as a matter of policy), when Carroll contacted them, and murdok doesn’t expect to have better luck.
Still, “Mountain View resident and self-described gadfly Don Letcher” was more than willing to chat with the Daily News writer. “Google is hiring 15 people a day and causing huge parking problems,” Letcher said – perhaps overestimating that number on the local scale, but actually underestimating it globally. “It just ruins the city. I’ve been here so long. It changes the complexion of the city.”
I dunno. As someone who’s visited the Googleplex, I can say that it didn’t seem too awful (on the contrary, it was quite nice). And plenty of places, from Iowa to North Carolina, have virtually (and perhaps literally) rolled out the red carpet for Google installations.
In any event, the Googleplex is going to get much bigger in the coming months and years. This may, in turn, lead to a number of other interesting developments.
