Battelle talks about Google’s UK engineer recruiting tour and the Easter Eggs being laid down by Urs Hlzle of Google …
… (currently taking a leave of absence from UCSB) . I posted the following comments on his blog about one reason Google’s branding is so incredibly strong.
Most developers understand the overwhelming joy of their first application that actually does something useful. Likewise, developers that have had large success (measured by the number of happy users on of their application) understand the incredible joy & responsibility of having to build a cluster of machines to support the application’s user base.
However, when you look at a rack of servers sitting in a cold hosting facility in the middle of a huge datacenter, there is no joy. Unless that data center is Google. Google inspires the techie within all of us with it’s awesome power. I think that’s the power of the brand Sergey and Larry have built. I feel as though I have a personal relationship with Google… not the company but with Google, the entity. I so respect the way they’ve applied their knowledge for good and they way they’ve been able to keep the company as personal as a mid-size company with a multi-billion dollar market cap can be.
When I think about Microsoft search, I don’t have that same connection or feeling of intimacy. After all, Windows was snagged out from under Apple and there’s no joy in that. Not that the employees of Microsoft today had anything to do with that but it’s a fact that will forever remain.
I for one am thankful for the power of Google and their ability to pump out incredibly powerful apps as if they were a 3 man development team. That kind of branding is going to be around for a long time.
As an interesting side note, Findory is taking the same approach as Google. Who cares if more than half of Google’s tools are in beta right now. I mean they’re putting some freaking incredible stuff out there that’s making our lives better. I’m glad to see companies like Findory doing the same thing. As usual, less is more in the world of internet technologies (less fluff more stuff).
Jason Dowdell is a technology entrepreneur and operates the Marketing Shift blog.
