Google: Ranked Best Employer; CEO Says to Apple 'How's thermonuclear war working?'

[dgstorm]

We have some interesting Google news this morning. First up, Fortune magazine ranked the top 100 companies to work for, and Google is in the number one spot on that list for the fourth year in a row. Interestingly, Apple is not even in the top 100. Here's Fortune's reasoning why Google continues to hold the crown,

“The Internet juggernaut takes the Best Companies crown for the fourth time, and not just for the 100,000 hours of subsidized massages it doled out in 2012. New this year are three wellness centers and a seven-acre sports complex, which includes a roller hockey rink; courts for basketball, bocce, and shuffle ball; and horseshoe pits,” Fortune explains. ~ Fortune

Our second bit of news comes from Google's top dog himself, Larry Page. In our title above we slightly paraphrased his statement. In an interview with Wired magazine, the Google CEO and co-founder responded to questions regarding the late Steve Jobs' and Apple's thermonuclear war against Android. His full response was, “How well is that working?” Here's a quote with the exchange that was this part of the interview,

Wired: Steve Jobs felt competitive enough to claim that he was willing to “go to thermonuclear war” on Android.

Page: How well is that working?

Wired: Do you think that Android’s huge lead in market share is decisive?

Page: Android has been very successful, and we’re very excited about it.

Wired: Did you envision that kind of success when you bought Andy Rubin’s small company in 2005?

Page: We have a good ability to see what’s possible and not be impeded by the status quo. At the time we bought Android, it was pretty obvious that the existing mobile operating systems were terrible. You couldn’t write software for them. Compare that to what we have now. So I don’t think that betting on Android was that big a stretch. You just had to have the conviction to make a long-term investment and to believe that things could be a lot better. ~ Wired

It's probably not surprising to see him respond this way. For the most part, Apple's legal war against "practically everyone" has done nothing useful except stifle creativity and slow innovation, and Page is simply implying the results have been useless.

 

[leeshor]

It's probably not surprising to see him respond this way. For the most part, Apple's legal war against "practically everyone" has done nothing useful except stifle creativity and slow innovation, and Page is simply implying the results have been useless.

And there you have it, in a nutshell.

 

[J515OP]

It's probably not surprising to see him respond this way. For the most part, Apple's legal war against "practically everyone" has done nothing useful except stifle creativity and slow innovation, and Page is simply implying the results have been useless.

And there you have it, in a nutshell.

If that's the nutshell version, then this must be the whole bag of nuts...

When you talk about the top places to work one has to go back to the beginning of the pc. IBM did not invent or even introduce personal computers. You have to go back to the late 70's when IBM was trying to recover from a near fatal mistake. In the early 70's the executive committee of IBM stopped all work on small computers that could be held on a desk, saying that they did not think that the goal was obtainable. Instead, they concentrated on main frame computers. By the late 70's you had small companies including Radio Shack putting out computers based on an 8086 chip from Intel.

IBM had to catch up and they produced what they called a pc. It was a clone of the first table top computers made by others. Still, those other computers come to be called pc clones. Actually IBM cloned those early computers rather than introduce a product invented and developed by IBM. They were of course well known in the field of business machines, as indicated by the last two letters of their name. The pc prospered because of IBM's working with a couple of new fangled gurus in Provo, Utah. IBM did not have a word processing program and instead recommended buyers of the pc to purchase a product called Word Perfect.

Now, we come to the part of being a top place to be employed. The two founders of Word Perfect Corp. promised their employees that if sales from that company increased by a certain per-cent from the previous year, the company would pay for each and every employee of that company a two week vacation in Hawaii. That promise was made at a Christmas party for the employees, and every employee of Word Perfect for the next 7 years was given a paid two week vacation in Hawaii. Needless to say Word Perfect had no problem finding employees. Those vacations lasted for 7 years and by then a man named Bill Gates had come out with Windows OS (the original OS was called DOS and I will leave it to those who read this to figure out what DOS stood for). Along with Windows, Gates also produce a word processor called Word. I think we all know now which of those early word processors survived. There is still a Word Perfect but it is owned by a Canadian company and I don't think that their employees all get a company paid two week vacations in Hawaii.

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