Now that Dominic has changed jobs I really needed to learn something about this new internet company called Google. To that end I read the google story
by David A. Vise. It gave a nice overview of the history of the company, and some discussion of its future directions in biology. One thing that I noticed but thought was a little inaccurate (possibly unintentionally) was in regard to a discussion of Google’s “20% time”. Vise cites Joe Beda’s discussion of this and compares and contrasts it to the views of other Microsoftie on “20% time“, but does so anonymously and fails to mention that that “other softie” is maven/evangelist/non-engineer Robert Scoble. He also neglects to mention that Joe worked for MS BEFORE he worked for Google, giving him arguably a little more insight into the benefits of “20% time” on software development culture. Still, why let the facts get in the way of a good story.