the Redmond company these days. He said he wasn’t sure what percentage of Google’s local staff came from Microsoft, but I got the sense it wasn’t all that high.
James Lauinger, the mayor of Kirkland, made a few remarks about Google’s importance to the local community. “Having a facility with high-paying jobs is key to Kirkland’s development,” he said. “Bringing high-tech to Kirkland is a key strategy.” He also stressed that Google should get involved with neighborhood transportation issues—in particular, in helping to bring “high-capacity transit to this region.”
Google’s senior vice president of engineering and research, Alan Eustace, then relayed some fun stories from the early days of Google Kirkland. One was that co-founder Larry Page originally liked Kirkland in part because it reminded him of Palo Alto, CA, and that he thought Google should be part of a community here rather than “just another building.” Another was that 15 minutes after Google announced it was setting up an office in Kirkland, computer scientist Ed Lazowska from the University of Washington called Eustace to chide him for not siting it closer to UW (on the other side of Lake Washington).
“We want the best people,” Eustace said about the talent pool around Seattle. He pointed to the region’s distinguished history of “great computer science” stretching back for decades, and called it “a very innovative place.” He also emphasized that the company’s Seattle-area teams are not being marginalized—a common problem among remote corporate labs. “It’s not just an appendage to Mountain View,” he said, referring to Google’s headquarters in Silicon Valley.
I also caught a couple of neat demos in the room. One was a Google Maps application for getting biking directions, which help you get from A to B on a bicycle while avoiding most car traffic. John Leen, an engineer at Google Seattle, said it’s working for 50 cities and is “coming soon.” He also showed some international updates to the traffic tracker (France, England, Scotland, Australia). John Merrill and Sean McGuire, engineers in Kirkland, showed off their AdPlanner interface for helping online advertisers find the best websites to place their ads. The tool, which includes website profiles and detailed information about what keywords visitors search for and so forth, has been available since June 2008 and has “many thousands of users,” Merrill said.
On a tour of the Kirkland facility, a Google spokeswoman emphasized how green the building design is (it is LEED Silver certified). Its features include light and motion sensors on all lighting fixtures, high-efficiency water fixtures, reused and recycled furniture, and recharging stations for electric vehicles.
Lastly, as I am wont to do, I asked Alan Eustace and Scott Silver individually to boil down Google’s culture to one word. Neither took the bait. Eustace did say Google’s culture is quite uniform across its various centers worldwide. He used words like innovative, open to new ideas, community focused (versus competitive), happy, and high-energy, to describe the culture, but wouldn’t commit to just one of them.
Silver came closer to giving me one take-home message. “Engineers are in charge,” he said.
