The Googlization of Everything

From Fast Company:

It's too good to be true. That's what Andy Rubin was thinking back in 2005. He'd worked for more than a decade at various tech outfits, including a stint at Apple, and now Google was interested in acquiring Android, his latest venture. When he dug around to see if the Internet giant would be a good fit, Rubin met with what he assumed was the usual Silicon Valley spin: lots of talk about boundless freedom, perfect perks, a culture that prizes spectacular failure more than middling success. Right.

But now he works for Google, and Rubin knows something new: It's true. Google is different.

When you visit the Googleplex in Mountain View, California, what's special is elusive. The company looks like the standard-issue Wii-in-the-lounge, hieroglyphs-on-a-whiteboard, code-until-dawn tech shop. But the difference isn't tangible. It's in the air, in the spirit of the place.

Talk to more than a dozen Googlers at various levels and departments, and one powerful theme emerges: Whether they're designing search for the blind or preparing meals for their colleagues, these people feel that their work can change the world. That sense is nonexistent at most companies, or at best intermittent, inevitably becoming subsumed in the day-to-day quagmire of PowerPoints, org charts, and budgetary realities.

The marvel of Google is its ability, after 10 years, to continue to instill a sense of creative fearlessness and ambition, even as it has grown to more than 16,000 employees. Prospective hires are often asked, "If you could change the world using Google's resources, what would you build?" But here, this isn't a goofy or even theoretical question: Google wants to know, because thinking--and building--on that scale is what Google does. This, after all, is the company that wants to make available online every page of every book ever published. Smaller-gauge ideas die of disinterest.