Google has offices for its developers in Silicon Valley, New York City, Paris, various spots in Asia, but nothing in Boston. In theory Boston has a lot of good software engineers, most of whom are happy to work for lower salaries than those paid in Silicon Valley. It might be easier to retain workers here in Boston due to the fact that a wage slave can afford a family-sized house if he or she is willing to live in an unfashionable suburb.
Google has obviously decided that right now we’re looking at some combination of (1) not enough smart people live in Boston, (2) most of the good people in Boston would be willing to relocate to the land of strip malls and traffic jams, (3) there aren’t any small companies worth acquiring in Boston, and (4) Google is having enough trouble digesting growth that they can’t handle geographic sprawl.
What do folks think? Should Google be in the Boston area? If so, what should they specialize in and where should the office be? If not, should we be depressed that we have nothing to offer an innovative software company?
You didn’t mention Google’s Kirkland development office. It’s a nice alternative to the strip malls of the valley.
Boston?!? Why not locate an office somewhere nice rather than in either mega-suburbia or another big city?
(Oddly enough was just reading about Teddie Roosevelt’s time at Harvard. Somehow I suspect Boston has changed… 🙂
South of Denver is supposed to have a concentration of tech companies, housing prices in the area are more reasonable, and the outdoors in Colorado is simply amazing.
Come on Philip – you’ve spent time tooling the country by car and small plane – surely you have seen nicer places than Boston! Factor out your fondness for MIT, and factor in most folks sooner or later are going to raise families.
If you had more average means and were going to raise a family (so house prices, safety, and quality of education are concerns) – where might you think about locating?
As another metric – you have run into a few rather nice airports for small planes in the middle places outside mega-cities/suburbs. Might that be an interesting barometer of sorts?
Is there any reason you’ve selected Google for this post instead of one of the other major companies lacking a Boston office?
Have you heard a rumor or something?
Is Google that great? It’s stock price is like a Dutch Tulip. Is data mining and search that cool? anyway..
I agree with the other posters. Why locate to a congested area. Most software monkee’s would like to be able to actually buy their own house. Boston real estate is in a bubble (as is most of the country). If anything, Google should locate near one of the many state schools in the Midwest (Iowa, Madison Wisonsin, Indiana, Champaign Urbana Ilinois, etc). Much more bang for the buck. Saves these students from having to relocate to Cali. From my work in California, it seems like all the talent comes from the Midwest or Boston anyway.
Google did advertise directly to the community a little while back with those posters featuring a logic puzzle, so they must like the talent. They were looking around for enough space for 1,000 people back in May: http://www.bizjournals.com/boston/stories/2005/05/30/story4.html
Folks: Boston has historically been the #2 city for tech startup companies and we have many good universities plus a lot of large venture capital funds. That’s why I think Boston would be more logical than Denver, say, or Duluth.
Al: Why Google? They are expanding at a remarkable clip. Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle are arguably the other IT companies that matter and they all have Boston offices already.
Totally agreed. I think a Google office would do fantastic here. There are so many techies in the Boston area, and they could find office space off 128 for a lot cheaper than they’re paying for in Silicon Valley, not to mention the fact that since the cost of living is less here, salaries could be lower and still be quite suitable for living around here. Plus, there are so many universities around here with folks studying technology-related subjects.
I agree: Boston has been an excellent place for technology companies. As a life-long midwesterner, though, I for one would like to see more software work being done in the central states. There is some, of course (I work there!), but, in theory, software can be produced from anywhere on the planet. Or off the planet.
Granted, a lot of the reasons for Boston and other current leaders in tech companies is the excellent schools in the area, through which students meet each other and eventually form startups. But, there are good schools in the midwest too (WUSTL, UIUC, for example), and even students from “lesser” schools can come up with a good tech product if they apply themselves.
Will it happen?… I hope so! 🙂
Oh yes… the real estate bubble here in Boston. It is true that things about out of control in the center of town near the cultural attractions. But HP did a study of its engineering staff near San Francisco and found that they did not value theater, art museums, symphony, opera, etc. They wanted a cheap suburban home and good schools for their kids and consequently were delighted to move to Santa Rosa. Google hires a surprisingly number of over-30 software developers (most companies don’t want to hire anyone over 25). The big concentrations of Boston tech companies are in places such as Chelmsford that are quite far from the city and where a house is about one-third of the price of a house in Silicon Valley. These are a long commute to anywhere interesting but it turns out that an average married-with-children engineer doesn’t appreciate the aspects of city life that people with a liberal arts education find appealing.
Hmm, maybe the NYC and Paris offices are more about advertising sales than about engineers, leaving Asia, which has obvious price advantages. (Paris may also be on the list for obvious advantages in localizing interfaces for the Euro crowd.)
That said I’m sure the company is getting to a size where it won’t be able to ignore the massive concentration of brainpower in Boston. It would be great for an elite internal skunkworks team competitive with the left coast offices. Oh I know, the Boston guys could do all the Mac ports ;->
Eh, would think of setting up facility where land is cheap but still within a day’s drive of a metropolitan/university area.
One of the reasons for the big push for importing NIV (non-immigrant visa) workers is that it’s hard to entice those already not living in SF/Bos area there for jobs that the pay scale is not scaled up enough to reflect the cost of living, or able to permit the economical purchase of a family home.
Sorry, tripling of my housing cost for a 10-20% increase in salary just doesn’t get it.
Naum, out here in the Bay Area we trick otherwise rational engineers into moving here by admitting them to schools like Berkeley or Stanford and then hoping they stick around!
These supposedly prestigous universities are really just loss leaders for real estate speculators. Stanford just sold a LEASE on its shopping center (yup, it has a mall) for $300 million. Berkeley as always in business matters was less adroit but compare land values to neighboring Oakland for an idea of the value created (excluding areas cheapened by student-elected rent control).
I think Boston works in a similar fashion.
Anyway my point is if you decide you want an MBA or comp sci PhD (so you can drop out like the Google and Yahoo dudes, of course) you will probably set aside your objections for at least a few years, and then we’ve got you hooked. Next thing you know you’re buying an overpriced condo from a poli sci major like me.
If not there’s always CMU, I think you can still get a house in Pittsburgh for less than six figures.
Boston doesn’t seem to fit Google’s style. Silicon Valley, New York and Paris all have similar hip elements to them. Everybody may universally agree that Boston has a lot of smart people, but it just doesn’t quite fit the image. Boston has a lot of wonderful stuff going for it, but at the end of the day, it still just seems really….. Old.
Wow,
New York, Paris, The Dalles (Oregon)
Who’d have thunk. Never thought I’d hear those towns in the same breath.
http://www.gorgebusiness.com/2005/google.htm
Well, the Colombia River gorge is a beautiful place to live and house it probably a fraction of the cost in other “Google” locations. (well, it has probably gone up since this announcement 🙂
An office in Boston is important, but our first priority should be to seize control of the means of production and turn Google into a worker-controlled democracy.
Phil-
I find your comment about Chelmsford-type places quite naive… It’s not that people up there don’t appreciate what the city has to offer rather they value their children and their upbringing! Most people like city attractions but feel green grass, space, etc., are far more important. Can you imagine a seven year-old trying to ride a bike through Harvard Square??
/dave
For the record, I live less than about mile from you but wouldn’t raise my own children there.
Dave: Excellent point. Kids shouldn’t grow up in downtown areas. I feel sorry for children who live in Penthouses on Fifth Avenue. They are denied the suburban good life as enjoyed by Dawn Wiener in the movie “Welcome to the Dollhouse”.
Google might be wasting time here. I work for a high tech company and it’s incredibly hard finding good people. The dot-com bust drove a lot of people out of the biz. I think, Phillip, that you have written about the steep drop in people selecting EE/CS as a major at MIT… no?
(adding to David’s question) …and if there are fewer people getting into (or staying in) CS & co., does that bode well for those of us who are still in it?
At a local Starbucks on Colorado Blvd in Pasadena–the famous Rose Bowl Parade Blvd–you will see a steady stream of energetic Yahoo! Search Marketing employees. Formerly Overture, Search Marketing is Yahoo’s Google killer. If you want Google in Boston, start up a similar Search Marketing company and wait to be acquired. Northern California is well known for its specialty in delivery technologies. Southern California is known for its content. As Boston is also known for delivery, there may be no synergies. Google would be better off in Southern California.
“Kids shouldn’t grow up in downtown areas. I feel sorry for children who live in Penthouses on Fifth Avenue. They are denied the suburban good life as enjoyed by Dawn Wiener in the movie “Welcome to the Dollhouse”.”
Good lord that was funny.
Specialization: mobile applications. Thousands of college kids armed with phones. It’s literally a walking distributed network. I know they just consumed Dodgeball – they could use Boston as a great test case.
Location: I think Cambridge is appropriate but real estate may be expensive (that wouldn’t make a difference to Google – if they want Cambridge, they’ll take it). Another option is towards Worcester (near WPI). I feel a good tech heartbeat every moment I’m in those two areas. Well, that was when I was living in Wellesley.
Guess I’m kind’a missing the logic behind locating in an area with lots of other tech companies. Maybe easier finding employees (steal ’em from other companies), but this works both ways – not clear this counts as an advantage.
Also, Google has a location in Silicon Valley and is not a startup. So why should they care about “a lot of large venture capital funds” near a new office?
If you can offer work in an office where an engineer’s salary buys a better standard of living, the area is a great environment for families, and there is less competition in local hiring – seems like this is a formula for retaining employees.
I would really like to see a Google office in Boston, because I think it would encourage more young people here to start companies around great products. There are some interesting projects in the Boston area but the tech biz community here has been anchored by big enterprise software firms. For many of those firms, they key to staying in business is controlling complex customer or government relations, NOT producing a good product. Google is the role model of a company that did well by producing a good product. Having some representation of that role model locally would remind startups that you can do better building a great product than turning your product into shit but schmoozing the right corporate partnerships.
Of course, the fact that we would benefit from this here might contribute to Google’s conspicuous absence.
Although I have heard (unsubstantiatable) rumors that Google has been looking for space…
‘Kids shouldn’t grow up in downtown areas. I feel sorry for children who live in Penthouses on Fifth Avenue. They are denied the suburban good life as enjoyed by Dawn Wiener in the movie “Welcome to the Dollhouse”.’ That is HILARIOUS — I am LOLing right here at work. 🙂
Google should run an office there. Maybe Phil would be brave enough to run it. Hire some of those old DEC people, the systems people and build a better cluster. GFS sucks. still buggy. Hire some MIT people and build a better enterprise search appliance, etc… still could use a better email search, one that is integrated into outlook like plaxo but can do better phishing filtering. I dont look at competitive email products like gmail or yahoo email but come up with a complete enterprise email product like outlook/exchange server, etc…..
The folks in Bluffton, SC, have started a letter-writing campaign to get Trader Joe’s to open a store in their town. Maybe we should do the same. Call it Flowers for Google. Everybody send Eric flowers with a note that says “We want you to come to Boston.” Better, I think, than a visit from our Governor on some junket.
Why would they care about being near venture funds? Well, they have their own venture fund — and many VCs don’t want to invest in a company alone, or invest in a company that’s far away (they want to keep an eye on their money).
I gather something may be in the works for Google in the Boston area. We’ll know more about that soon enough.
You make a pretty lame case for why Google should have an office in the Boston area. They will come there if there is something attractive there. Why should they come for cheap labor? Maybe you should propose a think tank of sorts, made up of MIT and Harvard geeks. Offer local flare. Point out that Boston is the guitar capital of the world. How many people know that? Quincy Market, Boston Pops, getting robbed in the Commons, what does Boston offer besides cheap labor?
rumor has it that google recently signed a lease for a large space in cambridge.