Corporate affairs and culture

Google is particularly known for its relaxed corporate culture, reminiscent of the Dot-com boom. In January 2007, it was cited by Fortune Magazine as the #1 (of 100) best company to work for. Google's corporate philosophy is based on many casual principles including, "You can make money without doing evil", "You can be serious without a suit," and "Work should be challenging and the challenge should be fun." A complete list of corporate fundamentals is available on Google's website. Google's relaxed corporate culture can also be seen externally through their holiday variations of the Google logo.
Google has been criticized for having salaries below industry standards. For example, some system administrators earn no more than US$35,000 per year – considered to be quite low for the Bay Area job market. However, Google's stock performance following its IPO has enabled many early employees to be competitively compensated by participation in the corporation's remarkable equity growth. Google implemented other employee incentives in 2005, such as the Google Founders' Award, in addition to offering higher salaries to new employees. Google's workplace amenities, culture, global popularity, and strong brand recognition have also attracted potential applicants.
After the company's IPO in August 2004, it was reported that founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and CEO Eric Schmidt, requested that their base salary be cut to US$1.00. Subsequent offers by the company to increase their salaries have been turned down, primarily because, "their primary compensation continues to come from returns on their ownership stakes in Google. As significant stockholders, their personal wealth is tied directly to sustained stock price appreciation and performance, which provides direct alignment with stockholder interests." Prior to 2004, Schmidt was making US$250,000 per year, and Page and Brin each earned a salary of US$150,000.
They have all declined recent offers of bonuses and increases in compensation by Google's board of directors. In a 2007 report of the United States' richest people, Forbes reported that Sergey Brin and Larry Page were tied for #5 with a net worth of US$18.5 billion each.


The Googleplex

Google's headquarters in Mountain View, California, is referred to as "the Googleplex" in a play of words; a googolplex being 1 followed by a googol of zeros, and the HQ being a complex of buildings (cf. multiplex, cineplex, etc). The lobby is decorated with a piano, lava lamps, old server clusters, and a projection of search queries on the wall. The hallways are full of exercise balls and bicycles. Each employee has access to the corporate recreation center. Recreational amenities are scattered throughout the campus and include a workout room with weights and rowing machines, locker rooms, washers and dryers, a massage room, assorted video games, Foosball, a baby grand piano, a pool table, and ping pong. In addition to the rec room, there are snack rooms stocked with various foods and drinks.
Sign at the Googleplex
In 2006, Google moved into 311,000 square feet (28,900 m²) of office space in New York City, at 111 Eighth Ave. in Manhattan. The office was specially designed and built for Google and houses its largest advertising sales team, which has been instrumental in securing large partnerships, most recently deals with MySpace and AOL. In 2003, they added an engineering staff in New York City, which has been responsible for more than 100 engineering projects, including Google Maps, Google Spreadsheets, and others. It is estimated that the building costs Google US$10 million per year to rent and is similar in design and functionality to its Mountain View headquarters, including Foosball, air hockey, and ping-pong tables, as well as a video game area. By late 2006, Google also established a new headquarters for its AdWords division in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
The size of Google's search system is presently unknown; the best estimates place the total number of the company's servers at 450,000, spread over twenty five locations throughout the world, including major operations centers in Dublin (European Operations Headquarters) and Atlanta, Georgia. Google is also in the process of constructing a major operations center in The Dalles, Oregon, on the banks of the Columbia River. The site, also referred to by the media as Project 02, was chosen due to the availability of inexpensive hydroelectric power and a large surplus of fiber optic cable, left over from the dot com boom of the late 1990s. The computing center is estimated to be as large as two football fields, and it has created hundreds of construction jobs, causing local real estate prices to increase 40%. Upon completion, the center is expected to create 60 to 200 permanent jobs in the town of 12,000 people.
Google is also making steps to ensure that their operations are environmentally sound. In October 2006, the company announced plans to install thousands of solar panels to provide up to 1.6 megawatts of electricity, enough to satisfy approximately 30% of the campus' energy needs. The system will be the largest solar power system constructed on a U.S. corporate campus and one of the largest on any corporate site in the world. In June 2007, Google announced that they plan to become carbon neutral by 2008, which includes investing in energy efficiency, renewable energy sources, and purchasing carbon offsets, such as investing in projects like capturing and burning methane from animal waste at Mexican and Brazilian farms.

"Twenty percent" time
All Google engineers are encouraged to spend 20% of their work time (one day per week) on projects that interest them. Some of Google's newer services, such as Gmail, Google News, Orkut, and AdSense originated from these independent endeavors. In a talk at Stanford University, Marissa Mayer, Google's Vice President of Search Products and User Experience, stated that her analysis showed that half of the new product launches originated from the 20% time.

Easter eggs and April Fool's Day jokes

Google has a tradition of creating April Fool's Day jokes — such as Google MentalPlex, which allegedly featured the use of mental power to search the web. In 2002, they claimed that pigeons were the secret behind their growing search engine. In 2004, they featured Google Lunar (which claimed to feature jobs on the moon), and in 2005, a fictitious brain-boosting drink, termed Google Gulp was announced. In 2006, they came up with Google Romance, a hypothetical online dating service. In 2007, Google announced two joke products. The first was a free wireless Internet service called TiSP (Toilet Internet Service Provider) in which one obtained a connection by flushing one end of a fiber-optic cable down their toilet and waiting only an hour for a "Plumbing Hardware Dispatcher (PHD)" to connect it to the Internet. Additionally, Google's Gmail page displayed an announcement for Gmail Paper, which allows users of their free email service to have email messages printed and shipped to a snail mail address.
Some thought the announcement of Gmail in 2004 around April Fool's Day (as well as the doubling of Gmail's storage space to two gigabytes in 2005) was a joke, although both of these turned out to be genuine announcements. In 2005, a comedic graph depicting Google's goal of "infinity plus one" GB of storage was featured on the Gmail homepage.
Google's services contain a number of Easter eggs; for instance, the Language Tools page offers the search interface in the Swedish Chef's "Bork bork bork," Pig Latin, ”Hacker” (actually leetspeak), Elmer Fudd, and Klingon. In addition, the search engine calculator provides the Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything from Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.[ As Google's search box can be used as a unit converter (as well as a calculator), some non-standard units are built in, such as the Smoot. Google also routinely modifies its logo in accordance with various holidays or special events throughout the year, such as Christmas, Mother's Day, or various birthdays of notable individuals.

IPO and culture
Many people speculated that Google's IPO would inevitably lead to changes in the company's culture, because of shareholder pressure for employee benefit reductions and short-term advances, or because a large number of the company's employees would suddenly become millionaires on paper. In a report given to potential investors, co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page promised that the IPO would not change the company's culture. Later Mr. Page said, "We think a lot about how to maintain our culture and the fun elements. We spent a lot of time getting our offices right. We think it's important to have a high density of people. People are packed together everywhere. We all share offices. We like this set of buildings because it's more like a densely packed university campus than a typical suburban office park."
However, many analysts are finding that as Google grows, the company is becoming more "corporate". In 2005, articles in The New York Times and other sources began suggesting that Google had lost its anti-corporate, no evil philosophy. In an effort to maintain the company's unique culture, Google has designated a Chief Culture Officer in 2006, who also serves as the Director of Human Resources. The purpose of the Chief Culture Officer is to develop and maintain the culture and work on ways to keep true to the core values that the company was founded on in the beginning — a flat organization, a lack of hierarchy, a collaborative environment.