Google Execs Seem Out of Touch With Social Networking Culture

A bit perplex by these two statemnets.

"But it’s an awkward time at Google, where a group of employees can leave, create a start-up and come back two years later through an acquisition with $50 million in their pockets."

So employees leave, create their own startup and Google happens to buy those startups. Here it sounds like a bad thing.

Yet.... a few sentences down she says , "Google needs to find a way to foster its employees’ entrepreneurial desires and talents"

Wouldn't this mean more employees would leave? If I have entrepreneurial desires, I'd quit my job and tried to pursue my own startup.

On a different note, I feel that Facebook is a trend supported by hype that can be brought down by any other hip social network site down the line. Just like Xanga, and MySpace before it. A good example is Digg, once thought to be a behemoth it died almost over night.

This article is plain pageview fodder. It begins by repeating known facts about the talent war between Facebook and Google, and then dives off about a "lack of social" at high levels without even attempting any connecting statements. Yes, Facebook's focus is "social", but it'll take more than an utterly unsubstantiated almost-quote like "younger employees, especially, say they are turned off by their bosses’ lack of social media savviness on a personal level" to convince anyone of even a base correlation.

I really don't think anyone presently working at Google is judging their bosses by their volume of tweets - and if they are, hiring them may well (imo) have been an error.

Correlation does not equal causation. The article assumes that because Sergey and Larry aren't Twittering and Facebooking, "Google does not understand social." I can't begin to tell you how myopic that view is. Sergey Brin, for one, is very much behind Buzz, and in many ways Google has not played its hand yet.

What a bunch of crap... By that same measure, Apple should considered as doing horribly as well -- where are the tweets / blog posts / check-ins from Steve Jobs or other senior execs?

Companies often become a reflection of the personality of their leadership. Though this factor should be strongest when the company is the smallest/youngest. Their strengths, their weaknesses, their tastes. Google would be just as prone to this, for good or bad, as Apple or Microsoft or Oracle. In fact, I think you could write the same kind of article about those other companies, except picking a different area or two where they seem to have a "blind spot", even if it isn't really accidental, but a matter of strategy or taste.

I don't hear the rank and file engineers going to facebook talking about how excited they are to be at a company that "gets it" socially or has really exciting challenges or their execs talk to people in 140 character blocks without a filter. I think mostly people going to facebook are looking at their pre-ipo status next to their roughly guaranteed blockbuster ipo valuation. Google shares have little chance to appreciate that much anymore, and certainly not in the timeframe.