Secrets of success from Google co-founder Larry Page

    # You don't want to be Tesla. He was one of the greatest inventors,
    but it's a sad, sad story. He couldn't commercialise anything, he
    could barely fund his own research. You'd want to be more like
    Edison. If you invent something, that doesn't necessarily help
    anybody. You've got to actually get it into the world; you've got
    to produce, make money doing it so you can fund it.

    Edison: "Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration."

    Telsa on Edison: "just a little theory and calculation would have saved him
    90 percent of the labour. But he had a veritable contempt for book
    learning and mathematical knowledge, trusting himself entirely to his
    inventor's instinct and practical American sense." 

When you are the only one who has done something, you are automatically the best. No matter how bad you are.

The second last quote sort of reinforces the "learn through mistakes" attitude of Edison:

    # The thing that matters is experience. We have lots of executives
    from failed companies; they learned a lot from these things. They
    say, 'We can't do that -- we tried that and it didn't work.' So
    failure is useful.

I work at Carnegie Mellon, and Google Pittsburgh is literally right next to the building I work in. I visited a friend there, and there really isn't much distinction between their office layout and the way the rest of the campus looks (except they have better food). Googlers attend and give talks on campus and in their offices all the time, right alongside the faculty and students.

So, yes, I would say they have succeeded in recreating the grad school environment, assuming their offices are anything like the Pittsburgh one.

  # Part of our brand is that we're pretty understated in what we do.
  If you look at other technology companies, they might preannounce
  things, and it will be a couple years before they really happen,
  and they don't happen in the way they said they would.

But this article takes their (rediff.com) entire post, posts it in full and never gives them credit.

Why isn't this plagiarism?

I'd like to see this applied to Google Analytics, which is nice but has no way to export any data. I'd also like a way to delete all the junk Google has on me like logs of my searches.

I guess I'd believe that "be good" was some kind of important principle to Google if they acted any different than any other company: use personal data for customer lock-in and to reuse/resell/mine elsewhere; give a small escape hatch to only those few services people complain loudest about.

My take away from the whole list.