Google's blog is highly dynamic indeed!

May 11, 2004 1:38 PM

Today's entry on the Google blog was altered in a subtle way. The earlier entry boasted of their Bangalore data center, but the afternoon's version now features the Zurich center more prominently and relegates Bangalore to a footnote. Could it be that the company is a little less boastful in their handling of the outsourcing debate than they thought they could be?
posted by clevershark (16 comments total)

Google, as a newly minted public company, is going to be risking a huge securities lawsuit with that blog. I predict that the content of the blog will get more and more innocuous until it is virtually unreadable.
posted by monju_bosatsu at 1:45 PM on May 11, 2004

I don't think they've said anything illegal, but no matter how good the intentions of those starting it and running it, it'll likely turn into a harmless PR channel eventually. There's just too much room for misinterpretation (like what happened here, less than 24 hours after it publicly launched).
posted by mathowie at 1:47 PM on May 11, 2004

It was definitely something entirely different originally.

More like, "don't bitch at us for outsourcing, we're hiring Indians because they're smart, not because they're cheap."
posted by smackfu at 2:00 PM on May 11, 2004

i keep hearing about these smart Indian developers. Could someone please send some of them my way? Where I work, the development team is about 50% Indian, and generally, they're just as bad as corporate developers anywhere. There are a few bright sparks, but the ratio seems to be about the same as any other ethnicity.
posted by dvdgee at 2:07 PM on May 11, 2004

When I read it initially, it felt like a piece of snark directed at people who think of hiring in Bangalore as "outsourcing" but in Zurich it's somehow "going far & wide to find the best & brightest."

I could see someone reading it and knee-jerking a misinterpretation, and given that this is kind of a sensitive time for Google, the rewrite is logical. Unnecessary, but this is not a time for a multibillion-dollar corporation to be snarking on a blog about sending jobs overseas.
posted by chicobangs at 2:27 PM on May 11, 2004

It probably goes without saying that the original version of an officially redacted Google blog is the one thing you won't be able to find in the Google cache.

(Not that you'd find this there in any event if it was from today. But it makes one wonder if Google is allowing/will allow its blog to be spidered and cached like everything else. Would you like some sauce with that goose?)
posted by George_Spiggott at 4:14 PM on May 11, 2004

Well, they haven't gotten aroudn to adding it to their robots.txt file yet.
posted by adamrice at 4:24 PM on May 11, 2004

Interestingly, when we announced our engineering center in Bangalore, we found ourselves knee-deep in the debate about "outsourcing" -- the practice of cutting a company's American operations in favor of cheaper labor elsewhere. India in particular has been a subject of a lot of press coverage on this topic lately, which we find to be pretty unfair. It's not their fault they have a lot of brilliant computer scientists who don't care to relocate to the States.

Via Hello, Typepad

And dvdgee, the grads from IIT are probably the smart developers Google is going to hire.
posted by chunking express at 4:26 PM on May 11, 2004

Indeed, here's a mock CV illustrating their expectation.
posted by Gyan at 4:42 PM on May 11, 2004

It's hard to take this googleblog seriously if it's going to be stealth-edited without notice... I guess it IS just another PR tool after all.
posted by clevershark at 4:47 PM on May 11, 2004

I think this will be addressed by someone at Google. The fact they made a change to the post has been mentioned all over the place. It would be nice to get more details on who posted the original entry, and who changed it. The originally entry raises a good point, and it is a shame they dropped it.
posted by chunking express at 5:00 PM on May 11, 2004

What WAS written isn't as important as the idea that they're not willing to stand up for ideas if they prove to be unpopular.

What does that mean for future official communications? It certainly means that anything that appears on the blog should be taken with a heavy grain of salt, and that despite being called the "googleblog" it will have to carry a disclaimer that the views expressed there do not reflect the opinions of the company.

That makes the blog essentially pointless, doesn't it? Maybe it was, as monju_bosatsu pointed out, a bad idea from the start.
posted by clevershark at 5:09 PM on May 11, 2004

Or, it just might be that the post was edited to the author's preference after the fact. I edit posts hours after I make them, and I know I'm not the only one.
posted by Jairus at 7:17 PM on May 11, 2004

True, but we're not exactly talking about a personal blog here...
posted by clevershark at 7:44 PM on May 11, 2004

When I read it initially, it felt like a piece of snark directed at people who think of hiring in Bangalore as "outsourcing" but in Zurich it's somehow "going far & wide to find the best & brightest."

Well, there is the little difference of salaries and other costs in Zurich being at least similar to, if not higher than, costs in California.
posted by billsaysthis at 8:07 PM on May 11, 2004

Yeah. I mean, I can barely spell properly, so I edit posts all the time. But this was quite the change. I'm sure it was out of fears there would be some "damn dem pakis, they're taking our jobs" backlash.
posted by chunking express at 8:08 PM on May 11, 2004