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The concept looks super cool, but that Radcliffe guy needs to fix his bad habit of ending most every sentence with a question? It's very distracting to the overall flow and feel of the video? I wonder how long it'll take for the first buildings to come to fruition?
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For what it's worth, MTV doesn't mean Mountain View to anybody who doesn't live or work in Mountain View. To everybody else it means MTV, making the things you say very confusing.
For what it’s worth, I live on the east coast, am not particularly keyed in to the Silicon Valley world like most HN readers, and knew (assumed) immediately that MTV = Mountain View based on the context of the article and the comment. I think it’s pretty obvious given the overall context here.
I work at Google in MTV and this is very exciting to me. I think the higher-ups at this company have the vision to pull this off, I hope I stay engaged here long enough to see it. The real concern (which Google can't fully solve) is housing. If you add 10k or 20k more employees in these beautiful new offices, where do they all live? I guess Google could build apartments too but that's not ideal, I don't want to live…
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I work for Google in Mountain View, and I'd prefer to work in a filthy basement in Kansas. The commute would be better, and the cost of living lower...
Move to Mountain View? For the 5 years I was at Google, I never lived more than 2 miles away, my commute was 15 minutes by bicycle, and for half that, rent was only about $1400/month (it started rising rapidly in the last few years). But wait, it's not SF? Well, neither is Kansas, and as far as urban life & young people go, Mountain View is a lot better than Kansas.
Yeah, but now it's
> The average cost for a 1-bedroom apartment in Mountain View is $2,356, according to myapartmentmap.com
http://www.sanjoseinside.com/2014/10/29/rent-control-off-the...
Granted, if you're a software engineer at Google that's not too horrible, but it sucks that so much of your big salary goes to renting an average little apartment.
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This is the first time Google is developing an office complex from scratch and it's somehow "Edifice Complex"? Mind you this is a $400 billion company.
You can object to it if you want, but it's a well known phenomena - starting to build buildings is often a bad sign for the company's long-term future prospects. And since we're talking about companies peaking, the size of the company isn't particularly relevant. It is, of course, not a universal law, but lavish new office spaces are one of those things that don't seem to go well.
So maybe it is that big successful companies tend to build buildings, and that success sometimes is the downfall of an innovative company.
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Move to Mountain View? For the 5 years I was at Google, I never lived more than 2 miles away, my commute was 15 minutes by bicycle, and for half that, rent was only about $1400/month (it started rising rapidly in the last few years). But wait, it's not SF? Well, neither is Kansas, and as far as urban life & young people go, Mountain View is a lot better than Kansas.
>only about $1400/month Interesting how you refer to that as "only". That's like 40% of the average American salary. But if you work at Google and you indicate $1400 with "only" I cannot help but assume Google employees are far above the average national income.
Yes, this is insane. But people can pay them. Tech company employees are indeed far above the average national income.
[1] http://sf.curbed.com/archives/2014/10/06/mapping_the_median_...
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Prop 13 limits property tax to the value of the house when you bought it unlike most places where you pay property tax on the current value. So what happens in other locations is that demand for locations starts going up, housing prices go up, taxes go up and people who can't pay those taxes get displaced. Developers buy those houses, raze them in favor of apartment complexes and eventually you get density. If people…
The alternative is people being priced out of the house they lived in all their lives. I consider that a worse outcome.
How often do buildings get to look like what the architects envision? I feel there is an often a disconnect similar to how many cars are initially designed to look futuristic and sleek, but later end up looking quite ordinary.
The problem is the full vision: architects love tossing in an unrealistic amount of people having loads of fun that's almost impossible to have in such a spontaneous way. They stage social utopic scenarios in their renderings which almost never describe how the public ends up utilizing and interacting with the public spaces provided by the project.
I work at Google in MTV and this is very exciting to me. I think the higher-ups at this company have the vision to pull this off, I hope I stay engaged here long enough to see it. The real concern (which Google can't fully solve) is housing. If you add 10k or 20k more employees in these beautiful new offices, where do they all live? I guess Google could build apartments too but that's not ideal, I don't want to live…
In the industrial revolution, it wasn't uncommon for major industrialists to build "model villages" [1] to house workers. The best examples include Bournville (Cadbury's chocolate), Saltaire (wool) and Port Sunlight (Lever Bros soap etc).
They were attractive places to live, compared with Victorian slums. You got a healthier, happier workforce living within walking distance of their jobs. Sir Titus Salt's Saltaire is now a World Heritage Site.
There's no reason why Google couldn't do the same, at least for a proportion of its workers. It looks as those Facebook will....