The question of Google's mojo is making the rounds these days. At Computerworld, Preston Gralla opines: Why Google has lost its mojo -- and why you should care. In that collumn, he points to a New York Times article about upset at Google after the company raised prices on its day care center. He also points to a blog by Sergey Solyanik, a Microsoft programmer who left Redmond for Google, then returned to Microsoft and got a lot of attention for it in the blogoshpere. And then, of course, Google's stock price has dropped this year.
Gralla then follows it up with More evidence that Google's Mojo is gone, in which he points to a Valleywag report that Google was eliminating free dinners at the Googleplex.
Oops, that last one turned out to be a red herring dinner. In a follow up, Valleywag reports that Google is only eliminating dinner at buildings not frequented by engineers. In comments on that posting, several people point out that it does not mean that only Google engineers get dinner, but that non-engineers still working late will have to walk over to an engineering building for their free evening meal.
What all this comes down to is that Google is cutting back a little on perks that other companies never offered in the first place. The reports of its dying mojo are greatly exaggerated. Cutting the subsidies to day care becomes disdain for those who have not cashed in stock options, one engineer leaving becomes a spate of defections.
But that's the position Google has gotten itself into by rising to the top of the tech world with unusual and often idealistic approaches to business. Anything that puts a chink in that dinner plate gets covered like the end of the Second Coming, when it's really more like the end of the Second Helping. Google still has the best perks in business, as far as I can see.
It does damage Google's reputation. A general rule of perks is that, once offered, do not rescind. It hurts morale, even if those perks were over the top to begin with.
As Google grows, it is starting to tighten its belt. I had an argument with a Silicon Valley executive a few years ago about Google's idealism. He argued that once it became a public company, those ideals would fall under the knife of shareholder scrutiny. Perhaps that's what we're beginning to see here.
But the things that really matter -- a clean, easy-to-use system, unobtrusive and relevant ads, free computing for everyone -- are safe, for the simple reason that they do not come at the sacrifice of profits, but contribute to its success.
Call me when things get really serious.