Daily Archive for May 9th, 2008

IS GOOGLE STILL COOL? POLLSTER SAYS NO

NEW YORK, N.Y. May 9th…Google just grew. That’s the beauty of a search engine.

It just grew again.

Google is recession proof. It’s stock price has gone from 85 to 572. It employs 4,000 plus.

It just added another employee.

And it just grew again.

But one aspect of Google is shrinking–its hip rating. And pollster Efraim Durg says this may bode ill for the Googlefuture.

Durg, founder of VoxPopMetrics.com, conducts “demographically controlled” surveys outside Stash’s Kielbassa in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn. He has one prompt: “Name the hippest company on the world.” He says Google was Number One on the “hipmeter” for years, but recent actions have lowered its standing.

“Google started to wobble when it agreed to censor itself in order to get into the Chinese market,” Durg says. “Still,some of my older demographic said it was cool because it was good business.”

But he registered substantial oscillations on his carefully plotted “hipogram” when Google announced its plan to offer all the books in the world online.

“Books are so old media,” Durg says. “My younger demographic was put off.”

The “hipneedle”dropped again when it was revealed that Google founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page were pushing 35.

“Only the very young and the very old are cool,” Durg says. “There are no cool people between 35 and 65.”

Brin and Page blundered again, Durg says, when they attended a conference for the “richest, squarest people in the world” in Davos, Switzerland.

“They wore shorts and sandals like they were trying to be cool, and cool people never try,” he says.”If they had shown up in really good suits they would have kept their cool.”

But the trouble really started when the Google lost twice to Facebook in the ultimate frisbee championships. “Spectators say the Googlers were run off the field,” Durg says.

People close to both firms says this defeat led to the defection of top Google ad executive Sheryl Sandberg to Facebook, which was followed in short order by the departure of Google senior manager Elliot Shrage to head Facebook’s new corporate and public affairs department.

“Executives are weather vanes,” Durg says. “They go the way the wind blows.”

Google maintained its cool in the corporate kitchen where it offered healthy, genetically unmodified cuisine from local farmers, as opposed to the indifferent institutional fare offered by Facebook. It also claimed the services of a chef who had cooked for the Grateful Dead and funkmeister George Clinton,

But that ended when chef Josef Desimone was lured away by Facebook. Famous for his wheatgrass shooters and homemade kombucha tea, which is said to increase neuron twitches in the brain, Desimone has now begun to reinvent the Facebook kitchen.

This latest departure rankled veteran Googlers more than any of the others. “We won’t miss Desimone,” a Googler told Silicone Valley gossip sheet ValleyWag. “Everyone hated his cafes. He had the worst heavy everything–fried menus.”

Durg shook his head at that disgruntled reaction. “Sore losers,” he said. “Very uncool.”