It’s good to be Google! Most of the Western world may be struggling with various degrees of above-average unemployment, but one much remarked-upon news item of late concerned the Mountain View, CA powerhouse’s awarding a 10% across-the-board pay-rise to all employees, together with a one-off lump-sum gratuity of $1,000. One aspect of that move’s appeal was how much of a throw-back it seemed as a personnel measure, far-removed from today’s HR environment where bonuses going only to those identified as the company’s true high-achievers, not to every employee, are more the norm. Yet a few analysts could still see the logic in this approach (including, for example, this commentator on the Atlantic website).

Writing in Le Monde, Marion Solletty takes yet another cut at what this latest move by Google means:

. . . the star of Silicon Valley feels itself under threat. Its vital forces, the engineers who fine-tuned its mysterious algorithms, are leaving it. With the eye of a connoisseur they have watched the sparkling rise of the new stars of the Web, the social networks. And they respond to the call of the bold.

Search, and text ads, and YouTube videos: all that is just so yesterday, man, just so . . . 2008, you know! And then following directly comes the anecdote of Cedric Beust (with a suspiciously French name!), a six-year Google employee who now has left to join LinkedIn.

What goes around, comes around. According to Solletty, Google first stocked itself with quality personnel by raiding the leading Internet-related firms of its own period of skyrocketing growth. Now it’s the turn of others, including especially Facebook, whose employee total has gone from 1,000 to 1,700 within the past year (although it has had its own top-level defections), or Twitter, which has tripled from 100 employees to 300 in that same period.

Ironically, Google’s latest salary-move did cost it one employee. The internal company message announcing it (“CONFIDENTIAL: INTERNAL ONLY”), and lauding employees as “the best in the world,” was soon leaked to an industry blog so we could all savor the message, at least vicariously. But he who did the leakin’ was fired.

UPDATE: It’s worse for Google than we thought! TechCrunch now has this piece about a Google engineer threatening to leave to join Facebook and getting $3.5 million in stock to stay!

Did you know that there is a search engine out there that is superior to Google? And that Microsoft will shortly purchase it? Obviously, all of this is important in the context of the take-over bid for Yahoo! that Microsoft announced just over week ago, a move that was widely interpreted as being a challenge to Google. Peter Buhr, writing in Die Zeit (Pincer-Attack on Google), sheds some light on what could be one important aspect of the proposed deal that I haven’t seen any coverage of in any English-language forum.

You can actually try out this other search engine for yourself to see what you think: it’s at AlltheWeb, and happens to be owned by Yahoo!, having first been sold to Overture in 2003 whereupon Overture itself was sold to Yahoo! in 2004. According to Buhr, the main problem that has held AlltheWeb back from greater public acceptance has simply been marketing – people never knew about it because PR has never been a specialty of the engineers there. (more…)

Going back to the French press today . . . which is dominated by coverage of France and Germany getting off without penalty for their defiance of the Growth & Stability Pact, by a vote today of the Council of EU Finance Ministers (“Ecofin”). (Well, not L’Humanité. Coverage over there is of leftist-type other stuff – anyone for Iraq: Every Day The List of Fallen American Soldiers Gets Longer? Today, if you want L’Humanité, you’re going to have to rev up your own French.)

I’ve reported and commented enough about the French and Germans violating the Stability Pact (latest here), and the Netherlands – among others – not liking it. What more is there to say?

Wait now . . . those of you with that French-leftist predilection . . don’t wander away all sniffling and sad now, I didn’t mean to be so abrupt. Heck, didn’t I show you my love with my recent coverage of the European Social Forum?

Tell you what: Let’s go to another French publication which is almost as leftist as L’Humanité, namely Le Monde Diplomatique (a monthly commentary newspaper), especially now that I’ve spotted this neat piece about weblogs (!) (check out the title, worthy of the Weekly World News: Internet Seized by Weblog Mania; the piece is from last August’s issue). By the way, I found that article via this almost-as-interesting leftist treatment (yes!) of Google (The World According to Google), from the October issue, which is also worth a look. (more…)