As I tell it in “In the Plex,” on the day of the Google IPO in 2004, director of engineering Wayne Rosing addressed an all-hands meeting.  In his hand was a baseball bat. His message to Googlers was that even though lots of them were going to be pretty rich that day, he would not tolerate any displays of wealth that could endanger the egalitarian company culture. Specifically, he said that if he looked in the parking lot over the next few days and saw an influx of new Porsches or similar bling-y just-bought cars, he would take that baseball bat and smash some windshields.

Google culture is by and large fixed now. But if Wayne Rosing were still around (he left in 2005), he’d probably be very busy with that baseball bat. Case in point: Ben Sloss Treynor, who came to Google in 2003. Treynor has been instrumental in helping build up Google infrastructure and is the father of the company’s Site Engineering Reliability team, which I described in my Wired story about Google data centers. I found him an affable and very helpful source when I interviewed him, twice, for my story.

What I didn’t know what that he is a major, major, car enthusiast who indulges his habit bigtime. According to a Wired.com story that ran today, Treynor has a collection that included but is not limited to “two Ferraris, an extremely rare McLaren 12C Spyder, and the brand-new high-performance Ford Raptor truck.” One of those Ferraris is a 599XX Evo. I don’t know what that is, but it sounds expensive. And in fact, Treynor purchased it for $1.78 million. (OK, it was a charity auction to help Italian earthquake victims.)

It seems that his collection predates the Google IPO. In 2003, Car and Driver magazine featured one of his Vipers, pricet-tag allegedly nearly $140K. Note I did not say one of his cars, but one of his Vipers. (According to the article he already had two of them.)

He seems to have a good sense of humor about his purchases. Recently when an incredulous car buff asked him to prove he owned all that horsepower–by taking their picture with pieces of bread of them– Treynor responded by posing the cars with bread items appropriate to the home country of the respective autos.

But would Wayne Rosing be amused? My guess is if he had stuck around at Google, Rosing would have long given up trying to police displays of wealth. How many Tesla windshields can one guy smash, anyway?

I produced what I hoped was a nice and accurate account of my visit to the Google data center in Hamina, Finland. It included some anecdotes about the local fauna. Specifically, a story about a moose that got on the property before the fencing was completed, and a team laying fiber that encountered a polar bear.

It takes a lot to ruffle a Finn, but apparently the polar bear story has blown out the Nordic stoicism and caused an uproar. It’s worse than a Nokia earnings report.

Let me explain why I included the polar bear in my report. It was an anecdote told to me by a high-ranking Googler, without a smile on his face. He reported that the employees in question had to stay in their car until the polar bear went away. This interview was on the record and recorded, by the way.

I had no reason to doubt the account.  But I am somewhat willing to concede that he may be mistaken.   In my defense, by the time I heard this story, there was no way to go to the scene of the alleged sighting and check for polar bear squat.

Now for the moose issue. At least one indignant Finn added another correction to the piece. According to this correspondent, I was remiss in calling a moose…a moose. In Finland, he told me, they are called elks.

Sorry, but I’m not backing down on this. I may not know the difference between a moose and an elk, but I’m pretty sure there is a difference. What’s more, even the Googlers in Finland refer to the intruder in question as a moose. This rogue moose is somewhat of a legend at the Hamina data center. No one is calling it an elk. And the proof is in the picture below.

Meanwhile, via WikiAnswers I have learned that there are polar bears in Finland.  Three of them, in fact.  They are reportedly in the Ranua Wildlife Park, in the Artic Circle.  I cling to the possibility that climate change, or a need to check Gmail,  may have driven at least  one of these snowy ursine creatures southwards, where it immediately began scouting out the broadband situation. Not impossible!

Anyone who has read IN THE PLEX knows that Marissa was a key figure at Google — and also an important source for me. It’s her quote about Google and Montessori that’s on the back cover of the book. She was extremely generous with her time, starting on the world-spanning Associate Product Manager (APM) trip that was the inspiration for the book. (I also had interviewed her numerous times for Newsweek.) During my research I not only continued interviewing her for background on the company, but what was happening at the moment. And she allowed me to observe some meetings and even her office hours. So I have a pretty good idea how she works and makes decisions.

With that in mind, I think that Yahoo was smart to hire her. I explain why in this post for Wired.com.

I also pointed out that her leadership of the APM program could be a “secret weapon” in rebuilding Yahoo.

But the Google connection goes much deeper than search. The president of Weather Underground is Alan Steremberg. But in the mid-1990s he was a grad student at Stanford, and rooming with a guy named Sergey Brin. When Brin and his partner Larry Page began developing a nascent search engine, they needed help, and had some NSF funding to pay for it. So in 1996, Steremeberg and another student, Scott Hassan, took part-time jobs to work on what was then called BackRub, a project that in 1998 became a separate company called Google.

By then Steremberg was gone. But at one point, he was a part of a foursome that revolutionized search. In The Plex relates how all four went to a meeting at a Palo Alto sushi restaurant with Joe Kraus and Graham Spencer to discuss selling BackRub to their company, Excite. The gangup was part of Larry’s strategy: “They had two so we sent four,” Hassan told me. But Excite didn’t buy. And now Kraus and Spencer work for Google.

Steremberg and and Hassan never did work for Google. (John Battelle, in his book “The Search” referred to them as the “missing Beatles.)” Hassan joined a startup called eGroups. He now heads Willow Garage, a robotics company. Sergey is a big supporter.

Steremberg had already been involved with Weather Underground since the early 1990s when it emerged from the Interent-based weather database at the University of Michigan. (The name was an homage to the sixties radical group associated with University.) In 1995 Steremberg and the other co-founders had broken it off from Michigan as a separate company. So BackRub was just a student job for him. Steremberg left around the time Hassan departed. In 1998 he became president of Weather Underground.

When Google got its first funding in 1998, Sergey and Larry made sure to give Hassan and Steremberg some equity. And now Steremberg presumably has equity in the Weather Channel.

Yesterday Microsoft announced a new device which is claims is both a tablet and a PC. I’ll probably post more about Surface later, probably on Wired.com. But in the meantime I’ve been watching the video of the launch.

This was a very unusual event for Microsoft. The guys from Redmond were totally unselfconscious in picking up a number of Cupertino tropes. On the, um, surface the MS execs aped the fresh enthusiasm with which Steve Jobs (and now Tim Cook and other exec) discussed his products. Clearly Steve Ballmer, Steve Sinofsky and (product GM) Panos Panay were passionate about the company’s new creation, even choked up about it.

But underneath the (here goes again) surface, the energy and emotion seemed rooted in liberation. Freed of farming out hardware implementation to partners, Microsoft was exulting in the opportunities to do cool things in the guise of whole widgetry. They got geeky about the nature of how design was deeply built into the new devices, down to its chemistry and materials. It was refreshing to see.

As I said, I’ll write later about the prospects for Surface. But as someone who’s written a lot about the Apple design process, particularly in my book The Perfect Thing, I saw a lot of parallels. And don’t call me crazy for wondering whether some folks on the Surface team had picked up my book. Panos Panay spoke at length about the concept of “perfect” as a motivating factor in the creation of Surface. The word was like a mantra for him.

In addition, he and the others dwelt on one symbol of the care and hard work deeply built into the new device: the crisp crackle that comes when the much touted smart cover snaps onto the tablet.
In The Perfect Thing, I have a long passage about coolness in a product. The legendary Israeli tech investor Yossi Vardi went on a quest to understand, and possibly capture the recipe, for coolness. He gathered all the information about great products and experiences. But ultimately, he found there was no code to crack.

He was left with one possibly apocryphal anecdote, about when the Japanese were building the Lexus. Their goal was to make something as cool as a Mercedes. They identified one particular trait: the solid, bizarrely satisfying click made when a Mercedes door shut. They tried to analyze why that sound arose. And they learned that it could not be easily replicated. It could only come when the entire rim of the door snugly closed against the chassis in an exact fit–a consequence of the painstaking planning and execution in every aspect of the car.

“The click came as a consequence of the way the door was, the care they took to make that,” Vardi told me. “And that was a consequence that stood for the perfection of the door.”

I’m not sure whether the Surface team studied my book or not. But I do know one thing: they consistently used one comparison to describe the sound and the feeling you get when the cover of their tablet clicks into place: a door shutting on a high-end luxury car.

The first is an essay on Larry Page’s anniversary as CEO.

Number two is a report on the latest from the company’s shoot-for-the-moon skunkworks, Google[x]. Project Glass is Google’s long-rumored digital heads-up display that lets you do everything a smart phone does in a no-hands, Phil K. Dick style.

Finally, today Larry Page posted a memo to the public about his thoughts after completing a year as CEO and beginning a new one. Here’s my take on it. What I really like about it is that it jibes pretty well with what I’ve been writing about Google and Page for the past few months. He even echoed the key word in my piece the day before–impatience.

To those who have been impatient for Larry Page to address the public, he’s come through nicely.

More generally, I have noticed that over the years, Google has gravitated from small tricks to elaborate presentations of outlandishly extravagant initiatives, often having to do with artificial intelligence. Supposedly the joke was that people might be inclined to believe that Google was unveiling stuff that was many years away from reality.  But the real joke was that even the scariest plans that Google joked about were the kind of thing that Google’s leaders actually dreamed about.   In that sense, Google makes fun of itself.  Sort of.

Even though that the Principle of Internet Idiocy applies to April Fool’s jokes, it’s pretty hard to trick people on 4/1 anymore.  (For those who don’t know, here is the Principle of Internet Idiocy:  when constructing a satire, it is impossible to imagine anything so outrageous that someone on the Internet won’t think it’s real.    Jonathan Switft would have a tough time in this century.)    One can predict with 100 percent certainty that on April Fool’s day, Google will produce many elaborate parodies–Wikipedia is already listing fifteen this year–requiring a lot of initiative.  (The most shocking thing Google could ever do on April 1 is nothing.)  Spontaneity is not a factor—for some employees the project is part of their job.

Left with that, we can only judge Google’s efforts by literary or entertainment value, which can be considerable. But none really deliver the sting of a joke that lures you into thinking, “Is this real?” then ups the ante by being so outrageous that you realize you’ve been stung.  I found Google’s main trick this year to be less of a prank than a slickly produced parody of Google’s ethos and the way it communicates it.   (The same with today’s fake Gmail announcement of a version that uses Morse Code–it’s a very funny parody of a self-congratulatory product announcement but when you’re done you say to yourself, “Hey, it actually is hard to type on a smartphone. Who’s the real butt of this joke?”)

The NASCAR thing is a straightforward description of a partnership between Google and NASCAR to create autonomous racing stock cars.  The home page links to a blog post, supposedly written by Sergey.  The post is poker-faced, only veering in the last minute with a joke about passengers in Google cars being about to eat sushi while driving.

Personally, I would have spiced with up with a head-on treatment of how Google cars would have channeled the hootch-running past of NASCAR—maybe fueling the cultural divide between Googlers and stock car racing aficionados–but that’s just me.

While Google gets high marks for execution, the joke itself really isn’t a mind stretcher.  A driverless NASCAR entry is really not so far-fetched.  I bet if Googlers worked on it for a few years, they could produce something that could actually win the Daytona 500.    Even if some clueless folks forget what day it is and retweets this as fact, you can’t really say they’re very gullible.   NASCAR itself posted a pretty amusing video with scenes of Sergey in a Google stock car (some real cash was spent on this!), and top drivers commenting on it. The drivers seemed to be in the joke, but the fans interviewed – good ole boys out of central casting who seemed repelled at the concept—took it as real.

And you can’t blame them. The fact is that the real world is much weirder than parody these days.  Compare Google’s driverless NASCAR to some of the news items we have seen over the past year (think: GOP primaries).  Stuff routinely occurs that one could not have predicted in a million years.  Stuff that makes even the craziest April Fool’s stunts look sedate.    And now think of this:  if Google in 2003 announced that it had developed self-driving cars, everyone would have taken this as a crazy joke.  But only a few years later, it’s totally real.

Absurdists have good reason to “feel lucky.”   The real world shocks us every day.  But there are no surprises when Google—and just about every other tech website in the world—feels compelled to come up with hoaxes on the one day when people expect to see hoaxes.    And that’s why April 1 is the dullest day of the year.

OK, I know it’s not Google.  But here are some thoughts on the Mike Daisey thing.

A theatre monologuist is not the same as a non-fiction journalist. The former is more like a roman a clef novelist, entitled to reengineer the pesky truth to shape a talk into a play. The latter cannot entertain even for a second the prospect of fabrication.

Daisey’s play obviously (to me) took liberties. I don’t hold him to his ludicrous self-portrayal as an over-the-top Apple fanboy (pre-China.) It set up what was to come. But presenting Apple’s alleged atrocities as first-person observation is something else, especially since he was explicitly asking for change. Even so, if somewhere,–maybe in the program or in interviews–he indicated he was fictionalizing what his readings told him was a situation worth exposing, it would have been ok. (Why not include a bibliography in the program?) His job as playwright is to move us in the theatre.

Explaining what was real and not might have made for less on an impact. But he wasn’t entitled to the impact–and celebrity buzz–of a witness. Only to the impact of a dramatist who wanted to make a point.

Instead, he presented himself as a witness in the controversy itself, and replayed his fictions in non-fiction settings, like the NY Times op-ed page. And he seems to have intentionally misled This American Life to regard his fabrications as fact. He doesn’t seem to have done this for the cause of Chinese workers, but self-aggrandizement and profit. It helped his play and his brand.

(Also, implicit in his presentation was that actual reporters couldn’t get the real stories from workers that he, a clueless theatre guy, got by pure gumption. Now we know that he made up his encounters, from stories written by real reporters.)

Daisey’s lame explanation–not really an apology–ignores his greed. I hope when he creates his next play–I expect it to be about this controversy–he accepts his culpability and examines why he behaved so cravenly. If so, it should be terrific.

Google’s very first employee—hired when the company was still working from its founders’ Stanford dorm rooms—is out of there. It came out today that after fourteen years at Google, Craig Silverstein would leave the company to work for Khan Academy, an educational startup that is itself a child of YouTube.

Craig was known for many things, but in the past few years most reporters connected with him as a mercurial commentator on Google culture. His gentle touch was instrumental in forming that culture. In the early days he would bring go around the cubicles crying out, “Bread!” and distributing loaves he’d baked himself. For the past few years he seemed to have a flexible portfolio, moving between New York and Mountain View. He was one of a surprising number of very early Googlers who, though rich enough to live like pashas without ever working again, have stuck with thecompany. Every so often one of those early employees peels off. Still, a number of the first group of employees— like Susan Wojicki (ads), Urs Hölzle (infrastructure), Salar Kamanger (YouTube), and Marissa Mayer (local) — still work long hours at key Google jobs. They can recall when just about the entire company could fit into a van for a ski trip. Now, if the Motorola Mobility deal goes through (word is that’s imminent) Google’s headcount will approach 50,000. That’s a lot of vans.

Though Craig has concentrated on culture in recent years, his technical chops were instrumental in getting the young company off the ground. A number of early employees I talked to mentioned that Silverstein’s tech prowess was one sign that the company was serious about hiring the best talent. And Craig himself was a great source for In the Plex, enduring multiple interviews.

Best of luck, Craig! Google will miss you.

They have a point. With SPYW, the search experience deeply becomes intertwined with Google’s social networking product. You see it in the search box, where the Google+ identity becomes the way to identify a person whose name is in a query. You see it in the search results, where Google+ content is overwhelmingly displayed compared to other social material from Google’s competitors. You see it in a “People and Pages” list–suggestions for connections on Google+–that appears in the same column as Google’s ads.

In short, they say there’s too much Plus and not enough of Our World, which has oodles of content on other social networks.

Let’s take a step back. Is it a good idea for Google to integrate social information into search? The answer, at least in concept, is yes. Google’s mission is to provide all the world’s information. Social information is a big part of that, and Google has been aware for quite some time that its failure to successfully handle the “people” side of its products has been its greatest failure. Google+ was part of a larger initiative to fill this gap. The other part was to make all of Google’s products more social. Including search.

Google CEO Larry Page prepped us for this recently by saying that Google+ was only the first part of Google’s social ambitions—the next step is to “light up” all of Google. As someone who watched the evolution of Google’s social strategy over a year before the release of Google+, I can affirm that this has always been the plan.

But when it came to search, there was a big question: would lots of social results will actually improve search for Google’s users? Do people want their searches full of information about the people they know? Google is convinced that the answer that, too, is yes. According to search quality guru Amit Singhal, it has carefully measured the responses of its users to its existing social search product (one much more modest that SPYW), and found that people respond favorably to search results tagged with connections to people they know. In other words, they click more often on social links, and are “happy” with the results. (Google knows they are happy because they don’t immediately return to the search box to try the same query again.)

The canonical example is that of Singhal’s dog, Chikoo. Previously, if Singhal had typed in the dog’s name into the search box, he’d get nothing but stuff about the tropical fruit by that name. Now, because he is fond of posting pictures of his canine on Google+, he can get doggie content. And since he shares those pictures with people in his family, when his wife does a search for Chikoo, she sees those images, too, and (says Singhal) is delighted to see the family dog in the results. (When I search for Chikoo, I see nothing about the Singhal family pet. As is appropriate.)

Now think about the circumstances that would lead to such a search in the first place. Singhal is going to Google search to look for information about his own dog, the way you or I would use a search engine to look for information about Jessica Biel or Mitt Romney. On first blush this seems odd, to be sure. But Google is always striving for more information in its indexes. It stretched the boundaries its results with its Universal Search product, which brought in media other than web pages, and got some flak for it. But it was the right thing to do, and Google figured out how to do it well. And now we demand images, video, books and other media in search.

Indeed, Google sees SPYW as a similar advance to Universal Search. With the fervor of a recent convert, it believes that social information is a corpus that must be included in search. One day we may marvel that when we searched we didn’t have access to all our social content. Fair enough.

But to really satisfy the user, you need a critical mass of that information to make the searches truly relevant. While there may well be some pictures of your dog on Google+, the bulk of such photos (for those of us who don’t work at Google) are probably be on iPhoto, on Path, and of course on Facebook. But you won’t find them on SPYW. (In a blog item defending SPYW, Google engineer Matt Cutts notes that you can find results from sites like Quora, Twitter and FriendFeed. He even shows how a Flickr photo can appear. But none are as deeply integrated into the product as Google+. And Cutts does not mention Facebook, by far the world’s richest social corpus, in his post.)

Google defends the predominance of Google+ content in its new product by claiming that competitors won’t share. “We always want to provide the most relevant set of results,” Singhal says. “We’re open to working with others. But that information is not available to us. They won’t even let us crawl it.” (And to its credit, Google offers an opt-out function—a toggle switch that lets people see results without social content. Maybe it should have been an opt-in.)

Now that Google has released the product, Eric Schmidt has publicly called for negotiations with social sites to integrate their content in Google search results. But there are competing stories about how much Google really wants to make those deals. Sources close to late 2009 discussions between Google and Facebook tell me that Google had the opportunity to integrate Facebook information in its search results–on the same terms that such content now appears in Bing. But, those sources say, Google refused, on the grounds that it could not technically provide the privacy protections required. Those privacy protections involved restricting social information only to people who users want to share with—basically what Google has now provided for users of its own service. (Google’s head of communications and public policy Rachel Whetstone responds: ” In 2009, we were negotiating with Facebook over access to its data, as has been reported. To claim that the we couldn’t reach an agreement because Google wanted to make private data publicly available is simply untrue.”)

In addition, it seems that in the run up to the SPYW launch, Google didn’t approach social sites and ask them to deeply integrate their services into the new product. To understand why Google may not have been so aggressive in seeking launch partnership, look back at what happened last summer. Google had made a deal with Twitter to get access to the “firehose” of its tweets in real time. Google had devoted considerable resources and effort to launch a real time search product that depended on Twitter content. But last July, Twitter decided not to renew the contract. That basically killed Real Time Search, and Google had to take the embarrassing step of shutting it down. The minds of Mountain View do not want a repeat of this incident. So Google is reluctant to develop new products that put it at the mercy of other providers.

Understandable? Maybe. But it’s counterproductive.

In any case, competitors say that Google could do more without such partnerships. Alex Macgillivray, Twitter’s general counsel and an important early employee in Google’s legal team, says that there was plenty Google could have done to make sure that relevant Twitter content was treated more fairly compared to Google+ content. “In the Google I knew, you didn’t have to have a deal for your stuff to be considered relevant,” he says.

(I don’t want to let Google’s social competitors off the hook. All too often, they regard the personal information users share with them as their own. Obviously, users should be free to dictate where their information should go—including whether information is available to search engines.)

No matter what the reasons, the unbalanced delivery of social content in SPYW is unsatisfying. It’s like a music service starting up with a license with just one label, or a map service going live with under half the terrain depicted. If I’m searching for social content, I don’t want to have to figure out which company is naughty or nice. I just want to find the pictures shared with me, whether they were posted to Facebook or Google+.

Nonetheless, Google decided it was imperative to get its social content into search now. Larry Page is a notoriously impatient leader. Read Google’s just-released quarterly magazine—it’s all about how Google is built for speed and nimbleness. It also boasts that Google is more nimble by shifting from a consensus culture into a command-and-control structure where someone is empowered to give a fricking order to the troops.

Obviously Google’s CEO seems to have concluded that deeply integrating lots and lots of Google+ into search is not a problem. I think Google wants us to see its social efforts not as a direct competitor to Facebook and others, but a core value of the company. By that thinking, Google+ is Google. And search itself is part of Google+.

That’s a heavy concept, and one that’s potentially groundbreaking. If Google is able to leverage the knowledge it accumulates about you, it can deliver much better search results. (Simple example: Google knows you are a vegan. When you search for a restaurant, you won’t see BBQ results!) Google notes that in order to do this, it has to know who you are, and that’s why the Google+ identity is now integrated in search.

But there is a risk to proceeding on this path. The company has spent its entire corporate life protecting the integrity of its search product. When writing In the Plex, I learned that the secret behind Google’s somewhat bland design was that if Google looked like it was designed by a machine, users would implicitly understand that Google search itself was unpolluted by strong opinions. Google meticulously positioned its flagship product as a neutral judge of what was relevant to the user.

Search, in short, should appear to be like Caesar’s wife, above reproach. When using its algorithmic wizardry to deeply integrate social information into its search experience, it behooves Google to avoid even a whiff of bias. With SPYW, though, the odor is unmistakable. No matter how you cut it, the search engine now increases the value of participating in Google+. It may be Google’s right to do this. But it also may turn off a lot of users. And it also provides ammo for Google’s detractors, including those in Washington.

In fact, some people are saying that Google’s move may trigger an antitrust action, and there’s already talk that the FTC is on the case. But you don’t have to get into legal issues to see why Google’s new product as it appears now takes the company into dangerous territory.