A passing note in the L.A. Times Magazine today suggests that Google is about to build an architecturally significant headquarters complex.
Time to sell the stock...
(As an explanation, I've had a theory for a long time that the longevity of a business' success maps pretty well to the inverse cube of the overstandard tenant improvements of the space it occupies.)
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Great theory clearly enuciated by Northcote Parkinson in his book Parkinson's Laws
The law is on the lines of a company will fail once it moves to custom designed buildings. As the management become more concerned with the building rather than the business.
Called "edifice complex" for which Google itself returns 161,000 hits.
I'm going to have to steal that.
It's a long-standing Silicon Valley axiom too, known as the "Castle in the Swamp" axiom.
I've worked for 3 companies for whom this law has proven true. Didn't know it had a name.
And now I do.
How do you explain the Johnson Wax headquarters by Frank Lloyd Wright?
A proper Google Plex should have 10^100 number of windows, which is a lot of windows so they're going to have to be pretty small. The elevators must have options for "Search" and "I'm Feeling Lucky". You could put a pop-up billboard on the summit, and then weld rebar across the slot to keep it from popping up.
I picture a huge white slab with a kazillion air-holes punched in it, topped off with the ugly crayon-box Google logo. There, the damn thing practically designed itself.
Dear Don,
I've been there. It is a wonderfully innovative and functional building.
SC Johnson
I had the opportunity to visit with engineering staff at both Dell and Compaq on business in the early '90s. Compaq campus was lush and beautiful. Dell was a sh*thole, with conference room numbers scrawled on scraps of paper taped outside the doors. Today, of course, Dell is Dell, and Compaq is a footnote.
For the Johnson case it would be interesting, although pretty well impossible - since it is a private company, to find out the impact on their profits of the new building in 1939. Although since they had already been trading for 50 some years one would hope they already had a large cash reserve.
The great Johnson Wax building has no windows that look out on Racine. Wright hated Racine and tried to get Johnson to relocate. Johnson refused, so Wright designed a building that totally ignores Racine.
Apple built its campus at 280 and DeAnza Road in the early 90s, just as its market share and stock price headed South. Perhaps the complex has now aged enough for its malignant influence to diminish.
RHIT the Google organizational culture is having some problems scaling up. If the limited amount of management attention is further diluted with architectural planning, do consider dumping the shares, should you be so bullish as to be holding them.
What does "RHIT" mean? And do you have some lnks about this topic?