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Google provides colorful bicycles for its Mountain View area employees to ride. But hundreds of these bicycles go missing every week, and some have been found tossed in a local creek:
"The disappearances often aren't the work of ordinary thieves, however. Many residents of Mountain View, a city of 80,000 that has effectively become Google's company town, see the employee perk as a community service," the Wall Street Journal reported.
And for the company, here's one Google bike use case that's got to burn a little: 68-year-old Sharon Veach told the newspaper that she sometimes uses one of the bicycles as part of her commute: to the offices of Google's arch foe, Oracle. Google doesn't really want non-Googlers using the bikes, "but it's OK if you do," Veach explained.
Google has hired 30 contractors using five vans to recover lost and stolen bikes, about a third of which are equipped with GPS trackers. The teams carry waders and grappling hooks for pulling bikes out of creeks.
The company can't even confront people who appear to have stolen their bikes:
Ensuring that only company workers are riding the "Gbikes" is not particularly straightforward: some Googlers don't exactly fit the stereotype of the Silicon Valley techie. Company transportation executive Jeral Poskey told the paper he once took action when he saw what appeared to be a homeless woman on a commandeered Google bike. "If I could describe her, you would agree with me," Poskey said. "She looked all panicked, and then she showed me her Google badge."
(Score: 4, Insightful) by TheGratefulNet on Monday January 08 2018, @03:57PM (3 children)
I used to work at SGI, who was the first (in that area) to have bikes like that.
SGI had all those buildings at shoreline and we often had meetings at diff sites, so we'd hop onto a bike, ride to the meeting and ride back when done.
SGI was a cool company with an honest product. I was proud to work for them.
google - not so much. never worked for them, but their whole purpose is ADVERTISING and I just can't get behind that. the other 'benefits' from google don't make up for the evil that google has become.
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday January 08 2018, @06:47PM (1 child)
SGI was a cool company with an honest product. I was proud to work for them.
google - not so much. never worked for them, but their whole purpose is ADVERTISING
Let this be a lesson to you. Cool companies with honest products don't last.
I think a relevant bit of wisdom is the sage words, "Evil will always prevail because good is dumb."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 08 2018, @07:28PM
You need competent and honest leadership too! [theregister.co.uk]
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Tuesday January 09 2018, @05:51AM
Google's whole purpose, as I see it, is to do crazy stuff. Advertising is just a means to fund that. Things like AlphaGo, Guetzli (35% better JPEG compressor), Maps, Earth, Tensorflow, Go, Loon, Wing, Translate, Search, Waymo are all funded by the ads money printing machine. What, you thought cutting edge research was free? Project Zero, which uncovered the recent Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities, among many many other security issues? Also funded by Google's ads.
You're welcome to have an opinion about whether all of those things are worth Google selling ads targeted with your data, of course.
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