14 DAY TRIAL // Although the Mountain View company is already owning an office in Kirkland, Seattle, Google wants to open a new center very close to Microsoft's building. According to Computerworld, the search giant leased 60,000 square feet of a Seattle building, planning to hire a considerable number of employees. The Kirkland employees worked on famous Google products such as Website Optimizer, Google Talk, Google Video and Google Maps. The same source reported that the Mountain View company will compete with Microsoft, the software giant that currently has 35.000 employees in the town.
"In the next couple of years we expect to grow substantially and continue to invest in the Pacific Northwest. Google already has a "few hundred" engineers in Kirkland," Scott Silver, technical manager for Google's Website Optimiser, said according to Computerworld. "The two companies have been and will continue to compete for talent, regardless of where they're located," says Matt Rosoff, an analyst at Directions on Microsoft, added according to the same source.
On March 31, 2007 it was reported that Google has no less than 12.238 employees in the offices from all over the world. As you might know, the search giant won the competition for The Best Company in the World to Work For after Forbes considered that Google offers the best conditions bundled with high salaries. The award is quite obvious because most of the Google employees are quite satisfied with their job, everyone having the possibility to use 20 percent of the work time for individual projects.
Anyway, Google's expansion continues, the search giant looking for new areas to open offices and to sign deals. Until now, the only area that remained untouched by the Google's evolution plans is China, the country that rejected most of the search giant's attempts to improve its presence into the region.