Yahoo's proposed new HQ in the Silicon Valley town of Santa Clara would be big enough to house 7,000 additional staff, according to former Valleywag Nicholas Carlson, at Business Insider. The company continues to try and push permits for the plan through the city's approval process despite plenty of available office space in existing Silicon Valley buildings.

We've seen this movie before. It does not end well:

• Fox Interactive's $350 million new HQ near Los Angeles was said to be the biggest area development deal in 25 years. Amid layoffs, Fox cancelled its move as the building was being finished.
  
• Internet conglomerate IAC finished its new Gotham headquarters in early 2007. Within months came a plan to break up the company.
  
• Amid the dot-com boom, network technology company Cisco Systems planned a controversial Silicon Valley megacampus for 20,000 workers. In late 2001 it scaled that back to plans for an office that could — maybe! — hold 3,000 to 9,000 workers.
  
• Handheld device maker Palm had dot-com-era plans for a 39-acre campus; the collateral alone on the project was $238 million. By mid-2001 Palm announced it would sell that land.
  
• From late 2000 to late 2001, USA Today reported, "Intel, Excite At Home and Inktomi... shelved or cut back plans for new plants or offices."

It's worth noting that Yahoo's plans have been underway since three years ago, when the company bought the land in question for $112 million. Seasoned real estate developers know it often makes more sense to obtain city approvals before canceling a project, since the approvals can usually be transferred to a new owner, making the underlying land more valuable. So Bartz is not necessarily at fault for Yahoo's hubristic plans. But that doesn't make her any less likely to be the victim of what they portend.

The rigid philosophy of testing every little aspect of a Web page's appearance — Mayer's team once tested 41 different shades of blue to determine which generated the optimal number of clicks — has driven away top design talent tired of the endless testing. But perhaps the problem is that Mayer's restive designers just aren't as smart as she is! Here's her explanation:

Every design starts with an instinct: It should look like this, or it should look like that. You can actually test it with data. The humbling thing about that is sometimes the data proves you wrong. So for every change I propose, you know, three out of four, four out of five the data will support the change.

It doesn't matter if Google's ugly — the data is on Mayer's side, see?

Wait a second: Mayer famously dismissed a Googler's application for a job transfer because they'd gotten a single C. "Good students are good at all things," she said at a meeting witnessed by a reporter. But Mayer has just admitted that she gets a C, a B-minus at best, at Web design. She recently touted a design featuring unpopular insurance giant AIG. By her own rules, shouldn't she be fired in favor of someone less tone-deaf on design?

Here's a segment from her appearance:

A tipster reports:

I was waiting to get lunch at Cafe 5ive at Google (very popular now that it's closing) today and overheard an engineer: "Can you believe this? They make 50 highly paid engineers wait in line for one lowly paid chef."

Watch out, Google kids — that "lowly paid chef"'s name is Jean-Claude Balek, and he's one tough character. He has "foie gras" tattooed on his knuckles. He's staying with Google and moving to another café. And we would not blame him one bit if he slipped a surprise into your next organic suckling pig.

(Photo by Roshan V)

In the piece, Rosenberg, who oversees Google's product management, says little that is surprising about Google's strategy:

This means that every fellow citizen of the world will have in his or her pocket the ability to access the world's information. As this happens, search will remain the killer application. For most people, it is the reason they access the Internet: to find answers and solve real problems.

What marks the essay is the pervasive reek of superiority — that Google knows best, and that Googlers can impose their values on the world. Take Rosenberg's discussion of "content," as Googlers are apt to call creative expression in text, video, and images:

Of course, the greatest user experience is pretty useless if there's nothing good to read, a truism that applies not just to newspapers but to the web in general. Just like a newspaper needs great reporters, the web needs experts. When it comes to information, not all of it is created equal and the web's future depends on attracting the best of it. There are millions of people in the world who are truly experts in their fields - scientists, scholars, artists, engineers, architects - but a great majority of them are too busy being experts in their fields to become experts in ours. They have a lot to say but no time to say it.

Systems that facilitate high-quality content creation and editing are crucial for the Internet's continued growth, because without them we will all sink in a cesspool of drivel. We need to make it easier for the experts, journalists, and editors that we actually trust to publish their work under an authorship model that is authenticated and extensible, and then to monetize in a meaningful way. We need to make it easier for a user who sees one piece by an expert he likes to search through that expert's entire body of work. Then our users will be able to benefit from the best of both worlds: thoughtful and spontaneous, long form and short, of the ages and in the moment.

We won't (and shouldn't) try to stop the faceless scribes of drivel, but we can move them to the back row of the arena. As Harry Truman said in 1949, "We are aided by all who want relief from the lies of propaganda - who desire truth and sincerity."

Who doesn't like truth and sincerity? But one of the wonders of the Web is that publishing no longer requires the traditional filters of traditionally determined "experts." Who will Google's algorithms privilege as an expert? The likes of Rosenberg, whose career before Google was marked by the baroque failures of @Home, a broadband service which ended in bankruptcy in 2001, and eWorld, an Apple-owned Internet service provider which shut down in 1996? Or his friends?

The point is that these kind of decisions can't be made by computers. They will be made by humans — in the Googleplex in Mountain View, in London, in Zurich, Sydney, and the rest of Google's lookalike, kindergarten-colored offices around the world. Rosenberg has at last made Google's goal clear: Not just organizing the world's information, but dictating it.

But they still need to sell all these god damn $25 packs of Fusion razors! [WSJ]

An eight-pack of manual Fusion cartridges costs about $25.03, compared with about $17.95 for the same number of Mach3 cartridges. P&G maintains shavers will perceive a difference in the new razor, and, more importantly, will be willing to pay for it. "During economic slowdowns men will make choices with their wallet, but we don't see them wanting to compromise their shaving," says Chip Bergh, group president of global personal care at P&G. "Instead, maybe they trade from a large count [of cartridges] to a small count, or they may extend their shave."

Or maybe they buy the 12-pack of 2-blade disposables like sane people? P&G can't say nobody saw this day coming:

The first broadcast of Saturday Night Live in 1975 included a mock commercial of a three-blade razor, with the tagline, "Because you'll believe anything." And the introduction of Fusion — kept under wraps until its introduction in September 2005, was eerily predicted by the satirical newspaper the Onion, which ran a mock memo from Gillette's former CEO Jim Kilts on how to top competitor Schick's four-blade razor by making one with five.

From: Zinczenko, David
Sent: Friday, February 08, 2008 4:55 PM
To: Men's Health Editorial
Subject: Read this (not that!)

The thought occurred to me while I was watching the Super Tuesday returns to ask: Who had a better last three weeks—Barak Obama, or Eat This, Not That? Crazy, audacious comparison, I know, but stay with me here. Let's see:

* Senator Obama was seen in a very positive light on national television. So was Eat This/Not That!

* He saw his appeal grow among women and ... so did Eat This/Not That!

* Senator Obama took on an entrenched political machine with ties to the fast food industry and made his mark ... so did Eat This/Not That!

* And Senator Obama emerged with hopes of turning his strong showing into a kind of a Barak Brand that could influence us for years to come, and guess what—so did Eat This/Not That!

And that's why I'm proud in joining him by saying, on behalf of the Men's Health team and my Rodale colleagues—Yes. We. Can ... Run a book straight out of the magazine brand and up the bestseller lists (even if not the New York Times bestseller list).

Some quick background for all of you:

.

* As mentioned, we developed the brand first. Eat This Not That! has been a mini feature in the pages of Men's Health since the dawn of the millennium. Okay, that's only a handful of years, but still: We had the opportunity to develop it out, test it with readers, screw it up, revamp it, and hone it until it became one of our most popular features. And all of that honing did something else as well: It allowed us to ensure that Eat This Not That! was a strong contributor to Men's Health and its mission.

* We built a publicity strategy in advance. Thanks to years of building relationships with the Today Show—a place that Men's Health was actually banned from before 2000, I think—we had a guaranteed outlet for the book. But more important, we had already built credibility with the program, having done weight-loss pieces with them for years. We didn't create a product and then try to sell it; we developed a reputation, and extended it in new and important ways. The Today Show wanted to work with us on it, because they believed in us, and knew that we had both the expertise on nutrition and the feel for what people needed and wanted. And that has made all the difference.

* We also put together a team out of the MH brand that was passionate about the product, expert in the field, and well-versed in the strategy.

— George Karabotsos came up with an innovative new design that might be even more iconic, in its own way, than the Zagat guides.

—the creative team—among them my brilliant coauthor matt goulding and our researcher Lauren Murrow—found a ton of ways to improve and give more depth to all of the information we presented.

—Paul Reader planned a media blitz with an irresistible hook—the fat/calorie reveal—and made ETNT an overnight staple on the Today show. As we predicted, the segments were the most popular things on the shows where they appeared; hence, more and more segments. They're watching their audience response, just like we did all those years. Our hit became their hit, which made our hit even bigger.

And, most important of all, we didn't settle for first or second or even twentieth drafts. We refined and refined and refined some more. Since less than 1 percent of the book's content came from the magazine, Matt, George, Lauren, myself and others rethought everything. We dispensed with the standard dedication, and instead used that far-forward piece of text to engage the reader in the battle we had with the fast food companies to get the information our readers need to make healthy choices. And in so doing, Eat This, Not That! became not just information, it became a quest we share with everybody who buys the book.

We went through 57 iterations of the cover. I counted them. We photographed french fries. We photographed cheese fries. We photographed our PR manager Allison Falkenberry posing like a diner waitress. And in the end, we chose the image you see here on the cover. Then we went through type treatment after type treatment, design after design, ripping it up and trying to improve it. Then we tried subline after subline, rewriting and rewriting, looking for the perfect language, until we hit upon "The no-diet weight-loss solution." And finally, when we were all done, Steve Perrine came in and said, "You're not done. You need to put an exclamation point after the title." So we ripped it up again, and Eat This, Not That became Eat This, Not That! And that's the sort of passion we brought to the project. That willingness to rethink, time and again, is what made it a sensation.

And of course, none of it could have happened without all of Rodale rallying to make our dream a reality. The entire Rodale books group, among them Liz Perl, Bob Anderson, Chris Krogermeier, Nancy Hancock, Tara Long, Keith Biery, Anita Patterson, Howard Weill and Bill Seibert, Bill Ostroff, Paul McGinley and Cynthia Dobson and Andrew Gelman, the indefatigable Michael Bruno, Sandra Matthiesson, Bill Stump, Sean Nolan, and on and on—all pitched in the last several months, and continue to today, to ensure that this book's important message got out, in record time, to a country of people in desperate need of this information. Many of us operated as if lives were at stake, which of course, they are. Our undying thanks to all of you who have inspired this project in so many ways.

And because of their efforts, we now have a hit franchise on our hands. So brace yourselves: We've already begun work on the sub-franchises and spinoffs that proceed logically from Eat This/Not That! The saying is true: success has had a thousand fathers, and mothers. So with all that fertile talent around, it should soon have 15 or 20 offspring:

* EAT THIS, NOT THAT for kids
* EAT THIS, NOT THAT for diabetics (Steve Murphy's brilliant idea)
* EAT THIS, NOT THAT for business travelers (Steve Perrine's idea, and a perfect tie-in for Best Life)
* COOK THIS, NOT THAT (Matt Goulding is in heaven over this one)

* SAY THIS, NOT THAT (Peter Moore already has a list of ideas for 85 spreads)

* WEAR THIS, NOT THAT

* BUY THIS, NOT THAT

* EARN THIS, NOT THAT

But the big overall lesson to learn here is a simple one, and we've all heard it from Steve Murphy a hundred times now: it all starts with an idea, and idea that debuted back in March 2002, on page 48. And the idea is very much like the idea of Men's Health itself—it's clever, it's useful, it's catchy, it's definitive...what tons of useful stuff is all about.. And why was it a hit? Because it helped all of us make one of the most basic, and dangerous, decisions they make every day: Should I eat this, or that? (We make 200 food decisions every day, by the way. Chew on that.) If we're armed with the right information, those decisions can help us live better.

And, going back to Mr. Murphy's rule, Eat this, Not That! has succeeded because, like Men's Health, it's an idea that is so big that it demands the attention of its target audience, that it creates its own web opportunities, its own publicity plan, its own circle of spinoffs, its own destiny. And I truly believe those kinds of ideas come out of a brand that is made up of dedicated believers who understand Men's Health's mission because they share it with their readers and web visitors and book buyers. We are they, and they are us. Eat This/Not That succeeds because the need came first, and the way to satisfy that need was brilliantly conceived. My trips through the drive-thru will never be the same, and for me and millions of other Americans, that's a very good thing.

Now, if only I could get Will.I.am from the Black eyed peas to do a music video for the book—Kind of a "Yes We Can...avoid the aussie cheese fries"—we'd be right there.

Thanks.

Orion also says Google needs "a more stable development and testability process." That's a common complaint among Android developers — and it's one Google plans to continue ignoring. According to Silicon Alley Insider, responding to one particularly virulent forum thread, one Google engineer wrote: "those posts aren't falling on deaf ears, they're typically falling in the wide-open ears of people whose hands are tied and whose mouths are gagged.”(Photo by traviscrawford)

I think Google approached daycare the same way they did their in-house cafeterias — with an assumption, born of sheerest hubris, that an age-old business needed reinventing, and that the brains at Google could provide a value-add to a matter on which they really knew nothing at all.

What they forgot to consider: If you mess up a meal, you can throw it out and start over tomorrow. People take their children rather more seriously than their lunches.

That said, what Googlers are really upset about is not the outcome, but the process. The old Google culture was one where anyone's idea counted, and if you did the work and proved your point with numbers, you'd be listened to. Here, the process of gathering input seems to have been a farce, tacked on at the end for appearance's sake to a top-down decision.

Also ludicrous: Google is spending time and money on something it doesn't even advertise as a perk. Why is it in the childcare business again? It's not to attract talented employees; if anything, this "privilege" of spending too much money on needlessly luxurious childcare might drive employees away. So no one's well served: Not employees, not shareholders, and certainly not Google users.

This must seem utterly ludicrous to anyone not in the airtight bubble of Larry and Sergey's inner circle. In that rarefied atmosphere, "don't be evil" has become confused with "we can do no wrong."

Nocera reveals that, at Wojcicki's behest, Google decided to upgrade its childcare to a hyperluxurious standard, including adopting the Reggio Emilia approach to pedagogy. The result: At tuition rates of roughly $14,000 to $19,000 a year, the subsidy paid by Google ballooned to $37,000 a year. From that followed a tuition hike to as much as $29,000 a year, at which price Google still loses money.

At no point, it seems, did Wojcicki or any of the others she involved in planning Google daycare do a market-rate analysis. They simply built the childcare facilities as they saw fit, and then priced it based on cost, not the going rates — even for the kind of quality care they professed to seek.

The Scandinavian School in San Francisco, for example, offers full-time Reggio Emilia daycare for $16,000 a year for infants, and less for toddlers and preschoolers. If the Scandinavian School charged Google's outsized rates, it would run a nearly 50 percent profit margin. Google, by contrast, is losing money by the fistful on its childcare.

So Google has on its hands a disaster: A disaster for parents, a disaster for children, and a disaster for Google shareholders. How does Google respond?

Not by fixing the problem, but instead by lying to a New York Times columnist. Nocera, a famed reporter, quotes Brin twice. Google PR repeatedly denied that Brin made these comments — an unbelievably brazen act, considering the remarks were made before large groups of Google employees. A sampler:

At a T.G.I.F. in June, the Google co-founder Sergey Brin said he had no sympathy for the parents, and that he was tired of “Googlers” who felt entitled to perks like “bottled water and M&Ms,” according to several people in the meeting. (A Google spokesman denies that Mr. Brin made that comment.)

But parents who talked to me said that several times during the six-week-long day care brouhaha, Mr. Brin made comments indicating that he viewed the whole thing as a giant economics experiment. “This is a supply-and-demand issue,” he told one group of parents — adding that Google needed to charge what the market would bear. (Through a Google spokesman, Mr. Brin denies making such a statement.) Given that Google has lots of pre-I.P.O. millionaires, it can clearly charge a lot.

Of course, Google PR would deny that Brin made these statements. They are damning; they suggest the founder is out of touch with rank-and-file employees, and callous in his treatment of them. He surely is, but it is unseemly to admit as much.

Wojcicki, with Brin's permission — what an indulgent brother-in-law! — is conducting an experiment on her fellow Googlers, and their children. But Googlers did not sign up for this experiment. Any parent knows how difficult it is to find good, affordable childcare, and how wrenching for children it can be to change providers. The real test going on here isn't some kind of supply-and-demand economics experiment. It's how arrogant Brin and his clique can get before his employees revolt.

A pity. In the long run, a humbling would have helped Google. Instead, CEO Eric Schmidt's trademark cockiness was on display — to the point that he lied about the progress of its search for a replacement CFO. (Schmidt said in the earnings call that no offers had been made; we've heard two candidates have turned down the job so far.)

It's hard to imagine that an advertising downturn wouldn't hurt Google. Schmidt suggested that if economic conditions turned tough, Google would simply snap up more of the advertising market. And Google's failures? Someone else's fault. Sales chief Omid Kordestani blamed sluggish-headed advertisers for not embracing YouTube's video ads. Cofounder Sergey Brin suggested slow networks and lame phones were at fault for Google's still-nascent mobile-ads business.

Google, in short, remains in a bubble. Its fate is unaffected by the outside world, unless its executives need someone else — someone technologically inept, preferably — to take the fall. Just wait for Google to have a bad quarter. Expect to hear excuses so convoluted that it took an army of PhDs to come up with them.

Woody Allen muse Scarlett Johansson will soon make her directorial debut this year in New York, I Love You, PageSix.com has learned exclusively. The project, in which Allen will also participate, taps 12 directors to create five-minute films, all love stories set in NYC. Johansson and Allen will join confirmed directors Anthony Minghella and Mira Nair on the project, from the producers of Paris, J’Taime, a similar flick from 2006.

What kills a company is not competition but arrogance. We control our fate.

One scenario — and the one aides are hoping for — would be a race between fellow New Yorkers Hillary Clinton and former Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Sen. Clinton's negative rating is the highest in either party, while Mr. Giuliani's is the highest among Republicans. That match-up could make what supporters see as Mr. Bloomberg's "above the fray" image more appealing. Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Giuliani are also seen as moderate on social issues, which could mute opposition to Mr. Bloomberg from the religious right. "If the parties nominate polarizing candidates...then there's plenty of room" for Mr. Bloomberg, independent pollster John Zogby said.

People of Iowa, New Hampshire, and those other states that only matter briefly every four years: Please, please nominate Obama and, hell, Huckabee. The only thing we have to look forward to in a Bloomberg presidency is figuring out where he'll live once he decides the White House is too tacky.

Where Bloomberg Fits in Election [WSJ]

The Financial Times Takes On the World [BW]

In graduate school, Ann Beattie used to tell stories about how over-the-top he is. It always strained credibility, because Ann Beattie is similarly over-the-top, and for her to claim that someone else had a big ego just seemed sort of weird. She said that he once silenced the person introducing him at a writers conference by saying, "When you have won the Pulitzer, you no longer require an introduction."

Magical Wednesday Update: Rocketboom still a dud, bloggers running out of headline puns. (But this post is still worth reading.)

Stop toying with us, Rocketboom! Days after host Amanda Congdon left, the video blog was still a no-show on Monday. This morning the front page promised "Rocketboom 2.0." Now the 'Boom taunts viewers with a fake-out shot and a message from producer Andrew Baron:

Rocketboom was obviously very dependent on Amanda's role. Since she left so suddenly...

Hold it, hombre. Andy makes it sound like Amanda was carrying the entire show in her little arms. What was it he said yesterday?

Fact: Over 95% of the directed episodes in the history of Rocketboom were directed by me.

Fact: I have edited well over 50% of all of the episodes.

Fact: I have Produced every single episode.

Fact: I have Published every single episode.

Fact: I have found/picked over 90% of all of the stories that we have ever used.

Fact: Don't talk the talk if you can't walk the walk.

Rocketboom [Official site]
CaseCamp [Andy's blog]