The best place to work in America is becoming like every other big corporation. Google, at its heart an overgrown advertising agency, is most famous for its lavish perks. Now those are disappearing.

Palo Alto's architectural review board approved plans for a new three-building daycare center on San Antonio Road, just off Highway 101. The new facilities will hold 250 kids, along with another 80-kid daycare center planned for East Bayshore Road on the other side of the freeway. A report in the Palo Alto Daily News

Google CEO Eric Schmidt and cofounder Larry Page sat down with reporters for over an hour during an impromptu press conference while playing Bilderbergers at Allen & Co.'s exclusive Sun Valley getaway yesterday. There was talk of Google's Android cell-phone operating system; of China; of the search-ads deal with…

John Sterlicchi, writing for the U.K.'s Guardian, just emailed me asking for my thoughts on "this Google daycare fiasco." (The short version: Google closed an outsourced daycare facility in favor of one run in-house, and hiked prices 70 percent, far above market rates; Googlers with kids in the facility, and those…

Some folks are just lucky. Susan Wojcicki, for example, rented her garage to Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and thereby got a job working at Google before its IPO, where she went on to take undeserved credit for one of Google's key products. And then there are Wojcicki's four children, fortunate in their own right. Not…

Now that it seems likely a large number of Google employee/parents will have to pull their kids out of the company's daycare program, it's a good time to revisit this video set to a tune by children's songwriter Laurie Berkner. Mock this clip if you must - I know I did - but Google is a very big deal to youngsters.…

Google cofounder Sergey Brin has explained his company's childcare fiasco thusly: It's an experiment in economics. And yet there's very little that's scientific about Google's approach to childcare, which has been to hand Susan Wojcicki, Brin's sister-in-law, a blank check, and then accuse parents of feeling…

The Reggio Emilia approach to preschool education is one of the major drivers behind Google's pending 70 percent hike in the company's daycare prices for its employees. What's Reggio Emilia? Wikipedia for once has a darned good writeup: "Teachers in Reggio Emilia assert the importance of being confused as a…

Joe Nocera of the New York Times has taken note of Google's childcare crisis. A brief recap: After taking its childcare programs in-house, at the behest of Google executive Susan Wojcicki, the sister-in-law of founder Sergey Brin, Google hiked its rates 70 percent. Parents were infuriated not just at the price hike…