Google: a cultural success story?

Currently ranked as fourth on Fortune's 100 Best Companies to Work For list, search engine king Google is just one of those companies that people are itching to work for. But while Google's culture is often steeped in praise, Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer has controversially said that the real reason Google is successful is simply this: "It got there first."

A look at Google's quirky perks might seem like an indication as to why the firm is riding so high: Last year, Google increased 401(k) matching and added a stock-option exchange program to help employees with underwater options. What's more - and perhaps most famously - Google engineers still get 20 percent of their time to develop their own projects.

In essence, Google seems to understand the future better than any of its competitors, right? Well, according to Ballmer: wrong. Speaking at the SMX West conference in California earlier this week, Ballmer - the man behind rival search engine Bing - said that Google's success was not tangibly linked to the company's culture, in fact, argued the Microsoft executive, it had instead spun out of the fact that it became successful in web search before its rivals.

"The number one thing that Google benefits from in search is that they did it right, first," he said. "There's a value to incumbency. You can ascribe these things to things like culture, but it's never clear which came first - incumbency or culture."

"Long-term optimism"

Of course, Ballmer also used the opportunity to lament about Microsoft's own culture. He admitted that the software giant had been late to produce a mature, usable search engine technology, but believed that - with Bing - was growing market share in the US, and believed that, eventually, Microsoft could become the dominant search engine

"We've got great long-term optimism," he said. "Tomorrow's goal is to gain a few points, a tenth here, a tenth there - just keep working and working."

But his comments about culture will be seen as a sideswipe at Google, say analysts - a company that has built a reputation based in part on its attempt to build a culture diametrically opposed to Microsoft's.

In fact, for HR managers, Google offers something unmatched to its workers that continues to keep the search engine giant at the for front of leaders' minds when it comes to "the perfect place to work."

Google's perks, which have admittedly seen some cuts in recent years, remain legendary, and Google's success has to be linked to that instilled sense of culture.

In 2008, when Google were ranked as Number 1 on Fortune's list of Best Place to Work, HR Management spoke exclusively with Lazlo Bock, Vice President of People Operations who told us: "If you think about Google, we are a tremendously innovative company with a huge amount of freedom across just about everything we do. We are also a company that operationally executes extremely well.

"It takes a tremendous amount of process and structure, balanced with with a tremendous amount of creativity and insight to be able to constantly improve."

Matthew Buttell

Matt Buttell graduated from Bath Spa University in 2006. Since then he has written for several publications, before moving to the web. He now writes solely for the internet, continuing to cover key business issues while managing his own personal blog.

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