Google, needing to do something to curb demand for its child day care, recently upped its charges from $1,425 per month to nearly $2,500, an annual increase of $24,000, to nearly $57,000 per year.
Understandably irate, parents fought back, using Google's weekly ask-the-executive meetings to complain about the massive rate increase. They conducted surveys showing that most parents with children
in Google day care would have to find less expensive services elsewhere.
It didn't work. While Google is reducing the increase slightly, it still plans to roll out the higher price over
the next five quarters.
The New York Times' Joe Nocera says that Google co-founder Sergey Brin, for one, had no sympathy for the parents, saying he was tired of Googlers who felt entitled to
free services (although Google denies he said this).
Moral of the story? Google, after a spectacular four-year run to a $170 billion valuation, is starting to show chinks in its armor.
As blogger Sergey Solyanik, a former Google employee who recently returned to work at Microsoft, says: "There are many things about Google that are not great. There are plenty of silly politics,
underperformance, inefficiencies and ineffectiveness, and things that are plain stupid." Including, perhaps, day care. "Day care matters to people's lives in a way that few other perks do," Nocera
writes, because like healthcare, it's a service that working parents desperately need. In turning a blind eye to their plight, Nocera says Google is acting like "just another company."
Read the whole story at The New York Times »