Full transcript
Someone Else's Campus
Google did not build this place. These buildings went up in the nineteen nineties for Silicon Graphics — SGI — the company that made the workstations that rendered Jurassic Park and Terminator Two. For a while SGI was the most glamorous name in computer graphics. Then the industry moved to commodity chips, SGI's business evaporated, and by the early two thousands the campus was available. Google moved in around 2003 and kept the low 1990s office buildings largely as they were. So the most valuable company campus of one era is the discarded shell of another. Nobody puts that on the sign, and it is the most Silicon Valley fact in Mountain View.
What You Can Actually Do Here
Be clear on this: **there are no public tours of Google's offices, and there have not been for years.** What opened in October 2023 is the Google Visitor Experience — a plaza, a store, a café, and an event space, all free and all deliberately separate from where people work. You may have read about the Android sculpture garden — a lawn with a statue for each version of Android in order, each named after the dessert that version was code named. Cupcake, Donut, Eclair, all the way up. Go looking for that lawn and you will not find it. The collection was pulled in early 2022 for repairs and redevelopment, and the statues are scattered around the campus now. A few turn up near the plaza. Treat any you find as luck. The Google Store here is one of only a handful in the world, and the merchandise is different from what you can order online.
Pair It With Something Real
Here is the honest assessment: the Visitor Experience is a nice thirty minutes, not an afternoon. You can see the outside of the office buildings and that is all you will see. So pair it. The Computer History Museum is a little over a mile from here — same errand, and that is where the actual history is, including Google's first production server, a stack of bare boards on a frame. Do them in that order: statues and coffee first, then the museum. One shows you a company that won; the other shows you the fifty years of failures and dead ends it was standing on.