NYT: What's Google's Secret Weapon? An Army of Ph.D.'s
SF Chronicle: Google hoping to limit exodus of rich workers

In an interesting juxtaposition of Google stories, The New York Times reports that Google's culture nourishes and is nourished by the hyper-educated, lofty and sometimes monomaniacal personalities of PhD's, while the San Francisco Chronicle reports exhaustively on the search giant's stated intent to keep its off-beat culture, and in fact plans to encourage it even further with additional benefits to woo brilliant employees.

The strategy differs markedly from the larger firms Google finds arrayed against itself. Microsoft, with more than 50,000 employees, maintains a research staff of only 700, roughly similar to that of Google. Microsoft continues to focus its operations, hiring and attitude on a rapid tempo of incremental software releases, rather than testing completely new types of web products. Of course, Google has not yet had the opportunity to deal with scaling its operations past several thousand employees, never mind fumble while doing so.