In its earliest days Google was more or less a postdoctoral extension of the Stanford computer science department, from which founders Larry Page, Sergey Brin and a goodly number of their pals sprang.

To this day they jam employees into shared offices and cubicles and would do so even if Google had more space - because Page, a student of "office flow," likes the idea of recreating that university environment in which he and Brin wrote the first Google search engine.

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