I did an internship at Microsoft in the summer of 2005. Every year, interns who are incoming seniors are invited to Bill Gates's house for a barbeque, and I was lucky enough to be able to go. At that time Google was so hot -- radically new and good, we thought, practically a developer's paradise -- but Bill kept saying that they were just the "media darling" of the moment. He said he'd seen it before, and soon enough Google would be just another company. A lot of the interns at Microsoft that year were probably rejected from Google -- maybe even <i>most</i> of us. "You just don't understand", we were thinking, "Google is different". There was no way <i>Bill Gates</i> could understand, of all people. But actually he was totally right.
I have two friends at Google, one entry level in AdWords and another a senior exec in the social media division, and they told me they have had enough due to these reasons Fred listed.<p>It was bound to happen one day.