Microsoft world's best company to work for: Study

Software giant Microsoft has topped a list of the world's best multinational companies to work for, where all the top-ten positions have been bagged by American firms.

Internet giant Google has been ranked at the fourth place in the list of compiled by human resources consultancy 'Great Place to Work Institute'.

Microsoft is followed by software developer SAS and network storage provider NetApp at the second and third ranks, respectively, while logistics major FedEx Express is ranked fifth on the list of '25 best multinational workplaces'.

While there are no Asian companies on the list, all the top-ten positions have been bagged by the US firms. Also, 18 out of the total 25 firms on the list are from the world's biggest economy.

The inaugural rankings were based on opinion surveys of more than 2.5 million employees across the world about their workplace culture.

Others in the top-10 include IT company Cisco (sixth), hospitality giant Marriott (seventh), food and beverage service provider McDonald's (eighth), personal and household goods makers Kimberly-Clark (ninth) and SC Johnson (10th).

The HR consultancy that prepared the list said that the rankings recognize those global companies that have demonstrated "a truly serious commitment to creating workplaces that foster trust, pride and camaraderie amongst their employees."

The list also included UK-based Diageo (11th), American Express (12th), Medtronic (13th), Intel (14th), Hilti (15th), 3M (16th), (17th), National Instruments (18th), Mars (19th), Accenture (20th), Roche (21st), Novo Nordisk (22nd), The Coca-Cola Company (23rd), Atento (24th) and Quintiles (25th).

Only those companies were considered for the list which have have at least 5,000 employees worldwide and a minimum of 40 per cent (or 5,000 members) of their global workforce were outside of the company's home country, among other conditions.

Google to close down Google Buzz

Google Friday announced to shut down the highly-controversial social networking product Google Buzz, along with several other services in the coming weeks.

Google on its official blog, Google announced the death penalty to its code search engine, Buzz, Jaiku which let users send updates to friends, the Google personalised homepage feature iGoogle, and the University Research Program for Google Search.

The shut-downs came as part of Google's housecleaning effort announced in early September, in which the company said it will shut down a number of products and merging others into existing products as features.

"Changing the world takes focus on the future, and honesty about the past. We learned a lot from products like Buzz, and are putting that learning to work every day in our vision for products like Google+. Our users expect great things from us; today's announcements let us focus even more on giving them something truly awesome," said Google in the blog post.

Google Buzz, a social networking and messaging tool integrated into Gmail service, has been widely criticised for privacy concerns and held back the search giant from expanding its businesses to the social networking space.

After Buzz, Google launched Google+ in June, which has been receiving a good response and passed the 40 million user mark, the company's chief executive officer Larry Page said Thursday.

Google Logo "Google doodle celebrates" !

Google Corporate Logo "Google doodle celebrates"

It's the holiday Google doodle that has replaced Google's corporate logo on its homepage today. Although less flashy in comparison to Google's bouncing balls doodle on the eve of Google Instant search's release, the current holiday Google doodle has taken a considerable amount of time to achieve.

Google Corporate Logo, For fashion screen appraiser

Google's chief doodler, Michael Lopez, and his team of five artists took a total of 250 hours spanning over five months to create the holiday Google doodle. Discussions of the holiday Google doodle started as far back as July, according to the Wall Street Journal.

netzens, 17 themed doodles have been unveiled by Google, celebrating the holiday.

“We call our special holiday logos, Google doodles”, said the VP of Search & User Experience at Google, Marissa Mayer on Google Sidewiki.

“The first Google doodle appeared on August 30, 1998. The new holiday Google Doodles are available on Google.com web page.

Google's Consumer Future

As it looks at its future, Google needs to realize it has a "user experience" problem and its simplicity—the elegant search box—isn't enough, especially as it starts to compete with rivals whose entire existence revolves around easy, consumer experiences. To me, user experience isn't about making things pretty and using pretty icons. Instead it's about making simple, beautiful, usable, and user-friendly interfaces.

No one can argue with Google's ability to engineer great software—it's done so in the past—but that simply isn't good enough in the new worlds it is trying to conquer. Televisions, phones, productivity applications, and even Google's own local pages are less about search and more about engagement: something not core to the company's corporate DNA. Here are three major challenges Google needs to surmount:

• Make software usable by tens of millions of people on a disparate array of products.

• Overcome its history of only using data to define its future.

• Figure out how to keep people in its playground, rather than helping people find the information they were looking for and sending them elsewhere: a radical new approach to business.