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 most of us. "You just don't understand", we were thinking, "Google is different". There was no way Bill Gates could understand, of all people. But actually he was totally right.
I had a similar experience at Amazon.com. I was at an internal conference brainstorming "the next big thing" at Amazon. Google's perks were brought up constantly as needed for retaining employees.
Jeff Bezos responded that the reason Google got so much attention and talent was not because of the perks, it was because they were the "Agenda Setters" of the day, and Agenda Setters come and go.
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.
