eBay executive Garrett Price is fighting with Craigslist in court over what, exactly, he said about his boss during business negotiations five years ago, according to NBC Bay Area. Craigslist, the online classifieds company, claims he confided a ferocious picture of Whitman:

[Craigslist CEO Jim] Buckmaster testified that Price told him that former eBay CEO Meg Whitman could go from "Good Meg" to "Evil Meg," and that in her frustration with Craigslist was leaning toward the latter and becoming a "monster."

Price, naturally, denies all this. Maybe he was awkwardly trying to set up a good cop/bad cop dynamic; he was negotiating to buy a stake in Cragslist at the time. But it all comes back to the bottom line: This kind of talk will haunt you, one way or another.

UPDATE: Added video of Buckmaster's testimony.

Google VP Bradley Horowitz (pictured) explained things at the annual Supernova conference in San Francisco the other day. He said the company intentionally (and selflessly!) leaves some brainpower outside its walls, according to the Register.

"I recently had a discussion with an engineer at Google and I pointed out a handful of people that I thought were fruitful in the industry and I proposed that we should hire these people...

But [the engineer] stopped me and said: 'These people are actually important to have outside of Google. They're very Google people that have the right philosophies around these things, and it's important that we not hire these guys. It's better for the ecosystem to have an honest industry, as opposed to aggregating all this talent at Google.'"

This is very generous of Google, given that it hires "the world's best engineers" via a grueling interview process, complete with quizzes. Some of its best employees had to short-circuit the system, but that only makes it more perfect, right?

Thankfully, Google is using this system for good, rather than evil, by turning down job prospects, for being too awesome. Now that's Christmas spirit: It's a sort of gift to the world. Not to the possible hires, of course, but in this economy they'll be working for an awesome company like Google in no time, right??

(Pic by Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten)

And that's among so-called "movers and shakers;" life might be even tougher on the rank and file. On the one hand, they get copious and diverse free snacks, food from the likes of David Chang and a very competitive salary. But on the other, there's the chaos that results from Google digesting acquisitions like DoubleClick and losing top executives like former ad chief Tim Armstrong. Some of the purported fallout, gleaned from the gossip in Business Insider's post:

• Advertising VP Penry Price is said to have lost power when Armstrong left and to be "looking for a way out."
• Mike Steib, director of emerging platforms, supposedly lost an internal power struggle. One source told BI: "It wouldn't suprise me to see him leave after a while."
  
• Director of media platforms Eileen Naughton won that aforementioned power strugle but supposedly wants to leave because she "thinks it's a crazy place and wants to get the hell out of there."
  
• Google's first Gotham engineer, Engineering Director Craig Nevill-Manning, is so rich, presumably on Google options, that people wonder if he'd rather be "traveling around in Africa having a fun time."
  
• M&A guy Jason Harinstein is said to be "poachable."

So there you have it: Google is a tough place to work in part because of the distracting wealth you earn there and because the awesome job offers you get as a result of working there. Sounds unbearable.

(Pic: Google New York, by Eddie Codel)

Not that we begrudge Sara Morishige, Ev Williams' glamorous and chic spouse, her design flourishes. After all, she did the interior for Twitter's last new office and was brought back to do this one, meaning, at the very least, there was no staff revolt about her prior work. And on balance, the level of quirk seems appropriate for a company whose unlikely success was built on the world-changing potential of 140-character status updates. (You can take the full official tour here.)

But the new batch of pictures, compiled by VentureBeat's Kim-Mai Cutler, contain the same sort of oddities as the last one, with its toilet-stall vanity mirrors and dining room DJ booth. And Cutler drops words that Morishige, seen yesterday decorating hubby's office, had a hand in the overall design. Highlights:

These sleigh chairs meld old-fashioned rocking chairs with a modern Ikea seats. Weird. Also, we want one. Via Twitter on Flickr.

Where have we seen these green, toy-soldier-esque deer before? Oh right, at the old office, which Morishige also designed. They became almost iconic. But not to the commenter who wrote, under this picture on Flickr, " this is what happens when you give the interior decorator a budget and no guidelines along with it. ;P " Zing! Via Twitter on Flickr.

The deer theme has been extended, with a hunting-and-death twist. Via Twitter on Flickr.

Not only does Twitter have a DJ booth, it also has a house DJ, apparently. Or maybe "Chief Wax Officer" would be a better term. Via Twitter on Flickr.

The very nice view from 795 Folsom St.

It's hard to blame them. Still, some of the pictures compiled by TechCrunch — from Twitter, naturally — have us scratching our heads. Click on any of the first three items in the gallery below to see what we mean.

The mirror in the toilet stall. Bill Farner, who took this shot, is confused about this oddly-located "vanity" mirror's purpose. Can't say we blame him!

The lone "at" symbol on this wall. Wouldn't "@wall" be more appropriate? Or "@couch!"By Ryan King.

The DJ booth in the dining room. It's not just lunch, it's a party! By @caroline.

DJ booth in context (it's in the back). By Bill Farner.

This isn't one of the "weird" things, but it's noteworthy because of the subject: That's Ev Williams' wife Sara Morishige. So this, presumably, is the CEO's own office. Anyone know what the "795" is about? In any case, it's generous of the new mom and longtime designer to handle the interior of her husband's office. That's going to be a crowded wall, judging from the density of what's up so far. By @caroline.

Business Insider has the full, 29-picture photo tour. Google has been outfitting its various offices like this for a while, but it's always an eye-openingly retro experience to actually see the office trappings of the hugely profitable company. Below, find our five favorites, the ones that really take us back to the days of Webvan and Pets.com. We mock, of course, because we're insanely jealous.

The reception area is straightforward enough...

Google takes a systematic approach to free snacks. A less successful dot-com would just have pre-wrapped candy and open/stale cereal boxes and so forth.

"We've hired a substitute short-order cook named David Chang. Apologies in advance if he screws up your lunch."

Of course there are razor scooters.

The requisite exposed brick. Plus a can of of kerosene in case you should ever feel disgruntled. Don't be evil!

A tipster forwarded us the above video, produced by and starring people who are supposed to be superhuman smarties: Google employees. And yet here they are pulling a Julia Allison. Maybe it's a simple case of geographic envy. Though they're singing about Los Angeles and filming the palm trees outside their office windows, these Googlers are in San Francisco, where the weather is getting damper, foggier and colder as the fall wears on. And the BART's been all full of morotists displaced by the broken Bay Bridge.

Or maybe this bunch just wanted a chance to show off their hip-twirling (especially the guy with the square design on his shirt, who clearly has been practicing in his moves in his bedroom mirror for like days). In any case, we couldn't help but notice a few things about their playground-y office environment:

UPDATE: The Googlers got shy and yanked the video; we've captured it and appended it to the end of the gallery, so you can enjoy the full experience of how workers play behind the Google curtain.

Notice the office fan. Who at the hugely profitable online company has been depriving these poor souls of proper air conditioning? At least they'll have those nifty Google zippered hoodies when the climate control fails them again this winter.

The free drinks fridge is fully stocked; apparently CEO Eric Schmidt was telling the truth about the company's return to growth mode after all!

We can't decide if that huge picture in the background is a cast promo for a late 1990s sitcom, or a picture of everyone in this office impersonating a Friends poster. (It's like we're always stuck in second hear...)

A massage chair, fun! We're not going to ask what the masseuse does behind that privacy screen back there. (Shameful, shameful lipdubs, probably.)

Work it! And when you're done could you mix us a very dry martini from the "lava lamps" sitting on the bar back there? Thanks!

"We're going to keep dancing until we've raised enough money to fix our office's crippling flat-panel-TV shortage! Our storage closets and several feet of our hallway are completely without gigantic flat panel monitors over every square inch and it's very sad. Operators are standing by for your donations."

"And I will keep rapping until there is a third flat panel monitor on this structural support beam, yo."

More evidence of the Googlers' sincere love for singer Miley Cryus and their selfless willingness to be the next internet company to host her ramblings now that she's gone and left Twitter.

It would seem Google lacks those fancy and super-comfortable Aeron chairs that became an icon for the c. 2000 dot-com boom. And it's already undermining the quality of its lipdubs; this account manager couldn't slide smoothly onto the screen, thanks to Google's cheap Office Depot chair.

When you learn to lip-sync more accurately you can be sent to the real LA. Until then, here's the Embarcadero's remarkable simulation!

We're not sure why Googlers got shy and yanked this video off of YouTube; one would think they'd be proud that the company retains a playful spirit despite the three rounds of layoffs early this year. And we've seen far worse lip-syncing! (Well, slightly worse, at least.)

That's according to Peter Norvig (pictured), Google's director of research, former Google director of search quality and former head of the Computational Sciences division at the NASA Ames research center. Here's what Norvig tells Peter Seibel in a Q&A in the new book Coders at Work (emphasis added):

One of the interesting things we've found, when trying to predict how well somebody we've hired is going to perform when we evaluate them a year or two later, is one of the best indicators of success within the company was getting the worst possible score on one of your interviews. We rank people from one to four, and if you got a one on one of your interviews, that was a really good indicator of success.

Small suggestion: Maybe Google can take these genius employees and have them, hmmm, we dunno, debug the frickin' broken interview process. Those who demanded they be hired should probably also be enlisted in the debugging effort. Writes Norvig:

Ninety-nine percent of the people who got a one in one of their interviews we didn't hire. But the rest of them, in order for us to hire them somebody else had to be so passionate that they pounded on the table and said, "I have to hire this person because I see something in him..."

Unfortunately, Google's had already done most of its hiring/rejecting and is now has been in layoff mode for much of this year. But, hey, there's always the next bubble.

UPDATE: A Goolge spokesperson disputed that the company was "in layoff mode," as we wrote, and stated: "To the contrary, we have been very explicit... that we are stepping our rate of hiring." Indeed, CEO Eric Schmidt stated in a discussion of Q3 results that "we're going to invest in people. We're already stepping up our hiring." That's in contrast to earlier this year, when Google had three rounds of layoffs from January through the end of March.

UPDATE 2: Norvig writes on his FriendFeed that we got "everything wrong" — this is just more evidence of how well the Google process works. Click through to read his full post (and our reply, underneath).

(Pic: Norvig, by Mathieu Thouvenin)

Speaking to reporters today in New York, founder Sergey Brin and CEO Eric Schmidt (pictured) said people shouldn't come to the company to get rich, and shouldn't expect fancy food, Peter Kafka at All Things D reports.

Brin:

There was a period of time where the [Google] culture, as it were, was misinterpreted... When there were a few of us working in the garage... occasionally [cofounder] Larry [Page] would Rollerblade in with a few sandwiches for food. And that grew up into everybody's expectation: "Oh, they should have all the gourmet food they want, at any time." ...We decided to... significantly cut down all the snacks that had been available.

Schmidt:

Google pays very well. Google is clearly a growth company... We don't want them to come to Google for those reasons. We want them to come to Google to change the world...



....The tightening that [CFO] Patrick [Pichette] in particular did, who I think is the current Google hero, really did change the culture in a much more pragmatic way: "We're happy to work here. We're happy to be employed. We love what we're doing. Our friends, you know, have been laid off."

So, to summarize, a CEO who is a multibillionaire due to his Google stock says that you shouldn't come to the company to get rich, but to change the world. And the co-founder who has got Google investing in and renting space to his wife's company and hiring his mother in law as a consultant says Google shouldn't breed a culture of entitlement. OK.

But that puts to lie Google's old line, which was that it made crucial productivity gains by keeping programmers in the office longer with perks like free haircuts, a climbing wall, free internet-enabled buses, and, yes, free gourmet food. Here's what Brin and co-founder Larry Page wrote in an open letter to investors ahead of Google's 2004 IPO:

We provide many unusual benefits for our employees, including meals free of charge, doctors and washing machines. We are careful to consider the long term advantages to the company of these benefits. Expect us to add benefits rather than pare them down over time. We believe it is easy to be penny wise and pound foolish with respect to benefits that can save employees considerable time and improve their health and productivity.

Brin also defended the perks in a 2001 New York Times article, saying that, compared to routine corporate costs like marketing campaigns, ''these things cost nothing." Apparently "nothing" really adds up.

Jobs is reportedly obsessing over a forthcoming Apple tablet, a top-secret device that is said to look like a giant iPhone. The device went through at least six redesigns, AppleInsider has reported, a tell-tale symptom of Jobs' perfectionism. The tweaking continues relentlessly and annoyingly, staff told the Journal's Yukari Iwatani Kane:

[Jobs] has been pouring almost all of his attention into [the tablet]... Those working on the project are under intense scrutiny from Mr. Jobs, particularly with regard to the product's advertising and marketing strategy, said one of these people... Mr. Jobs's focus on the tablet has been jarring for some Apple employees, who had grown accustomed to a level of freedom over strategy and products while the CEO was on leave, said a person familiar with the matter.

Freedom over strategy and products? What the hell kind of hippie commune were you operating while Dear Leader was gone, Tim Cook? Something tells us you'll be first through Jobs' inevitable reeducation camps, once he gets this tablet shipped out the door.

Sure, both offices offer the self-consciously hip common areas that have been endemic to internet companies since the late 1990s. Witness the pictures of video games, couches and even mattresses in some of the pictures below (via Photography Lounge).

But it's been 20 years since the publication of Peopleware, the popular software productivity bible that showed how quiet, private offices made programmers more productive. Some software entrepreneurs, most notably New York-based Joel Spolsky, have managed to implement this humane, practical idea on a startup's budget. At Twitter in Facebook, the staff are smushed together in crowded, open-plan offices. And one of these pictures makes it look like Twitter has people working in the basement or something? For all the superficial nods to the sensibilities of their workers, neither Facebook nor Twitter appears to have invested much in the spaces where these people spend the lion's share of their days.

Sure, these companies are growing fast. But Facebook just moved into a new HQ and is supposedly doing $500 million per year in revenue. Which just goes to show that while Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are constantly changing their game, like for the Valley's office drones remains all too similar, boom after boom. At least at these two companies some of the staff have a decent shot at earning a windfall off their stock options — and saying goodbye to Valley programmer pens forever.

Some kind of... sitting bed? Sexxxy. At Facebook.

DJ tables! W00t! At Facebook, obviously.

Facebook is not just a social network, it's also your number one Palo Alto destination for INSANELY discounted HiFi components!

The less cool side of Facebook. No view of the outdoors for YOU!

Even more depressing, somehow. At Facebook.

Surely Twitter's cooler, with this arcade game!

And this cool TV room, with the green deer!

(Twitter HQ)

But it can get a little crowded...

(Twitter HQ)

...especially near the precious, sweet sunlight....

(Twitter HQ)

...but also even in the cork dungeon!

Sure, it can be time consuming, but then so can washing away the day's hack-attack sorrows at the local pub. This little office brew, discovered at Twitter HQ by Mashable's Ben Parr, offers at least a visual gulp, and the promise of beer to come, without anyone needing to leave the building — just the thing to cap a battle with Russian cyber armies. Of course, combined with the free falafels Parr snapped, and with previously-reported ideas for a games room, lockers and wine cellar at the Twitter offices, the beer does tend to lend Twitter something of a frat-house aura. It is the grunt-iest of the blogging platforms!

(UPDATE: We originally said Parr was Pete Cashmore. Sorry Ben!)

From left to right are Facebook's Vaughn Smith, FriendFeed co-founder Jim Norris, FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit and FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor. But the winner is clearly the guy on the far right, Mark Zuckerberg: if the Facebook CEO was the one dropping $50 million in this situation, that only made him more entitled, under Silicon Valley social mores, to dressing in shorts without socks. Let's just hope he never uploads pictures of a multi-billion-dollar transaction; it's a good bet a Speedo would be involved.

For comparative purposes, this is what a merger looks like in New York, with an old media company involved:

UPDATE: When Patricia Handschiegel sold StyleDiary in 2007, she snapped a decidedly unglamorous picture of herself at the end of the closing, when the fashionista found herself clad in a t-shirt, her hair pulled back. "This shit makes you humble," she told us at the time. Indeed!

(Top pic by FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit; bottom pic by Getty Images)

The project was reset at least a half-dozen times... Each time, development was frozen and key aspects of the device rethought, retooled and repositioned...



... Jobs, who's been overseeing the project from his home, office and hospital beds, has finally achieved that much-sought aura of satisfaction.

That's the difficult, obsessive boss we all know and love! How about a few more redesigns, just for fun, Steve? It'll make you feel better!

The documents show fast-growing Twitter estimates it will have 25 million users at the end of this year, 100 million at the end of 2010 and 350 million at the end of 2011, estimates ambitious even by the standards of optimistic Silicon Valley startups to say nothing of a microblogging service that has had trouble serving just it's existing user base.

More revealing: A "wish list" from Twitter's employees, reprinted by the French website Korben. The company has raided top talent from Google's notoriously entitled ranks, so perhaps it should come as no shock that its staff are demanding a wine cellar:

Plans for new offices including a wish list from the employees who would like a nap room, a games room, plants, a chief cuisto, a meditation hall, garages to cycling, Adjustable offices, a gym, a meditation room, a washer / dryer, wifi, lockers, wine cellar, an aquarium and so on ... They have imagination.

Documents revealed by the hacker:

Twitter email account

Evan Williams' Facebook profile

Twitter floor plan

Plans for Twitter reality show

Plans for Twitter reality show, part 2

Plans for Twitter apparel

List of high-profile Twitter users

Twitter's domain name control panel

The company is becoming infamous for its bingeing on and purging of personnel. Winter before last, Yahoo laid off around 1,000 employees, then immediately announced 459 new openings. In the spring came more layoffs, followed soon after by billboards like the above, snapped by Flickr user "nfarmer" next to U.S. Highway 101: "We're hiring!"

Now the back-and-forth has reportedly reached the level of self parody as Yahoo toys with its recruiters, the very people who are supposed to facilitate the Web portal's hiring cycles. We hear Yahoo has been trying to hire fresh blood into its recruiting office, including some from Fox Interactive, where recruiting honcho Elaine Fortier used to work.

Fair enough, right? Except that Yahoo has laid off dozens of recruiters over the past eight months, telling them (says a tipster) they are eligible for re-hire and promising they would be notified of new opportunities at the company. None, apparently, were contacted for the latest round of hiring.

This leaves a good number of people out in the cold, since Yahoo has, we hear, reduced the size of its recruiting organization to roughly 40 at the Sunnyvale headquarters from 220 spread throughout the U.S. (including Southern California and New York) in December. Apparently some of these people even left jobs as lawyers to become recruiters. D'oh.

As tough as it is on workers, maybe this will turn out to be a wise strategy for Yahoo; once everyone in Silicon Valley has put in a stint at the company, they're bound to end up using some Yahoo product or another, if only to figure out how much their shares are worth.

It has to be Peter Mattis, co-creator of the open-source image editor GIMP and a Google engineer. The clues are all right there in the Times article. A tipster helped lay them out for us.

"Harken Pretty" anagram: The apartment, once thought to be sold to movie stars Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick, instead went to an LLC called "Harken Pretty," which is an anagram of the first names of the buyers, according to the Times. Mattis is married to Kathryn Kimball; the couple are pictured in the image at left, taken from Kimball's Facebook profile (here's Peter's profile). "Harken Pretty" is the most coherent anagram for the couple's first names.

Young family: The buyers have a "young family," just like the trio of Mattis, Kimball and baby in the picture above.

Used to live in SoHo: The Times' mystery buyers want to escape "the hustle and bustle and celebrity of SoHo, where the family now lives." Mattis and Kimball used to live at 56 Crosby Street, according to sales records, before putting the property up for sale earlier this year. (Mattis implied in the Times that some of his coworkers might be jealous of his new home; perhaps they could take some relief in the fact he had to cut the price of his old home twice, reducing the asking price by a total of $650,000.)

Money to burn: The new apartment costs about $3.5 million more than the current listing price of the old apartment. But judging by Mattis and Kimball's political donations, they have plenty surplus cash to spend. Campaign records show donations to three different candidates in the last presidential election by the couple: $2,300 to libertarian Republican Ron Paul; $4,600 to Demorat Hillary Clinton; and $4,600 to Democrat Barack Obama in Mattis' name and another $2,300 in his wife's name (see here and here).

We've emailed Mattis at Google, Facebook and two old Berkeley email addresses. We'll let you know if we hear back. UPDATE: Mattis called; he wasn't happy to see his family plastered on a website and went out of his way to say he wasn't telling us anything on the record. (The photos above were taken from the public front of Mattis and Kimball's Facebook profiles.)

Says TechCrunch:

MySpace has been holding a number of meetings for staff... during which they've referred to the recently terminated employees as "fat". Unfortunately, some of these "fatty" employees have been present at these very meetings - the company has kept a number of terminated employees onboard through the duration of their contract...

And if that weren't bad enough, workers' final paychecks will bounce, incurring a bank fee and possible overdrafts, since MySpace screwed up its calculations and put a stop payment on the drafts. Hopefully you didn't deposit yours too quickly!

It's a good thing MySpace's business doesn't involve brokering sensitive relationships or allowing people to communicate clearly with one another.

At least Swisher had the good taste to go after one of her News Corp. colleagues, too, calling MySpace chief (and former Facebook COO) Owen Van Natta a girly penman. On tour with Facebook PR chief Brandee Barker, Swisher also threw in some self-deprecation that doubled as disclosure: thanks to a spouse who works at Google, Swisher dines freely on the search giants vaunted food, making the All Things D editor especially well-positioned to judge Facebook's cafeteria food against the competition.

It also makes her ideally suited to poke fun at Facebook for trying to stay cool despite its move from downtown Palo Alto to a fuddy-duddy old HP office park in the suburbs.

Facebook ought to invite Swisher back for a proper lunch review, if only to clear the name of its poor chef.

Quick highlights reel above; full eight-minute tour below.

[All Things D via Business Insider]

"Bill Gates shocks Cambridge with open-collared shirt" said the Seattle Examiner, before calling the billionaire's wardrobe a "call to action for all laid back Seattle business executives, as well as tech geeks everywhere."

Quite the opposite, actually. Gates can go casual while accepting an honorary degree precisely because of his power; mere peons will find a highly irregular wardrobe has real consequences in the real world. It's the same deal with Gates' new ranch in a desolate stretch of Wyoming: you buy one if you're in such demand you must flee all large clusters of humans.

(UPDATE: The tie item originally appeared in TechFlash.)

(Video via Cambridge News; image by AP)