The Google vice president's three-day wedding was anchored at the San Francisco Four Seasons, where she lives, and involved command performances by the rock band The Killers and renowned chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten, as we reported yesterday. Vogue, eagerly fed event details by fashion-obsessed Mayer, adds the detail that the actual ceremony took place on Treasure Island in the San Francisco Bay, and was followed by a custom fireworks display.

Vongerichten prepared lobster and beef tenderloin, Vogue adds, followed by cake from New York baker Ron Ben-Israel, making the wedding feast something of a shut out for all those Michelin-starred local chefs. As for the clothes:

• Wedding dress by Naeem Khan, who did Michelle Obama's first state dinner dress and has outfitted Jennifer Lopez and Beyoncé for events. Vogue said the dress included "a bodice crocheted and embroidered in snowflake lace" and was paired with "a floor-length bridal coat."
  
• Veil by Carolina Herrera.
  
• Shoes: Mary Jane by Stuart Wietzman "with a blue crystal design on the instep."
  
• Groom Zach Bogue wore a Broni tux and a "somewhat funky" shirt from Etro.
  
• Bridesmaids were in jewel-tone dresses from Reem Acra.'
  
• Mayer's ivory "going-away number" was based on something Jackie Kennedy wore when touring India.

So just your typical three-day wedding with fireworks, The Killers, Jean-George catering and a spread in Vogue. The pictures, we'd wager, will be forthcoming in Vogue's print edition. But someone must have some casual snaps in the meantime, not to mention more information about that singing toast from Google exec Craig Silverstein. Data to ryan@valleywag.com.

• The Killers. The rock/synth-pop bad played for Mayer and her guests Friday night at San Francisco club Bimbo's. Mayers' friends tried to Twitter discreetly about the private performance; others around town caught wind of the show but the not the bride.
  
• Jean-Georges Vongerichten. Vongerichten is considered one of the world's best chefs and is proprietor of, among other establishments, an eponymous restaurant in New York with three Michelin stars. He doesn't have a restaurant in San Francisco, however, which makes it all the more remarkable that Mayer brought his culinary services into the SF Four Seasons, where she lives and the home base for her nuptial celebration. Rumors of his presence at the hotel have already begun to circulate.
  
• Singing toaster: Mayer was serenaded by Google co-worker Craig Silverstein in a singing toast. Anyone have further details?
• Mystery pastry chef: Also something of a star, apparently, though we don't know who it is yet.
  

Mayer is an obsessive and data-driven planner in her role as VP for search products at Google. She also loves Oscar de la Renta and having her own fashion spreads in Glamour and Vogue. So it's no surprise her wedding was such an elaborate affair, from the ornate, velvety invitation boxes right through to the celebrity catering. Husband Bogue, a hunky investment manager one year her junior, is no doubt accustomed to handling the pressure of such complex, high pressure events.

Many of Mayer's friends seemed similarly in sync with Mayer, tweeting infrequently during the three-day affair in a nod to Mayers' privacy (not to mention her intense security policies).



Speaking of which: We've yet to find any pictures from the wedding. Mayer banned outside photography, one source tells us. If you have one, or can answer any of the questions above, or know the names of the more prominent guests, I'd love to hear from you.

Oh, and Marissa, Zach: Congratulations!

(Top pic: Mayer at New York's Carnegie Hall in November, accepting a "2009 Women of the Year" award from Glamour. Getty Images.)

Instead, it was an Apple iPhone that the couture coder, fresh off her latest fashion-mag spread, showed to TechCrunch's Robin Wauters backstage at LeWeb:

Wauters: By the way, thank you for showing me your Google Phone backstage.



Mayer: (laughs) I didn't, that was my iPhone. And you know I can't comment on speculation.

Google's most stylish executive (by a mile) using the iPhone when she could lug a Droid, running Google's Android OS, or the mythic G-Phone, expected to be branded by Google directly? That's comment enough right there.

(Pic: An earlier incident of iPhone brandishing: Mayer shows off her Jesus-phone in 2007, when the device was brand new and Google had yet to release its Android phone OS. By Tamar Weinberg.)

Mayers' three-day nuptials at the San Francisco Four Seasons, where she lives, were announced via an elborate invitation, a heavy red box covered in a velvety material, as we've reported previously. That sounded about right for the fashion-conscious overachiever.

The Google VP's obsessiveness apparently extends to security, as well: The invitations indicate guests are to keep some sort of ID card on them at all times during the weekend, we're now told.

And said guests aren't sure what this means: Are these "smart" cards implanted with radio "RFID" tags? If so, guests could theoretically be tracked across a 135-foot radius with a stationary receiver. Or maybe they'll be simple credit-card-style tokens with a magnetic stripe, swiped on demand. Or maybe former cheerleader Mayer has something more festive and creative in mind. If you've got a clue, do share it with us.

Requiring that guests basically wear a tracking tag will certainly further the image of Google as Big Brother. The search giant tracks a staggering amount of personal data, and company executives have lately been clumsy in answering mounting media questions about the info-hoard. Then again, some of Mayers' guests will be fellow Google executives; perhaps having a taste of their own medicine will have a moderating effect on the data Google collects.

Speaking of which: Though Mayer is employee number 20 at Google and has great power within the company, it's not at all clear that co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin will be in attendance at her wedding. Mayer was not invited to Page's private-island wedding to Lucy Southworth, a source close to the event tells us, so she could hardly be expected to invite Page to her bash.

In any case, a tracking scheme will certainly help Mayer keep out the likes of Valleywag as her wedding party makes its way around the Four Seasons, even as it reinforces her rep as something of a data-hungry cyborg. No worries Marissa; we'll try not to take it out on your gift.

(Pic: Mayer, by Esther Dyson)

The generous explanation for Schmidt's statement is that he's revolutionized his thinking since 2005, when he blacklisted CNET for publishing info about him gleaned from Google searches, including salary, neighborhood, hobbies and political donations. In that case, the married CEO must not mind all the coverage of his various reputed girlfriends; it's odd he doesn't clarify what's going on with the widely-rumored extramarital dalliances, though.

Schmidt's philosophy is clear with Bartiromo in the clip below: "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." The philosophy that secrets are useful mainly to indecent people is awfully convenient for Schmidt as the CEO of a company whose value proposition revolves around info-hoarding. Convenient, that is, as long as people are smart enough not to apply the "secrets suck" philosophy to their Google passwords , credit card numbers and various other secrets they need to put money in Google's pockets.

It's enough to make one pine for the more innocent Google bursting forth in the c. 1999 group picture at the top of this post, also gleaned from CNBC's special. The hair might have been sillier — dig co-founder Sergey Brin and VP Marissa Mayers' cuts, top center — but no one was yet audacious enough to argue against the very idea of a secret.

Mayer's union with real estate investment manager Zach Bogue will take place as part of a wedding stretching from Dec. 11 - 13 at the San Francisco Four Seasons, we're told. Mayer and Bogue bring out the competitive overachievers in one another, and the event sounds like an extension of their mutual mania. Even the invitation came wrapped in a heavy red velvet box, said a tipster.

The lengthy wedding should only further Mayer's reputation for aggressive well-roundedness: She was on both the debate team and pom-pom squad in high school, and today her master's degree in computer science makes a geeky contrast to the Oscar de la Renta clothes and fashion spreads in Vogue and Glamour. In keeping with the theme, we'd expect her fairytale weddings to have some geeky twists (laser tag, anyone?). If you have any further details — or better yet, a picture — we'd love to hear from you.

UPDATE: Added location of the Four Seasons.

UPDATE: We failed to mention that Mayer lives at the SF Four Seasons, in a penthouse, as we've reported previously. So maybe she's having the wedding at home.

(Pic by JD Lasica)

Mayer was employee number 20 and retains immense power within the Googleplex. But, as much as she likes to insinuate her vital early contributions to hits like GMail and AdSense, the VP for "search product and user experience" isn't quite the very bedrock of Google's success, as Glamour seems to imply in naming Mayer one of its "Women of the Year:"

We google about 7 billion times a month. And each time, it's like a trip into Marissa Mayer's mind. That sunny logo, blessedly spare interface and perfect list of links you get in response to a query are all pure Mayer.

Google's minimalist design and "perfect" search utility are "pure Mayer?" Google co-founder and Mayer ex Larry Page would take issue with that; he invented the algorithm at the heart of Google while a Stanford University PhD student. Co-founder Sergey Brin, part of the same PhD program, also contributed to the system. Google also had what was, by the standards of the day, a spartan homepage going well before Mayer joined in 1999, complete with a "sunny" if slightly fatter logo.

So while Mayer should continue to enjoy tonight's Glamour awards ceremony, relish her pretty pictures in the magazine (above) and stand proud of her accomplishments at Google, there's no need to give the competitive overachiever credit for every last innovation at the company.

(Top pic: Glamour)

Mayer discussing her award on Today this morning:

The incident on Silicon Valley's 910 AM neatly encapsulated the computer scientist-music industry culture clash Google Music will have to overcome. Mayer went on the show to tout Google's ability to find songs and lyrics — it reportedly plans to sell MP3s against those searches — but ended up hearing about how one of the hosts was Googling for nude pictures of her. After the segment wrapped, a spy tells us, Mayer "got pissy" with the station over how she'd been treated on air. The hosts later discussed on-air some complaints they'd received from unidentified parties at Google. (See clip above; the full show can be found here at episode 110409 H1.)

It's easy to understand how Mayer became offended. She's got a master's degree in computer science from Stanford, oversees hundreds of managers and thousands of engineers at the world's most powerful internet company — and she was subjected to repeated discussions about whether there are naked pictures of her online. Also easy to understand is how this happened: It's radio. Morning drivetime radio, at that. Crude talk is par for the course. The likes of Howard Stern would consider this segment a giant softball, even if it was followed by a rant about how free school lunches might turn children into lifetime welfare cases (lovely).

In short, welcome to the radio/music business. Get used to the sleaze!

"Marissa unintentionally encourages promiscuity," managing editor Robert Thomson said. Uh, really? Yes! Since the font used to attribute quotes on this Google News page is too small for Thomson's taste, search chief Mayer is encouraging "digital disloyalty" among readers who are the actual legal property of the Wall Street Journal.

"Why isn't the font size bigger?" Thomson demands. Seriously, Marissa. What do you know about designing websites in comparison to the leering, name-calling newspaper lackey of digital media genius Rupert Murdoch?

The threat from Microsoft's Bing search engine has even lit a fire under Google's icy, hypercompetitive search chief Marissa Mayer, according to the Wall Street Journal:

In recent months, Ms. Mayer has repeatedly pushed her team to better understand and compete with Bing, according to people familiar with the matter.

Mayer is hardly alone in her obsession. In June, the New York Post reported that Google co-founder Sergey Brin was "rattled" by Bing and personally led a "team of search-engine specialists... to determine how Bing's... search algorithm differs from" Google's. The bloated and insular company should focus that fanatically on its users and customers; Bing's market share is stalled at 9 percent, and Google's biggest threat will probably end up being a startup no one has yet heard of.

(Pic: Adam Tinworth)

Google had more luck patenting the design of its search results, which were submitted along with the home page in early 2004 and cleared the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office at the end of 2006. The home page, in contrast, was split off into a separate application, receiving its design patent for a "Graphical user interface for a display screen of a communications terminal" just yesterday. The document (see below) is as minimalist as the interface, containing a single illustration of Google.com, with the company logo depicted in dotted lines to indicate it is not an integral part of the patent.

In other words, subject to how the patent is enforced, Google owns the idea of having a giant search box in the middle of the page, with two big buttons underneath and several small links nearby. Since the time of the patent application in 2004, the company has moved some links, for searching News and Groups and other alternate databases, from directly above the search box to the top of the home page. But Google presumably believes its patent is broad enough to cover the variation.

It's not clear how the company, already under scrutiny from antitrust regulators, will wield the patent against competitors. The Yahoo Search page, depicted at left, bears a striking resemblance to Google.com, while Microsoft's Bing, which features a photo and several headlines, is more distinct. But there mere existence of the patent should create enough uncertainty to scare some worried startups away from Google's stripped down look. So while people may flock to the search engine for its clean, minimalist design, in so doing they are supporting a company that is poised to retard the spread of such an aesthetic online.

Google's shareholders will be more pleased, of course, as will staff. Google diva Marissa Mayer, the overachieving VP of search, added another patent to her trophy case with the decision. Powerful executive; athlete; fashionista; and genius inventor of this totally unprecedented rendering of HTML. Is there anything Mayer can't do?

Patent document:

Elliot Holt of One Story Magazine brought squirrel porn into the microblogging era. Small animals, small medium. Appropriate!

Marissa Mayer quoted Tom Clancy. We'd never have pegged the Google bigwig as a fan of techno-thrillers, but her and Clancy both strive to make them.

Jennifer 8. Lee's source wish list read eerily like Julia Allison's blogger wish list. We tried not to think about it.

Silicon Valley PR maven Brooke Hammerling might have grown up in New York, but she'll always be a California girl at heart. Judging from her taste in music, at least.

Former Googler Kevin Marks, a social networking guy, took a dig at the type of software that actually makes people more productive.

Did you witness the media elite tweet something indiscreet? Please email us your favorite tweets - or send us more Twitter usernames.

Zack Bogue, 33, turned in a very respectable performance, placing in the 14th percentile overall and in the 24th for his age and gender bracket.

Mayer, a year older to her lawyer fiancé, wasn't quite up to his pace. She finished a full 17 minutes behind hubby-to-be, in the 59th percentile overall and 52nd among women 30-39. (See results below, via RunRaceResults.com and a helpful tipster.)

But Mayer's run marked a real improvement. Last year she was down in the 66th percentile overall, 57th among her age group.

After a year's training, she's already improved her time by... well, about a minute and a half. At this rate, with continued support from her partner in workaholism, Mayer should be able to live up to her memorable pronouncement that "Good students are good at all things" within just a few decades.

(Top pic via MarathonFoto.com — buy your commemorative copy of Marissa Mayer's race photo today!)

Larry Page has complained that his search team "laughed at me" when the Google co-founder originally suggested Google needed to index content as quickly as Twitter; the chuckling of Page's ex Mayer would have been particularly unbearable, as the search VP is known for her incessant cackle.

But Page should be the one laughing now. Not only has Mayer come around to his point of view — "real time search is incredibly important," she told the Guardian this month — she's just signed up for the microblogging service he has championed:

"One hand in the future and one hand in the present" is a decent motto for a Google executive. Though it must sting to find the future on another company's website.

While Trump and Kushner just go to real estate events and check their BlackBerries, Mayer and her husband Zack Bogue — "lawyer/investment manager/athlete/philanthropist" — have actually rewired one anothers' cyborg circuitry:

She's also converted him to sleeping an hour less per night... "She woke

Zack up at 5:00 a.m. and wanted to give her speech; I said, ‘Zack, you

signed up for it. Now you know.' " Zack knows and thrives.

When not subjecting one another to sleep deprivation, Mayer and Bogue like to run triathlons and marathons, carry their laptops everywhere so they can work, stay up late so they can work and maintain three homes, to be near wherever the work is. The couple also enjoys encouraging you to give up on your worthless, silly professional life and consider maybe jarring homemade jam on a farm somewhere, or making hummus in a filthy commune or whatever it is the remaining hippies do these day.

I still remember the day I called you up and tried to recruit you to Valleywag — only to learn that that sneaky rapscallion Nick Denton had beaten me to the punch by one whole day in offering you the night shift at Gawker. It all worked out in the end — and perhaps better than I could have imagined back in 2007. But the main lesson I take away from that is that you can get Denton to do pretty much whatever you want if you're patient enough.

Denton, who has a weakness for idle truisms, likes to say that gossip is a young man's game. But you're old enough to remember the first dotcom bubble, and how it popped. That's going to be key in the next few years. We may escape a depression, but Silicon Valley is facing a reckoning nonetheless. Too much venture capital chased too few idea for far too long — and a buoyant economy can no longer hide the startup factory's mistakes.

The biggest mistake you can make is getting too close to your Valley sources and fall for their groupthink in order to ingratiate yourself. (You know how I've scolded you for gullibly buying the hype that Twitter is an amazing source of real-time news. Okay, perhaps it was — for five seconds, before the blowhards, spammers, and self-promoters found it.) At least your schooling will help you remain an outsider: As a Berkeley grad, you'll have an instinctive dislike for the Valley's Stanford in-crowd.

At the same time, don't forget that your years living, studying, and working in the Bay Area give you a better understanding of your beat than anyone can have from 3,000 miles away. Gabriel and Nick, though well-intentioned, have the Manhattan media habit of confusing proximity with relevance. Gawker is much more than New York now — and Valleywag's unique place therein must be firmly grounded in northern California's shaky soil.

Remember: Love is far more powerful than hate. Keep a clear-eyed passion for the Valley. Most tech reporters here secretly loathe their subjects, but try to disguise it with a supine gladhandery as they beg for scoops about new startup website features. They hate themselves and the people they write about. Sad, right? By loving the Valley, you can write about it more honestly than any of them. Just prepare to have your heart broken again, and again, and again. To truly love something, you must love it with all its failings.

For example, the Valley's Alice-in-Wonderland economics — why is Twitter worth more than most startups precisely because it has no revenues to speak of? But the thing you must love most about Silicon Valley — the part of the story the local press corps always skips over in favor of buzzwords, punditry, and lazy analysis — is its people.

The Valley's story is not one of chips and code. It is not a tale of technology. It is the always-running tragicomedy of the people who make technology.

Here are a few characters to watch. I hope it helps — but I can't wait to see who you add to the list.

Marissa Mayer Valleywag's first story remains its best. The public face of Google, Mayer also runs search, the only business that matters there. The cupcake frosting of her girly image — one she assiduously advances at every opportunity — may humanize the otherwise robotic computer scientist. But it is a distraction. The real question to ask about Mayer: Does her spreadsheet-ridden management style scale to new problems beyond search? Are her strengths now turning into limitations?

Mark Zuckerberg Ignore the nerd façade. Facebook's 25-year-old CEO is headstrong and ruthless. Here's the grand irony of Zuckerberg's revolutionary venture: He claims to be all about openness and sharing. But his imperious, my-way-or-the-highway management style has created a fractious culture of dishonesty, delusion, and disillusionment at the social network. His underlings either learn to say things they don't believe, or they move on. This is why Sheryl Sandberg is exactly the wrong COO for Zuckerberg. The veteran of the Clinton Administration has forgotten her Google training and reverted to Washington-player form, where staying on message is all that counts. Facebook's best hope is that Zuckerberg learns from his mistakes — but first he has to recognize them as mistakes.

Carol Bartz Yahoo's CEO swears like a sailor. At last, a boss who has found the right language to describe Yahoo's plight! Bartz brings a refreshing frankness to Yahoo. But the already demoralized troops she inherited will need to start seeing results. Otherwise, Valleywag will continue to be a steady recipient of leaks from Sunnyvale.

Elon Musk The CEO of Tesla Motors and SpaceX is living the geek high life, playing with fast cars, rocket ships, and other people's money. It's wonderful that Musk has realized even a small part of his childhood fantasies. But he risks destroying his dreams by refusing to reconcile them with reality. Factcheck everything Musk says. For example, was he actually running either Zip2 or PayPal, the previous dotcom successes he likes to cite in his bio, when they were sold?

Owen Van Natta Everyone is going to give MySpace's new CEO a pass, because the so-called "social portal" is so clearly troubled. If the former Facebook executive succeeds in a turnaround, it will be viewed as an astonishing achievement; if he fails, people will say no one could save MySpace. That's not fair. Hold his feet to the fire, and judge this disturbingly tan rock-star boss like anyone else on the list.

Peter Thiel Thiel, the PayPal cofounder, likes to brag about how he recruits only the best brains from the best schools to work at Clarium Capital, his hedge fund. Oh, really? Take a look at their résumés on LinkedIn. Like so many of this outspokenly harebrained libertarian's theses, the claim sounds good on paper but doesn't stand up to inspection. Valleywag, alone in Silicon Valley, can take a keen look at Thiel's rhetoric without being dazzled by his inflated wealth.

Tim Armstrong Like Van Natta at MySpace, Armstrong, a Google golden boy now charged with running AOL, will be enjoying a honeymoon. Don't worry: There are plenty of disgruntled AOLers who will gladly help you break up the lovefest.

Jimmy Wales Remind me: What does Wikipedia's founder actually do to earn his keep, besides give speeches? In all this time, I was never able to figure that out. Maybe you can!

Eric Schmidt When did Google's CEO turn into such a raging egomaniac? When the blogosphere was the only corner of the Internet that criticized him, he dismissed it as a "cesspool." But now everyone from Hollywood to the New York Times to the Federal Trade Commission is looking askance at his online empire's practices. "Don't be evil" has turned into "don't get caught." He will, though. Be ready when he does.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin Google's wonder twins have achieved geek nirvana, creating a cloistered campus with free food, lava lamps, and exercise balls to spare. They have a fleet of jets to transport them to rocket launches or rendezvous with Richard Branson and Bono. They've even managed to get married and reproduce. Just one question: Are they still sane? Were they ever?

There are many people who will help you — many of the same people who helped me so much, I hope. They include:

• Nick Denton, for putting up with three years of playing hard to get — and then putting up with much more besides.
• Brian Lam, Choire Sicha, Noah Robischon and Lockhart Steele, for tag-teaming me into taking the job.
• Gabriel Snyder, for expertly steering Valleywag into Gawker's welcoming arms.
• All the Valleywaggers: Paul Boutin, Nick Douglas, Megan McCarthy, Tim Faulkner, Mary Jane Irwin, Jordan Golson, Nicholas Carlson, Jackson West, Melissa Gira Grant, and Tim Woolery. You guys, we've been through so much together!
• Richard Blakeley: We made sweet Photoshop magic together.
• Everyone at Gawker Media: How much do I love you? Far more than just five milligrams.
• Sarah Lacy, Kara Swisher, and Peter Kafka: My peers and fellow purveyors of Valley gossip, you constantly inspired me.
• Countless sources, tipsters, and fellow scribes: Please understand that I esteem you none the less for not naming you here. In fact, your continued anonymity is the best sign of my abiding affection.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Good luck, Ryan. I'll be reading eagerly.

Don't screw it up.

Yours,

Owen
The Valleywag

(Photos by Brian Solis and Scott Beale/Laughing Squid)

The rigid philosophy of testing every little aspect of a Web page's appearance — Mayer's team once tested 41 different shades of blue to determine which generated the optimal number of clicks — has driven away top design talent tired of the endless testing. But perhaps the problem is that Mayer's restive designers just aren't as smart as she is! Here's her explanation:

Every design starts with an instinct: It should look like this, or it should look like that. You can actually test it with data. The humbling thing about that is sometimes the data proves you wrong. So for every change I propose, you know, three out of four, four out of five the data will support the change.

It doesn't matter if Google's ugly — the data is on Mayer's side, see?

Wait a second: Mayer famously dismissed a Googler's application for a job transfer because they'd gotten a single C. "Good students are good at all things," she said at a meeting witnessed by a reporter. But Mayer has just admitted that she gets a C, a B-minus at best, at Web design. She recently touted a design featuring unpopular insurance giant AIG. By her own rules, shouldn't she be fired in favor of someone less tone-deaf on design?

Here's a segment from her appearance:

Mayer's previous attempt to pretty up the customizable iGoogle homepage with designer looks fell flat. At a press event for this week's Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Mayer showed off less girly "themes" for iGoogle featuring videogames and professional sports. In designing the FIFA soccer theme, however, someone forgot that tarnished insurance giant AIG still had its logos on Manchester United players' uniforms. Oops!

Here's Mayer briefing the press on the new designs:

One witness declared her top "hideous." Another offers the following commentary: "Something a Palm Beach retiree would wear to a VFW ball. Also, roots showing badly." Meow!

Since assuming leadership of the consumer web team, I started attending the legendary weekly UI review meeting. I did this both as a representative of the web group, and also to help keep my team on track with what Marissa and her team expected of us. By this point in my career I had worked with her many, many times, and I had been attending the review regularly for a couple of months. She had even shaken my hand once to thank me for launching a particularly big and difficult campaign.
One of the last times I sat in that meeting, as we were dispersing, she looked right at me and asked her assistant to "cut down on the number of guests - there are too many random people here." I knew then that despite all the work I had done for her team, she didn't recognize me at all. I had earned no influence. I stopped going to the reviews after that.
A few weeks later, after thinking about my experiences and opportunities there, I decided to resign.

Halsall then calls for a change in Google's "creative leadership" — a veiled way of asking for Mayer's head on a platter.

Her tale comes after Doug Bowman, Google's top designer, criticized Google's obsession with numbers in making design decisions, a strategy advanced by Mayer. Another former designer, Kevin Fox, now at a startup called FriendFeed, doesn't wholly agree with Bowman — but notes that Google's design group has "had a glass ceiling from the very beginning." That, too, seems like a veiled reference to Mayer's iron grip on the look and feel of Google's consumer Web products. It doesn't take a degree in visual design to notice a pattern here.