Anatomy of a Downturn

Still, for all the legends of its cavalier attitude toward the bottom line, all the tales of a company so flush that it can play in the sandbox and worry about the budget later, Google's been surprisingly responsive to the slowdown, and willing to cut back in order to survive the hard times intact. It's hard to turn a battleship the size of Google in a matter of months, but the company's been much more responsible than, say, Lehman Brothers. And it shows; even as the online advertising business begins to flatten, Google's share of the search market continues to grow, and it's been among the few technology firms to escape laying off its full-time workforce.

The story that emerges is one of a company that saw the downturn coming, and quietly curbed back the excesses that made it such a fun place to work, in order to live through the grim years and hop back in the sandbox one day. Being so dependent on one revenue source isn't where they wanted to be in the next recession, but so far, Google has managed the tough times more responsibly than anyone who scoffed at Sergey Brin's plans to float in space would have thought.