From John Battelle’s Friday brain-dump, this interesting observation:

I spent a good couple of hours at HP this week as well. FM has done business with nearly every division of HP over the past four years, and it’s remarkable to spend time simmering in the culture of a company that is, in just about every way possible, Really Grown Up. HP has more than 300K employees, but it was founded on the base principles (and with the base narrative) to which nearly every Valley startup aspires. Every time I visit I am struck by the sterility and grayness of the company’s initial appearance, and then how warm, innovative, and driven the people working there turn out to be.

Which leads me to Google. I’ve been getting a lot of feedback from folks about troubles and growing pains there, and have done a fair amount of thinking about it. I’ve been sort of hard on the company of late, but there is a much longer thought piece to be written along the lines of themes I’ve been all about for the past five years – how does the company become, well, more like HP? I met this week with Katie Stanton Jacobs, a former Google who is now Director of Citizen Participation at the White House. (How cool is that title?!). Our conversation reinforced my thinking about the pros and the cons of working at Google now. The company has a very hard transition to make, to my mind, in terms of talent retention and management style. But that’s not endemic to Google, it’s endemic to any great company that has reached the lofty position in which Google finds itself. And by the way, what Katie is doing – leaving a very good job with tons of stock to work for the government and try to really change the world – well that’s just really, really inspiring.

And it says something good about the nature of government these days.