"Another important factor that nobody talks about is teachers' salaries," Brin said. "Teachers are among the lowest-paid professionals. At Google, we've been paying our teachers 25 per cent more, but even with that, they're among the lowest-paid employees. I think it's really important to have a living wage for teachers."

Schools, of course, cost money. Google doesn't actually run a school, so Brin must be talking about the workers at his company's wildly overpriced childcare centers. On the Google model, even with teachers at the bottom rung on the payroll ladder, Brin's answer was to demand more money from parents.

Yet I haven't exactly seen Brin standing in solidarity with the teacher unions in California when they've lobbied for salary increases and smaller class sizes. Nor has Brin come out against Prop 13, the bill which froze property taxes in California, permanently hobbling education spending. But then it's been typical of Google to think they can have their gourmet, organic, locally-sourced cake and eat it, too.(Photo by AP/Douglas C. Pizac)

I think Google approached daycare the same way they did their in-house cafeterias — with an assumption, born of sheerest hubris, that an age-old business needed reinventing, and that the brains at Google could provide a value-add to a matter on which they really knew nothing at all.

What they forgot to consider: If you mess up a meal, you can throw it out and start over tomorrow. People take their children rather more seriously than their lunches.

That said, what Googlers are really upset about is not the outcome, but the process. The old Google culture was one where anyone's idea counted, and if you did the work and proved your point with numbers, you'd be listened to. Here, the process of gathering input seems to have been a farce, tacked on at the end for appearance's sake to a top-down decision.

Also ludicrous: Google is spending time and money on something it doesn't even advertise as a perk. Why is it in the childcare business again? It's not to attract talented employees; if anything, this "privilege" of spending too much money on needlessly luxurious childcare might drive employees away. So no one's well served: Not employees, not shareholders, and certainly not Google users.

This must seem utterly ludicrous to anyone not in the airtight bubble of Larry and Sergey's inner circle. In that rarefied atmosphere, "don't be evil" has become confused with "we can do no wrong."

The Dennis Troper & Susan Wojcicki Children's Trust — Troper, Wojcicki's husband, also conveniently works at Google — filed in May to sell $1.2 million in Google shares. Which raises the question: Why do they need Google-subsidized, mommy-approved childcare? With that much in the bank, the kids could cut Mom out of the equation and hire their own nanny. It would be a lot cheaper than Google's gold-plated daycare, which reportedly costs the company$50,000 per kid per year.

Nocera reveals that, at Wojcicki's behest, Google decided to upgrade its childcare to a hyperluxurious standard, including adopting the Reggio Emilia approach to pedagogy. The result: At tuition rates of roughly $14,000 to $19,000 a year, the subsidy paid by Google ballooned to $37,000 a year. From that followed a tuition hike to as much as $29,000 a year, at which price Google still loses money.

At no point, it seems, did Wojcicki or any of the others she involved in planning Google daycare do a market-rate analysis. They simply built the childcare facilities as they saw fit, and then priced it based on cost, not the going rates — even for the kind of quality care they professed to seek.

The Scandinavian School in San Francisco, for example, offers full-time Reggio Emilia daycare for $16,000 a year for infants, and less for toddlers and preschoolers. If the Scandinavian School charged Google's outsized rates, it would run a nearly 50 percent profit margin. Google, by contrast, is losing money by the fistful on its childcare.

So Google has on its hands a disaster: A disaster for parents, a disaster for children, and a disaster for Google shareholders. How does Google respond?

Not by fixing the problem, but instead by lying to a New York Times columnist. Nocera, a famed reporter, quotes Brin twice. Google PR repeatedly denied that Brin made these comments — an unbelievably brazen act, considering the remarks were made before large groups of Google employees. A sampler:

At a T.G.I.F. in June, the Google co-founder Sergey Brin said he had no sympathy for the parents, and that he was tired of “Googlers” who felt entitled to perks like “bottled water and M&Ms,” according to several people in the meeting. (A Google spokesman denies that Mr. Brin made that comment.)

But parents who talked to me said that several times during the six-week-long day care brouhaha, Mr. Brin made comments indicating that he viewed the whole thing as a giant economics experiment. “This is a supply-and-demand issue,” he told one group of parents — adding that Google needed to charge what the market would bear. (Through a Google spokesman, Mr. Brin denies making such a statement.) Given that Google has lots of pre-I.P.O. millionaires, it can clearly charge a lot.

Of course, Google PR would deny that Brin made these statements. They are damning; they suggest the founder is out of touch with rank-and-file employees, and callous in his treatment of them. He surely is, but it is unseemly to admit as much.

Wojcicki, with Brin's permission — what an indulgent brother-in-law! — is conducting an experiment on her fellow Googlers, and their children. But Googlers did not sign up for this experiment. Any parent knows how difficult it is to find good, affordable childcare, and how wrenching for children it can be to change providers. The real test going on here isn't some kind of supply-and-demand economics experiment. It's how arrogant Brin and his clique can get before his employees revolt.

The May memo, promising rates wouldn't rise 75 percent:
The June price hikes:

Wojcicki has modest tastes in cars: She chauffeurs her kids in a Honda Odyssey minivan. But when it comes to spending Google's money, she is far less thrifty. Wojcicki, an early Google employee, was dissatisfied with Google's Kinderplex, which has been run by an outside firm, CCLC. CCLC is used by many companies in the Valley, including Cisco and Electronic Arts, but it wasn't good enough for Wojcicki, who pulled her children out, and set about designing a new Google-owned facility, with a blank check from Brin.

The Kinderplex is losing its lease this month. The Woods and the Wetlands, as Google's new child-care facilities are known, are implausibly plush — and proved hard to staff until Brin and cofounder Larry Page were dissuaded from rejecting caregivers who didn't have a 3.5 GPA from a top school.

The price is likewise out of sight. One of the new centers has 18,500 square feet for 80 children — or 230 sq. ft. per child. Minimum licensing requirements are 35 sq. ft. of usable floor space per child; a more generous recommendation is 50 sq. ft. per child. Even allowing for some space for other uses, that seems extravagant. Brin told employees that the new centers cost $40,000 a year per child to operate — more than the roughly $30,000 a year Google planned to charge employees, but also far above market rates.

That number was also a 75 percent increase over Kinderplex's near-market fees, and the figure sent Googlers, ever driven by data, into a frenzy of mathematical modeling. Detailed proposals for reducing the cost of the centers came out — and were ignored.

Google's chief child-care officer sent an email out a few weeks ago promising that prices wouldn't be raised 75 percent. Sure enough, they weren't. Instead, Google's head of HR, Laszlo Bock, told employees earlier this week that prices would be raised a mere ... 70 percent.

The monthly fee for a preschooler is rising from $1,070 to $1,710; for an infant, it's rising from $1,470 to $2,390. At those prices, one parent says, if you had two kids, you could afford to just hire a nanny instead.

For the likes of Wojcicki, a top Google executive and an IPO lottery winner, those costs are inconsequential; having a luxurious child-care center near the Google campus is more important. But for workaday Googlers, especially those who didn't join the company before the IPO, those prices are out of sight. Even Bock, Google's chief people officer who was saddled with the unfortunate task of explaining Wojcicki's decisions, has told fellow Googlers he will take his children elsewhere rather than pay the new rates.

We hear that one top Google lawyer has quit over the price hike — not because she couldn't afford it, but because the way Brin's inner circle decided it, without consulting the data. (This departure may come back to haunt the company.)

Google used to be a place where rank didn't matter: If the numbers showed you were right, Larry and Sergey could be persuaded. That Brin let his sister-in-law's wealthy whims rule over the interests of hundreds, if not thousands, of working Googlers shows that Google is becoming yet another big company, with an insular clique at its heart. What it proves is that at Google today, it's not what you know. It's who you know.

How lucky for Wojcicki's kids that her mother has friends in high places. How unfortunate that other parents don't. One can't fault Wojcicki for wanting good things for her children. But doing so with Google's money, creating a luxury service affordable only to top executives and IPO lottery winners? That's inexcusable.