In technology circles, disquiet is brewing because of Google’s failure to establish a Google campus in Dublin in the same way that it had established ground-breaking technology and innovation hubs in other major cities such as London. According to industry sources, the failure of the company to establish a campus in the capital Dublin, which is the designated Middle East and European headquarters of the company, is an indication that the search engine giant’s commitment to Ireland isn’t very clear-cut and can be considered questionable. Large Google campuses have been established in competitor cities such as London, Warsaw in Poland and Sao Paolo in Brazil.
The purpose of Google campuses is to act as hubs for start-ups that are focused on helping companies in the early stages providing an eco-system of technology innovators at important locations for the company. The industry sources also highlighted other large scale investments made by Google in European cities in the previous 18 months. Recently, London was chosen by the largest search engine of the world for establishing its venture capital unit of Europe. $100 million has been dedicated by the company for the funds that would be used to make investments in European businesses.
Before this, Google Ventures had only been working on businesses in Silicon Valley such as taxi app Uber. The company is also spending money in its new offices in London where it has sales and marketing units as well as a large engineering operation. Last year, Google purchased a site right next to the King Cross Station and is using it for building a UK base. Some sources have said that there is a concern that most of the technology companies that have come to Ireland in the past 10 years haven’t established any deep roots in the country. No comment was made by Google regarding this matter.
The industry sources are of the opinion that even though they are large, it is not very difficult to move operations. Moreover, it is very disappointing to note that a campus hasn’t been established by the most powerful technology company of the world. They want Google to use the capital city of the country i.e. Dublin for building a campus that could be an ecosystem of innovations and startups in the country. This is not the only issue that’s worrying the technology experts of Ireland. The Irish experts are also worried about the lack of any really successful technology startup of the country itself.
There hasn’t been a single Irish technology company so far that has managed to break the billion-dollar mark. The highly successful online payments company called Stripe was founded by Patrick and John Collinson, the Limerick brothers when they were still in their teens, but most of the development was carried out in the US. This couldn’t be good news for Google as having headquarters in Ireland allows the company to reduce its tax dues substantially and problems there can lead to greater expense and problems in the future for the search engine giant.