Fifty candles to blow out for LEGO Monday, with Google's minimalistic homepage offering a birthday 'Doodle' tribute to the beloved plastic building blocks. Google uses 'Doodles' on its homepage to mark special days and what it considers original, innovative artists and thinking. Google says it's 'Doodle' team (Team Doodle!) embraced the idea of a LEGO 'Doodle' because of the special role LEGO building has played in the search engine's 10-year history.
Google co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, used the iconic building bricks as the external low-cost and expandable casing for 10 4-GigaByte hard disks when they were busy developing their search engine. The original server casing still exists and is on display as part of an exhibition chronicling 80 years of computing machines at Stanford University. Additionally, LEGO bricks can be found scattered around Google's many offices, to help stoke creative inspiration, and have reportedly been used in Google's college graduate recruiting exercises to test potential candidate's creative horsepower. I can see the candidate faces now when the interviewer hands them a box of LEGO bricks, yells "build us something special!", and walks away. Sure you have a 4.5 GPA. But can you 'bring the brick'?
The LEGO Group traces its roots to Denmark, where in 1932, it began producing wooden toys. It expanded to plastic in 1947, and a year later filed a patent for the now-famous interlocking bricks, calling them "Automatic Binding Bricks". The Lego Group's motto is "Only the best is good enough", translated from the Danish phrase, Det bedste er ikke for godt. Two products have been developed to commemorate the brick's anniversary: an open-ended LEGO set with a classic village theme including a gold 2x4 LEGO brick launches in August, and a one-of-a-kind Town Plan, featuring city hall, movie theater, gas station, car wash, two automobiles and eight mini-figures, including a letter from Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen, the company's owner, is now available on LEGOshop.com.
