google, yahoo, Microsoft

Kendall Square Gets a GYM Membership: Google, Yahoo, Microsoft

Wade Roush 2/13/08

On November 11, 2005, tech blogger Om Malik challenged his fellow bloggers to “Stay GYM Free” for a week. “Whether we hate them, or we love them, we do love to talk about them…Them being Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, aka GYM,” he wrote. “What would happen if the blogosphere decided that we would not talk about the Big Three for a whole week?”

Om fell off his own anti-GYM wagon the very next day. But in his defense, we at Xconomy probably would too—especially these days. In fact, we can’t help pointing out that with Yahoo’s acquisition of Maven, announced yesterday, Kendall Square has scored a GYM hat trick. Before 2007, none of the Big Three had independent operations in Kendall Square. Now they all do, almost in a straight line down the Main St.-Broadway corridor:

• Google occupies offices on the 7th and 13th floors of the Cambridge Innovation Center at One Broadway, and is renovating nearly 60,000 square feet of space at Five Cambridge Center, with a move expected early this year.
• Yahoo, with the Maven acquisition, will have at least 60 employees at Maven’s Four Cambridge Center location.
• Microsoft is renovating space at One Memorial Drive for a new concept development center, a new outpost of the Microsoft Research division, and employees brought on as a result of Microsoft’s 2006 acquisition of Softricity.

Because we’re map freaks, we’ve put together this little pictorial guide to the GYM presence in Kendall Square, with help from Google Earth. Once Google moves, the three companies will even be in proper G-Y-M order from west to east. (For more fun with maps, check out out our Greater Boston Innovation Map.)

Wade Roush is Xconomy's chief correspondent. You can e-mail him at wroush@xconomy.com, call him at (617) 252-7323, or follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/wroush.