London, May 26 (IANS) Google’s Pac-Man logo led to almost five million wasted hours and cost the economy about $120 million, an analyst estimated.
Google apparently had about 505 million users Friday when the Pac-Man doodle went live. The game took up 4,819,352 hours of employee time and cost the economy a whopping $120,483,800, said Tony Wright, founder of Rescue Time, which is a tool that helps businesses to measure how time and attention was being spent.
‘For that same cost, you could hire all 19,385 Google employees. That includes Larry (Page) and Sergey (Brin), right down to the janitors. You could hire them for six weeks – imagine what you could build with that army of manpower,’ The Telegraph quoted from Wright’s blog post.
Internet users were happy to find the Pac-Man doodle on the search engine’s home page. It was to mark the 30th anniversary of game’s release.
The game could be played by clicking ‘Insert coin’. It was online for 48 hours before Google went back to its usual logo.
The search engine giant was ‘overwhelmed, but not surprised’ by the reception given to the Pac-Man doodle, said Marissa Mayer, vice president of user experience at Google.
‘Due to popular demand, we’re making it permanently available at google.com/pacman http://www.google.com/pacman,’ she was quoted as saying.
rounak