您正在看的时事英语是:Google秘密武器在于高学历人才。 $50 billion sitting in the corporate treasury.

It's no contest: Google is going to win a battle of benefits, what with its on-site gym, on-site dentist and on-site celebrity chef who previously served the Grateful Dead.

Yet none of that matters, really. What trumps all else is Google's willingness to organize the entire company around the insight that top talent likes to work with other top talent, tackling interesting problems of their own choice. It's the same reason that some computer science students complete a master's degree and then persevere for three to five more years for a doctorate. It entails deep original research for a dissertation, while subsisting on a meager fellowship that allows for a celebrity chef only like Colonel Sanders.

Rajeev Motwani, a computer science professor at Stanford, says: "Good Ph.D. students are extreme in their creativity and self-motivation. Master's students are equally smart but do not have the same drive to create something new." The master's takes you where others have been; the doctorate, where no one has gone before.

Until recently, when computer science students completed their long Ph.D. training and stepped into daylight, they were treated warily by industry employers. American business has had to overcome its longtime suspicion of intellect. "Why I Never Hire Brilliant Men," an article published in the 1920's in the American magazine, is a typical specimen of an earlier era. In modern times, computer scientists are hired, but a doctorate can still be viewed as the sign of a character defect, its holder best isolated in an aerie.

Xerox famously put together a dream team of computer scientists in the 1970's, placed it on a hill in Palo Alto, Calif., and received, in short order, the modern easy-to-use personal computer and the laser printer. Unfortunately, neither the researchers nor Xerox corporate had any idea how to bring these creations to market, and the eXPeriment was a business failure.

Steve Jobs avidly hunted and hired Ph.D.'s during his ill-begotten entrepreneurial experiment at NeXT Computer in the late 1980's, while he was away from Apple. His NeXT computer, what he called a "scholar's workstation," was marketed exclusively to students for the low, low introductory price of $6,500. It failed for some ineXPlicable reason to sweep campuses. He has not been heard since to boast, as he did then, that 70 percent of his manufacturing employees had doctorates. (Admittedly, these were few, as the factory was highly automated.)

In 1991, Microsoft established its separate research organization, following contemporary orthodoxy, and sought Ph.D.'s to conduct research full time. Its mainstream recruiting, however, remains focused on undergraduates and master's students.

"We're not heavy into Ph.D. recruit