They've had an office in Paris since 2002, for business.
Maybe you're talking about their engineering office. You might think they made it to please politicians, but I think the real reasons is for recruitment. There are many talented engineers in France, some of them not willing to move to Zurich, London or Silicon Valley. If they want a chance to hire them they need an office in France.
Anyway, supposing they get rid of their engineering office in Paris as a revenge, they'll still need to have a business office like they have since 2002.
Yes, they've had a business office, that precisely noone cares about :)
"You might think they made it to please politicians"
This is not even a secret. The original office existed because of certain folks not wanting to relocate, but it was only ever grown to please politicians. It was even made into a media event with eric schmidt and the president of france.
"but I think the real reasons is for recruitment"
This is false, sorry. I wish it wasn't. As I said, i'm pretty sure this isn't even secret.
"If they want a chance to hire them they need an office in France."
I'm just going to be blunt here: They did okay without having to hire them before, they would do okay without having to hire them afterwards.
This is not a knock on french engineering folks, really, it's more a statement "there is sufficiently high quality supply of engineers elsewhere that it is not actually necessary to be there".
Heck, the engineers in france are probably even significantly more expensive than elsewhere, too.
The office was not made, or expanded, for recruitment.
It was, like a lot of other companies do, to have skin in the game.
1. The French engineers cost less than SV or Zurich because the lower salaries make up for the higher labour taxes. Google pays well for the market but it's still lower than other locations.
2. They need an office for business reasons, period. Whether they have engineers or not does not change their obligations to the French law and their ability to escape taxes.
3. Google's strategy is not to attract French engineers specifically, but to have offices everywhere to hire talented people where they are.
You keep changing your comment, so it's hard to respond :)
1. This is, AFAIK, not accurate for Google.
2. This was not the question. The claim was "surely they need some great presence in the 6th greatest economy", and the answer is "no, they don't". Unless you mean "an office with 2 people in it", which is kind of irrelevant to the broader point of whether google would pull out of france. Most people would see closing the engineering office as pulling out of france, the same way closing the russia engineering office was seen as pulling out of russia, etc.
I'll simply avoid engaging about what their obligations are, because it's not my area of expertise. I also don't care much, because i know that if every country tries to extract billions from google and others, like they are trying to now, there aren't enough billions to go around. So it won't end well for someone.
3. Errr, no. This is not Google's strategy, it's actually quite the opposite. Google asks people to relocate to one of the existing eng centers, and if they are unwilling, passes on them.
Google very much does not want hundreds of engineering offices, much to the disdain of a good number of people.
Google's distributed office strategy is a point of contention even within Google :)
Have you worked in a software company like Google (Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon... ) ?
I have. I'd be surprised if any software company of that size gave up even a single qualified engineer to avoid legal trouble (legal trouble that is entirely Google's fault and not the engineer's.) That's just not the way the market works right now.
These days i'm an engineering director at Google, so, yeah, i have :)
I also worked at RedHat, IBM, and Microsoft, all of which would qualify.
I actually don't know if Google has closed offices to avoid legal trouble. But definitely, other large companies i've worked at have, in the past, decided it's not worth the hassle to have those offices when the government started pressing interesting claims (i'll just use that phrase to try to avoid taking something someone will see as a position, because i'm not the place i work for, and haven't really thought hard enough about this to have a position).
Your claim "that's just not the way the market works right now" is honestly, not something that has been a consideration at any of those companies. The pools of engineering talent in the world are too large, and most people relocate if you pay them well.
The considerations were all political and strategic.
(Like I said, i haven't been involved in office closings for Google. I do have a bit of trouble seeing why they wouldn't have mostly the same considerations)
Maybe you're talking about their engineering office. You might think they made it to please politicians, but I think the real reasons is for recruitment. There are many talented engineers in France, some of them not willing to move to Zurich, London or Silicon Valley. If they want a chance to hire them they need an office in France.
Anyway, supposing they get rid of their engineering office in Paris as a revenge, they'll still need to have a business office like they have since 2002.