It’s been a busy Thursday for Google in the news. In addition to weathering reports of new cloud-based services launching next month and U.S. regulators gearing up to approve Google’s bid for Motorola, the Internet search behemoth is at the center of the tech news world today. And the list of headlines is about to get even longer.
According to a report this week from Bloomberg, Google is allegedly planning to launch a bricks-and-mortar retail presence beginning with a shop at the company’s European headquarters in Dublin, Ireland.
So concrete sounded the report that few chalked it up to the rumor mill. But on Thursday, a Google rep confirmed that the story is mostly bogus and Google has no plans of embracing retail the way tech rivals Apple and Microsoft have.
“We already have an online store selling things like Google T-shirts and pens,” one Google spokesperson was quoted as saying in various media outlets. “We have the option of a small space doing the same in our Dublin office, but we’ve not made any decisions. It’s simply a planning application.”
Whether this “planning application” develops into a full-blown retail strategy likely won’t become clear for quite some time.
