This March, Avinash Kaushik, and this week, Robert Love. Both have moved from their previous positions to new roles at Google. Kaushik is now Google’s “Analytics Evangelist” and Love is on the staff at the “Open Source Program Office”. Consider this a follow-up to my New Year’s Eve post, where I listed a few of the leading lights of the tech industry who’ve joined Google.

This is perhaps a first for the industry (well, any industry). Not even in the heady seventies and eighties were so many legends employed by one company. While Microsoft and Apple both were home to incredible talent during their peak, none had so fecund a roll of luminaries as Google can boast of now.

That throws up its own share of problems. Can Google grow fast enough (at the same time, not overheat) to keep up with the output of this talent pool? (Otherwise it risks losing them to frustration, as the Dodgeball founders demonstrated.) Can it manage the kind of innovation that is likely to emerge from these folks? More importantly, even if it were to manage to grow that fast, is the world ready for it? Case in point: though several countries now have the infrastructure and the technology to truly experience video-heavy content on the Internet, there are several issues that Google’s YouTube has to grapple with. Most recent are its tiff with Thailand for a spoof on its monarch, and with Viacom over licencing issues . Those are not technological issues but ideological ones; one dealing with a culture’s tolerance, the other over copyright.

Google’s illustrious talent will, in all probability, line up more potentially disruptive innovation. The company’s long term (even intermediate-term) success depends on how skilfully it can balance its own fast growth with a world that is not changing as fast.