Brin, Schmidt and Page of Google.

Valleywag, the cheeky Gawker news source on Silicon Valley, claims that Larry Page has reacted to Google’s stock quote fall by wreaking havoc in the Googleplex:

“Here’s some fuel for your fire: a couple weeks ago, at a regular engineering all-hands, Larry Page went on a half-hour rant that left the entire engineering team wondering if he’s gone nuts.

“He spent a long time lecturing everyone about how we’re not smart enough to pick the right projects to work on, and he singled out a couple of projects (in front of hundreds of engineers) to complain about because they weren’t using shared infrastructure components.

“Then he announced that he doesn’t want people to use 20% time to work on new ideas — yep, Larry has suddenly decided that the only good way to use 20% time is to work on someone else’s project.

“So don’t expect to see any products like Google News coming out any time soon.”

Did this really happen? The Valley wag gives us a non-commital update:

“Update: A source says that CEO Eric Schmidt may have started the drama during discussions over Google Video, and that this may all be old news to the Googlefolk.”

They’d hardly be human if they didn’t show some emotion at the recent slew of bad news. So they’re not zombies after all. Hold the front page.