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One Company's Audacious Plan To Organize Everything We Know
Free Press
September 2008
On Sale: September 18, 2008
288 pages
ISBN: 141654691X
EAN: 9781416546917
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
Based on unprecedented access he received to the highly
secretive "Googleplex," acclaimed New York Times columnist
Randall Stross takes readers deep inside Google, the most
important, most innovative, and most ambitious company of
the Internet Age. His revelations demystify the strategy
behind the company's recent flurry of bold moves, all
driven by the pursuit of a business plan unlike any other:
to become the indispensable gatekeeper of all the world's
information, the one-stop destination for all our
information needs. Will Google succeed? And what are the
implications of a single company commanding so much
information and knowing so much about us?
As ambitious as Google's goal is, with 68 percent of all
Web searches (and growing), profits that are the envy of
the business world, and a surplus of talent, the company
is, Stross shows, well along the way to fulfilling its
ambition, becoming as dominant a force on the Web as
Microsoft became on the PC. Google isn't just a superior
search service anymore. In recent years it has launched a
dizzying array of new services and advanced into whole new
businesses, from the introductions of its controversial
Book Search and the irresistible Google Earth, to bidding
for a slice of the wireless-phone spectrum and nonchalantly
purchasing YouTube for $1.65 billion. Google has also taken direct aim at Microsoft's core
business, offering free e-mail and software from word
processing to spreadsheets and calendars, pushing a
transformative -- and highly disruptive -- concept known
as "cloud computing." According to this plan, users will
increasingly store all of their data on Google's massive
servers -- a network of a million computers that amounts to
the world's largest supercomputer, with unlimited capacity
to house all the information Google seeks. The more offerings Google adds, and the more ubiquitous a
presence it becomes, the more dependent its users become on
its services and the more information they contribute to
its uniquely comprehensive collection of data. Will Google
stay true to its famous "Don't Be Evil" mantra, using its
power in its customers' best interests? Stross's access to those who have spearheaded so many of
Google's new initiatives, his penetrating research into the
company's strategy, and his gift for lively storytelling
produce an entertaining, deeply informed, and provocative
examination of the company's audacious vision for the
future and the consequences not only for the business
world, but for our culture at large.
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