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How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
Simon & Schuster
April 2011
On Sale: April 12, 2011
432 pages
ISBN: 1416596585
EAN: 9781416596585
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
Few companies in history have ever been as successful and as
admired as Google, the company that has transformed the
Internet and become an indispensable part of our lives. How
has Google done it? Veteran technology reporter Steven Levy
was granted unprecedented access to the company, and in this
revelatory book he takes readers inside Google
headquarters—the Googleplex—to show how Google works. While they were still students at Stanford, Google
cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin revolutionized
Internet search. They followed this brilliant innovation
with another, as two of Google’s earliest employees found a
way to do what no one else had: make billions of dollars
from Internet advertising. With this cash cow (until
Google’s IPO nobody other than Google management had any
idea how lucrative the company’s ad business was), Google
was able to expand dramatically and take on other
transformative projects: more efficient data centers,
open-source cell phones, free Internet video (YouTube),
cloud computing, digitizing books, and much more. The key to Google’s success in all these businesses, Levy
reveals, is its engineering mind-set and adoption of such
Internet values as speed, openness, experimentation, and
risk taking. After its unapologetically elitist approach to
hiring, Google pampers its engineers—free food and dry
cleaning, on-site doctors and masseuses—and gives them all
the resources they need to succeed. Even today, with a
workforce of more than 23,000, Larry Page signs off on every
hire. But has Google lost its innovative edge? It stumbled badly
in China—Levy discloses what went wrong and how Brin
disagreed with his peers on the China strategy—and now with
its newest initiative, social networking, Google is chasing
a successful competitor for the first time. Some employees
are leaving the company for smaller, nimbler start-ups. Can
the company that famously decided not to be evil still
compete? No other book has ever turned Google inside out as
Levy does with In the Plex.
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