Customer Reviews

In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives

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Among recent great books describing the business and impact of information technology, In the Plex is one of the best. As impactful as Pulse: The New Science of Harnessing Internet Buzz to Track Threats and Opportunities, and with story-telling as engaging as Idea Man: A Memoir by the Cofounder of Microsoft this book will be on the shortlist of 2011 "must reads" in the business of technology.

One of my favorite writers, Steven Levy of Wired, gained what may be unprecedented access to the employees and upper management of Google in order explore the history, the work environment key management decisions of one of the most innovative and culturally-influential companies of all time. Google manages this with 24,000 employees who see Google as the perfect employer for them. Levy describes Google as a place for the "unspeakably brainy", a kind of "geek never-never land" - just the right kind of environment to maximize innovativeness. Among the perks is the requirement for every engineer to spend a share of their time on personal projects. And as daunting as it sounds, Levy says Co-founder Larry Page actually still signs off on every single hire.

The co-founders Sergey Brin and Page literally started Google from a garage. (The name was a misspelling of the mathematical term for 10 to the 100th power - Googol. But the name stuck.) Their big idea: efficient searches and how to make money at it by selling keywords. Levy then leads us through Google's history of fantastic growth and innovation focusing mainly on big decisions in the firm. Among them the mistakes of handling the special case of China where media access is more controlled than Google would prefer and where management style of the China-based executives were more like a stodgy, old IBM than the free-thinking Google. The company with the motto "Don't be Evil", ultimately decided to leave the China market.

The rapid growth of the firm was itself a major challenge. That many smart people with the freedom and resources to chase many ideas could spread themselves thin. Some of the ideas could be technically possible because of the clever solutions Google staff would develop, but some ideas had other obstacles the engineering-oriented firm didn't anticipate. For example, Google's plan to scan in millions of books and offer them online ran into what should have been entirely foreseeable legal obstacles from authors. But as Levy describes in the first pages of the book, "To Google, it was a boon to civilization." It is this story that frames much of the rest of the book: visionary and cash-rich but somewhat naïve technologists struggle with practical realities of the rest of the world.

Some of the employee perks are drying up as economic hard times have even hit Google. The sheer size of the firm has required some amount of long-avoided bureaucracy and rapid acquisitions of firms the engineers thought were cool has slowed down. As Levy says, even the "Don't Be Evil" motto is now used as ironic humor by Google's detractors. But Google, with a $180+ billion dollar market capitalization is an example of a massive creation of wealth from one of a few areas where US exports lead the world: world-changing innovation.

Levy's telling of the Google story is based on access no other author had and, as a result, it is the best story about Google written to date.

Ever since its inception, and in many cases even before it became incorporated, Google has been referred to mainly in the superlatives. The briskness with which it became the dominant player in online search, the sheer size of its operations and the infrastructure, the incredibly short time within which it became one of the largest companies in terms of market capitalization - all of these are the stuff of legends. It is unsurprising then that Google would attract a high level of media attention, and there are literally hundreds of articles written about it every day. (I know this because I just did a quick search for Google in Google News.) Over the years there has also been no shortage of books on Google. However, in terms of the depth and breadth of its research, as well as the amount of first-hand information that it provides, Steven Levy's "In The Plex" stands in a category of its own.

In the minds of its founders and most of the early employees, Google is first and foremost a technology company. The business model of online advertising came about almost as an afterthought, and one continuously gets the sense that its purpose is to pay the bills so that Google geeks can have a free reign in pursuing their latest techie interest. This attitude is an integral part of Google's DNA, and any book that aims to provide the reader with a better sense of what Google is all about needs to get this point across. Unfortunately, there have been several books in recent years that were more concerned with all the intangible aspects of life in the age of Google and had almost completely missed this point. "In The Plex," I am happy to say, did not fall in that trap. Steven Levy comes across as an extremely competent and well-informed technology journalist who clearly relishes the opportunity to write about all the intricacies of Google's engineering prowess. In this respect as well, this is a quintessentially Google book. If Google were a person, this is probably what its autobiography would look like. Levy, who currently works for Wired magazine, literally embedded himself deep within Google and over the course of two years or so interviewed hundreds of Google employees. The result is a very comprehensive book on almost all aspects of Google's technology and business.

The book is very informative, probably more so than all the other books on Google out there combined. Even some of the already widely familiar stories about Google's origins and early years have been given new details. The book is also remarkable in that it provides a lot of information on some very specific technical details and innovation that Google has accomplished over the years. Granted, much of it is many years, or even over a decade, old, but for the longest time Google has been extremely cagey about revealing any of that information to the wider audience. The fact that most of the information in this book has been obtained directly from Googlers, including the notoriously secretive founding duo, may signal that Google has come to the point where it has become confident in its own strength and comfortable with the idea that revealing certain information about itself will not jeopardize its business model.

I relished the opportunity to find out more about some of the Google's early "magical" features and projects. For instance, even though I had been relying on it for years, I finally understand how Google's famous spell-checker works. The reader can also learn more about the early days of Google's book scanning technology, the development of its massive data centers, the rise and fall of Google video, and several other Google projects and initiatives that have been undertaken over the years. All the stories are to the point and are not laden with techie jargon.

The part of the book that I liked the most was the one that dealt with Google's abortive efforts to gain a foothold in China. China's government is notorious for its online censorship and the very restrictive measures that it used when dealing with foreign companies on its soil. Nonetheless, it was very hard for Google to forgo the world's second largest economy (third at the time) and the world's most populous nation with well over billion and a half of inhabitants. Google tried to compromise and work out some sort of rapprochement with the Chinese government, but this attitude was so antithetical to almost all of Google's core beliefs and business practices, that it was doomed from the get-go. One person that was particularly uncomfortable with the whole situation was Sergey Brin, who immigrated with his family to the United States from Soviet Union when he was just six years old. His family's experience with totalitarian regime shaped his thinking, and it proved decisive in the long run. What finally triggered Google's pullout from China was a Chinese government's hacking into Google Chine's servers and accessing of some highly classified information. The showdown with China reads almost like a spy thriller, and it highlights all the complex interconnections between business, technology, policy and politics that will dominate life in the twenty-first century.

This book's laser-like focus on Google is actually one of its weaknesses. Many of Google's main rivals are mentioned, but mostly just in passing. There is also very little discussion of Google within the larger online economy. All of this has an effect that it is sometimes hard to put many of the interesting facts and stories in this book within a larger context. Another one of the book's weaknesses is the lack of critical assessment and analysis of various products, projects, policy decisions, and inevitable failures. The author appears a bit too eager to present Google's version; any criticism remains of the mildest variety. One gets a sense that this book was thoroughly vetted by Google's PR department. I guess that is the price one has to pay for having unprecedented access to Google's own internal information. However, for the most part it was worth it.

One thing that did surprise me with this book was the very limited attention that it gave to some of the most headline-grabbing issues that currently grip Google: Android OS and social networking. Android is mentioned in one of the earlier chapters, but only in terms of its early development and the fallout that it engendered with Google's relations with Apple. Since those early days Android has become a major player in its own right, a very viable alternative to iPhone, and very likely the dominant mobile operating system in the near future. And as was hinted at one point in the book, it also brings in very healthy revenue. Social networking fares even worse than Android. It has been relegated to the epilogue, even though companies like Facebook and Twitter are threatening the very model of the web that is at the core of all of Google's services.

CONCLUSION

This is by far the most thorough and informative book on Google that is currently available. If you are interested in learning more about Google and are going to use just one source then this book should be it. It is well written, interesting, and free of puff pieces. It has a few shortcomings, but overall they are insignificant compared to the amount of material that one can glean from it.

If you want a good history of Google's early years, this is the book for you. The author, a Google booster, had unparalleled access to current and former Google employees and presents more information about the history and development of the company than has reached print before. If you're interested in the causes of Google's recent stumbles, though, the author's hagiographic approach gets in the way of understanding. Here are a half dozen "evil" approaches from the "don't be evil" company that simply are not adequately explained.

(1) Google went into the China market and self-censored itself based on what it understood the Chinese autocrats wanted it to do. It didn't get out of China until the Chinese government launched a sophisticated hack that not only broke into and stole Google's top secret code, it stole the gmail contact lists of Chinese dissidents. Why didn't Google recognize the slippery slope of the rationalizations that allowed it to participate in this charade, especially co-founder Sergey Brin, who had escaped from a similar regime?

(2) Google was initially in favor of the positive public good of "net neutrality" when it was trying to break into the field, but suddenly it's no longer in favor of such neutrality for wireless. Why the about-face?

(3) In its book scan project Google initially took the legal position that what it was doing was fair use, and the author makes clear that the legal community thought it would win on this point. (p. 362). Yet ultimately Google bought into a suggestion from the Writers Guild of America that Google should become the designated internet bookstore for copyrighted books that are out of print and that it should create a registry to determine who should be paid for the books. Not coincidentally, Google would have profited handsomely by this arrangement. The only explanation the author proffers is that "it was a foregone conclusion that [co-founder] Larry Page would sign on.... It was his personal history and that of Google that determined that he embrace the scheme." (p. 362). This tautology is no explanation, and of course a federal judge has now rejected the settlement, a fact that occurred too late to get into this volume.

(4) On the Wi-Fi-street view project, again the author has no explanation as to why Google cars roaming the street sucked up all unprotected communications to and from the internet, other than "the engineers working on the Wi-Fi street view project noticed that someone had written useful code and implemented it." (p. 343). What?

(5) Google implemented a social networking application based on gmail that automatically gave everyone access to your entire email contacts list, and showed the frequency with which you communicated with each contact ("Buzz"). The $8 million privacy settlement that Google entered into a few months ago didn't make its way into this book. How could the "don't be evil" company be so tone deaf on privacy? Again, the author doesn't offer any clues.

(6) The most problematic issue has resulted from Google's purchase of internet ad king Double Click. After the purchase, without letting any of us know, it substituted its former privacy-conserving policy of keeping track of our web browsing only when we clicked through to one of Google's advertisers, to a new policy of keeping track of us every time we visit a web page that either has a connection to Doubleclick or contains Google ads, whether or not we click on the ad. All Google has to do to keep track of ALL of our individual web browsing is to match this up with the search data that it keeps for each of us for 9 months. What guarantee do we have that Google won't do that in the search for the type of profits it was looking for in China, in the book search project, and everywhere else? The author just doesn't say.

I bought this book automatically because I had previously read and enjoyed Levy's previous works: Insanely Great, Hackers and Chaos. Given his heritage covering technology companies and personalities as both an author and a journalist, I was curious what he would make of Google.

The book is expansive and provides a lot of additional colour around Google, some of which I found of interest as I had worked at Yahoo! competing against Google and working with some of the early darlings of the web 2.0 movement - Flickr and Delicious. There were a couple of things that surprised me such as Google's use of machine learning on areas like translation explained why grammar is still so bad in this area as it needs heuristics that lexicographers could provide similar to that offered by Crystal Semantics.

Overall it was interesting to see that as with most large organisations Google is not only fallible but run through with realpolitik and a fair bit of serendipity. This contrasts with the external perception of Google as the technological Übermensch. A classic example of this is the series of missteps Google made whilst competing in China, which are documented in the book. From staffing practices, promotional tactics and legal to technology; Google blew it's chances and Baidu did a better job.

As an aside it was interesting to note that Google used queries on rival search engines to try and work out how to comply with Chinese government regulations, which is eerily like bad practices that Google accused Bing of last February in `hiybbprqag'-gate.

There is a curious myopia that runs through a lot of later Google product thinking that reminded me of the reality and perceptions that I was aware of existing inside Microsoft from the contact I have had with the organisation through the various different agencies I have worked at. A classic example of this is the Google view of a file-less future, which by implication assumes that people won't have legacy documents or use services other than the Google cloud. It is a myopia that comes part of arrogance and a patronising attitude towards the consumer that Google always knows best about every aspect of their needs.

Contrast this with Apple and iTunes. Whilst Apple would like to sell you only content from the iTunes store, it recognises that you will have content from different sources: Amazon MP3s, ripped CDs, podcasts and self-created files that iTunes needs to play nicely with.

The `no files' approach assumes ubiquitous bandwidth which is likely to be a fiction for a while. (Part of the reason why I am able to write this post is that I was stuck for half-a-day on a train journey to Wales enjoying patchy mobile phone coverage and a wi-fi free environment, which allowed me to focus on reading this book in hardback). This approach smacks of the old data lock-in that Microsoft used to have with proprietary file formats for its Office documents.

Levy does a good job pulling all of this together and chronicling Google, but he fails to cast a critical eye over it all. I suspect that this is because he is too close to the company: the access that he gained enveloped him. Which is a shame as all the experience and insight Levy could bring to the book that would add value to the reader is omitted. Whilst In The Plex is an interesting historical document, it could be so much more.

With its global reach, driverless automobiles, plethora of digital platforms, dizzying arrays of real-time algorithms, and density of computational expertise and server farms -- not to mention its great and growing wealth -- Google is a coevolving innovation ecosystem par excellence. Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin do more than just listen to the technology; they've turned their company into a most fluent translator of its every hiccup, whisper, and utterance. Even bats must envy their flair for echolocation. They'll hire the world's best specialists, deploy microphones anywhere and everywhere, and do whatever it takes to ensure maximum technological intelligibility. But the genius of Page and Brin lies not in their own acuity, but with their ability to evoke it in others. They hunger for techno talent that listens even better than they do.

In the Plex flawlessly describes Google's unique culture, which is dedicated to getting the world's greatest technologists to innovate beyond disciplinary boundaries. Although Steven Levy does not quite offer -- or create -- fully rounded views of the many Googlers mentioned in his pages, his descriptions of their design sensibilities and innovation ethos are without peer. This is the best book about Google yet written, because Levy gets the "push the envelope until it rips" intellectual extremism that defines Google's most effective intrapreneurs. Sure, they're very smart. But their drive and ambition have to get Page and Brin hot and bothered, or they will not have much impact.

"Page once said that anyone hired at Google should be capable of engaging him in a fascinating discussion should he be stuck at an airport with the employee on a business trip," Levy writes. "The implication was that every Googler should converse at the level of Jared Diamond or the ghost of Alan Turing. The idea was to create a charged intellectual atmosphere that makes people want to come to work. It was something that Joe Kraus [a top-tier Google hire] realized six months after he arrived, when he took a mental survey and couldn't name a single dumb person he'd met at Google. `There were no bozos,' he says. `In a company this size? That was awesome.'"

Serious readers will come away from In the Plex knowing in their heart of hearts that their own organizations aren't as passionately committed to technology, technologists, and their creative coevolution as Google. Recruiting the very best quants and software jocks was simply the most obvious element in the coevolutionary equation. What really made the difference was the founders' relentless emphasis on creating the fastest possible and best user experience. Milliseconds mattered. The fastest search had to be the best; the best search had to be the fastest. That is an innovation imperative requiring exquisite skills in listening to technology.

But Google's founders -- intuitively, analytically, or alchemically -- thoroughly grasped that they had launched not a company but a global innovation ecosystem that technologically transformed value creation. The company's culture evolved around the interaction of brilliant people with brilliant technology. It wasn't just that smart Googlers made innovative technology; innovative technology made Googlers smarter. Google was as much a hive mind as an innovation ecosystem.

In the words of publisher and digital entrepreneur Tim O'Reilly, Google was the first real Web 2.0 enterprise: "The real heart of Web 2.0 is harnessing collective intelligence." This was Google's transcendental essence. Google understood and exploited the innovation ecosystem of network effects faster, better, and cheaper than anyone else. Virtually every successful investment the company made was based on the belief that the economics of network effects ensured that great innovation would be great business.

This proved true. From Page's PageRank (pun intended) algorithm that made links the center of search to Google's expropriation of rival GoTo's auction business model for keyword search, Levy observes, everything was engineered around exponential expectations.

To succeed, Google would ultimately have to manage billions of queries and petabytes of data. To sustain success and growth, Google would inherently need to think not just big but huge. The firm would need to listen for and exploit network effects wherever it could find or create them. As Levy documents with relish, from Android mobile phones to Gmail to YouTube videos, Google literally and figuratively enjoyed an embarrassment of digitized riches.

What a fantastic innovation environment. Network effects meant that the innovation paradigm could shift away from linear research and development to more iterative experimentation and scale. Business experimentation soon converged and coevolved with technical and computational experimentation. Google's ecosystem became an economy. So the company hired innovative Berkeley professor Hal Varian as its chief economist; Varian has proved adept at designing market mechanisms for monetization and using Google searches as forecasting tools for the global economy.

Levy holistically captures Google as a global business; a data-driven, experimentation-oriented innovation culture; a cutting-edge technologist; a pop culture icon; and the living extension of its founders' vision. He strikes these balances remarkably well, although he is, perhaps, a little too generous to a company that clearly offered terrific access.

That said, Levy doesn't flinch in describing Google's difficult moments, such as the souring of relations with Apple's late CEO Steve Jobs, who felt betrayed by the top management at Google when that company introduced the Android phone. Indeed, Levy's earlier books on Apple -- The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness (Simon & Schuster, 2006) and Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything (Viking, 1994) -- give him great insight into and context for writing about idiosyncratic technical geniuses worth billions of dollars.

Levy also points to the struggle of retaining exceptionally talented people who invariably chafe at the technical and business conflicts that emerge in every fast-growing global enterprise. As dominant and influential as Google may be now (wasn't that true of Microsoft barely a decade ago?), Schumpeterian reality suggests that today's Googlers may be the firm's most serious rivals tomorrow. To its credit, Google recognizes this. It knows that some of its best people may listen to the technology in a different way -- and choose to do their translating elsewhere.

Google came into being with lofty and ambitious goals to dominate the Internet as an artificial intelligence company; to make the world a better place. The founders' Montessori naiveté and hubris led them to challenge preconceived notions and "authority" that would have otherwise halted global-scale ambitions. They would eventually persevere as one of the most disruptive and profitable companies the world has ever seen. Google went big -- and they succeeded, albeit with some well-publicized missteps in both China and social.

This book is the definitive story of that journey. It covers the very earliest days as a garage operation right through to 2011. Levy is masterful at capturing the awe and ire that the founders' impactful vision has imparted on the world. I highly recommend this book to anyone seeking the true inside story of Google from within the Googleplex.

First I must confess that I am a life-long geek-nerd and love all things about technology and business. Therefore, I am slightly biased towards books like this. I have a Droid and wouldn't be caught dead without my Google GPS... Now that I have put forth my disclaimers... I absolutely loved this book! It's the first time I've gotten so wrapped up in a business history book. Levy has an outstanding way with words, and his story-telling gift has allowed him to take what could have been a very dry telling of the Google story and make it interesting for the "everyman". Occassionally, he gets a little too deep in the technology, but one can forgive him for this because the story is so rich.

Essentially "in the plex" is a story of how Google got started and opens the door wide on its culture, visions, and business strategy. The only reason why I did not give it 5 stars was because it is slanted. Either he is truly enamored with Google or he agreed not to say anything negative. It's almost a PR piece for Google. No organization is flawless, but he paints Google and its founders as angels.

It's an excellent read, well written, and should be read by all who want a peek into The Google and the future.

In the late 90's a young Larry Page, enrolled at Stanford in Computer Science, needed a subject for his Phd dissertation. His was a razor sharp engineering mind, but he was in need of something big, something worthy of his geek brain. They say technology lies on the edge of complexity, and thus, in those days, the most complex thing was the Internet, just a few years from launching into the mainstream. The web was growing at an amazing rate, truly a worth challenge for Page. That Stanford project became Google (not Googol), and today, the web is sprawling more than it ever has, making a Search engine, on the face of it, worth more than it ever was. Amidst infinite complexity, Google's algorithm has incredible value precisely because the world, and the web, is incredibly complex.

The story of Google turns out to be a nice little summary of the last 15 or so years of Computing, picking up right about the time our last gen Silicon Valley Royals (those being Steve Jobs and Bill Gates) buried the hatchet (that story, by the way, is depicted nicely in the great "Pirates of Silicon Valley" TV Movie by Noah Wyle and Anthony Michael Hall, respectively).

So why read a book about Google anyway? Well the truth is, most people won't. Most people will find this stuff incredibly dry. Everyone wants a Google business card, but few of us actually want to actually work at Google and stay up for 14 hours discussing search algorithms, Gmail Spambots and Google Streetview. Engineers, however, love this stuff. The simple act of saying, "This is hard, it's never been done before, it's probably impossible" is the equivalent of telling Schwarzenegger in the late 70's that he couldn't pick up a huge boulder. He's going to pick that rock up or die trying.

The other thing Engineers like is money. It turns out that if you go back to Apple in the 80's, Microsoft in the 90's, and Google in the 2000's (and now Facebook in the 2010's), Engineers go wherever the IPO tells them to go. And thus we find ourselves in an interesting position: Google has lost some of its smartest people, and Facebook is the coolest kid on the block. Despite all the bad press, Mark Zuckerberg (who famously had more Facebook plaintiffs than Friends) is the most popular kid on Google Plus (Google's Facebook wannabe).

But before we get into that, let's take a step back and try to understand what really drives this company: Google was never about making money. In fact, the founders taunted the business guys, mostly because they weren't smart enough to be Engineers. To be an MBA with no Engineering experience at Google is to be, in a way, a second class citizen. And yet Google gets richer and richer, almost as if to say, "We can do this stuff without even trying. What do we need you for?"

So how does Google make money? By saving the logs of everything everybody on the Internet searches for, they can track incredibly detailed patterns of behaviour (like the way our brains have muscle memory and habits). If Google understands what you want, maybe Google can anticipate what you're looking for. And thus, perhaps they could actually give you an ad that you didn't hate. This is the point. You're not supposed to hate Google Ads. You're supposed to like them. And for that, Advertisers pay big money. Ideally, it's a win-win. If an advertiser starts talking to you about something you want, they're not annoying; they're actually useful.

Here's where it gets really interesting: you may have heard that Google's mission is to organize the world's information. As such, it's inextricably tied to the growth of the Web. And thus, Google will do anything that promotes Web usage. This is why almost all Google services are free.

Who could argue with this great business model? You take something that people are looking for, and give it to them for free. They never pay anything (like TV commercials), and we get big businesses to foot the bill. But Google does have its critics, namely Privacy advocates. Google often responds to criticism by calling upon the Invisible hand of the market: "If we do something wrong, people will tell us, and they'll stop using our stuff, and thus, the product will fail." It's the kind of undeniable and irrefutable logic that almost suggests the Governments step away from all consumer protection. There's just one problem: a similar defence could be used for Drug Dealers. After all, the addicts keep coming back, they obviously like the product right? (What's the emoticon for sarcasm again?)

And what's Google's drug in this analogy? Free (as in Beer). By getting the users hooked on free, they can pull in the advertisers. And it turns out, as long as you have lots of white space (Google's most preferred design language. Ahem.) you can put ads there. And if you suggest Google is exploiting people, they will respond that they are merely anticipating what their users are looking for and suggesting solutions. We users should be so lucky.

Don't think of Google as a Search Engine, or a business; think of Google as a Brain. And where is that brain? Strewn around the world in Google's top secret Data Centres of course, where it holds indexes of everything on the Web, with its own fibers engineered to bring you the fastest results it possibly can. Like a man made Cerebral cortex connected to the worlds most efficient and genetically perfect spinal cord. Zero Downtime, Unlimited Memory and Super-Speed.

You see, human brains are great, but they have this little problem of wearing down and expiring every 80 or so years.

So if you're going to build a mechianical brain that can live forever, first you have to teach it stuff (Indexing the world's Information), and you have to give it a great memory (aforementioned Data Centers). As the brain becomes more intelligent, soon you'll want it to learn to speak (Google Translate) and develop feelings and social skills, which brings us back to Google+, Google's "Facebook-killer".

So Social turns out to be the next phase in building a brain. Ironically, such technology only helps Google anticipate the users' wants and needs, feeding them better ads. Your friends know you.. they know what you like. That's why Apple integrated something called Ping into iTunes.. they figured your friends knew what kind of music you like better than a computer algorithm (previously known as iTunes Genius).

And Mark Zuckerberg figures your friends who actually know you know what kind of cola you drink, what kind of shoes you like, better than some computer. Your friends have actual brains. They're humans. As Business Guru Tom Peters famously said, the soft stuff is the hard stuff.

The next level of search will come full circle, riding on the back of actual humans who know you. After all the fiber-optic cables have been laid and multi-million dollar data centres have been built, Zuckerberg, Brin and Page are the guys at the party, asking your friends what you want for your birthday, then handing you a brightly coloured package. As you tear off the wrapping paper, you can't believe it: "Wow! This is perfect! How did you know I was looking for a new Tennis Racquet? I love it!"

I guess some questions are better left unanswered. ;)

More reviews like this at 21tiger

A fascinating read that dives deep into the history of Google and its founders like no other resource before it. Captivating from the start, painting a vivid picture of the behemoth and the characters behind it. This is one book you won't regret reading and will end up recommending to all your tech junkie friends.

My only quarrel, that also extends to books besides this one, is with Amazon permitting publishers to charge more for Kindle editions than the physical books. Not only is this insulting to the consumer, but it works against the Kindle, Publishers, and Amazon. I nearly didn't buy this book because of this rampant asinine practice and after seeing what I would have missed, it irks me even more.

Frankly, I have read a number of books about the distinguished company - Google. How does a company created by two gents- Sergy Brin and Larry Page- become such a successful company?
Well, Steve Levy, the author, starts from the very beginning and gives the reader an insightful look into the rise of Google. The recipe for success is described in detail as we learn about the personalities of the founders, the growing pains on the climb up, the contributions of the new hires,the company's philosophy and the never-ending improvement quest. After reading Steve Levy's book, I believe I know how... "Google thinks, works, and shapes our lives."