Hardcover, 424 pages
English language
Published Aug. 6, 2011 by Simon & Schuster.
Written with full cooperation from top management, including cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, this is the inside story behind Google, the most successful and most admired technology company of our time, told by one of our best technology writers.
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 …
Written with full cooperation from top management, including cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, this is the inside story behind Google, the most successful and most admired technology company of our time, told by one of our best technology writers.
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, 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? 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.
Amazing read. Gives a good view into the search engineering mammoth. Success of Google is because of the audacious vision of Larry and Sergey, combined with their extreme discipline in execution. Interesting to see that they have a Googley approach in every single thing they do. A must read for anyone interested in Google's products and engineering.
Subtitled How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives this is basically the biography of a company. Right from Google's creation and through to the failure of Buzz with all the highs and lows in between.
Since Google is a company of the internet age there were areas where I skimmed, thinking that I knew all about this. More interesting to me was the behind the scenes information. It was interesting to see how the the viewpoints of senior Googlers differed from the common interpretation of their actions.
The section on China was particularly revealing with lots of description of the friction and disagreements within Google itself about whether to engage with China and when to pull out.
Another bit of particular interest to me was comparing the struggle that Google had once it became an established tech giant and the struggles the Obama administration had.
In both cases idealism …
Subtitled How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives this is basically the biography of a company. Right from Google's creation and through to the failure of Buzz with all the highs and lows in between.
Since Google is a company of the internet age there were areas where I skimmed, thinking that I knew all about this. More interesting to me was the behind the scenes information. It was interesting to see how the the viewpoints of senior Googlers differed from the common interpretation of their actions.
The section on China was particularly revealing with lots of description of the friction and disagreements within Google itself about whether to engage with China and when to pull out.
Another bit of particular interest to me was comparing the struggle that Google had once it became an established tech giant and the struggles the Obama administration had.
In both cases idealism and a certain naivety came into hard conflict with entrenched interests. And both groups discovered that while the facts are indeed the facts. The facts won't stop people from misinterpreting everything you do and seeing the worst in you.
I've always had a soft spot for Google and tend to think that at lot of the criticisms levied against them are rather ignorant or fail to recognize the realities of the world. This book reinforced that belief.
It is a bit of a dry read. Perhaps because the people are secondary to the company in the story of Google. It took me a while to read because I found it easier to dip in and out than to read whole chapters at a time. But it is fact with insight.
Not quite as mandatory reading as his classic Hackers, this is nonetheless a good book for anyone who is interested in more contemporary Internet history. Levy got "embedded" in Google for a couple of years and had access to pretty much all of the significant people in the Google story. One personal note: the Google "house economist", Hal Varian, was one of my professors at the University of Michigan when I was studying for a Ph.D. there in the early 1980s. I doubt he could pick me out of a lineup, though.
