If Google were a person, Tim Wu, a Columbia law professor and veteran of Silicon Valley, is quoted as saying in this perspicacious new book, it would have “all the flaws and all of the virtues of a classic Silicon Valley geek.”
Kimberly White/Reuters
Ken Auletta
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Sergey Brin, left, and Larry Page at Google Inc. headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. in Sept. 2008
It’s an observation echoed by the book’s author, Ken Auletta, who in “Googled” depicts the company as a brilliant, game-changing behemoth that can be socially inept, and both naïve and arrogant in its dealings with the world. The book, more fair-minded reportage than a polemic, leaves us with a telling portrait of a paradigm-altering company, which in 11 years has utterly transformed the business and media landscape, but which also suffers at times from the sort of myopia that comes from determinedly left-brain thinking — that is, a scientific-engineering driven point of view that prizes data, efficiency and growth while often overlooking more human and political concerns like privacy and copyright.
Certainly Google’s founding by Larry Page and Sergey Brin and its rocketlike ascent have been chronicled many times before — among others, in Randall Stross’s “Planet Google” (2008), “The Google Story” (2005) by David A. Vise and Mark Malseed, and “What Would Google Do?” (2009) by Jeff Jarvis. Television profiles have duly noted the company’s laid-back, collegiate atmosphere, just as newspaper and magazine articles have deconstructed its emphasis on teamwork and embrace of bold, envelope-pushing moves.
In “Googled,” Mr. Auletta has not only amplified such earlier portraits through new interviews with the company’s principals, but he’s also drawn on his own experience writing the “Annals of Communications” column for The New Yorker magazine to situate Google’s rise and global expansion in context with the digital revolution and the crisis that traditional media faces as old sources of revenue dry up and people increasingly turn to the Internet as a provider of news, movies, music and video.
Already, Mr. Auletta writes, much of “the planet has been Googled, with the company becoming, as Larry Page has said, ‘part of people’s lives, like brushing their teeth.’ ” Mr. Auletta writes that Google has “transformed how we gather and use information, given us the equivalent of a personal digital assistant, made government and business and other institutions more transparent, helped people connect, served as a model service provider and employer, made the complex simple, and become an exemplar of the oft-stated but rarely followed maxim, ‘Trust your customer.’ ”
Google has become such a household term that its name has morphed into a verb. “Its index contained one trillion Web pages in 2008,” Mr. Auletta writes, “and according to Brin, every four hours Google indexed the equivalent of the entire Library of Congress.” Having acquired YouTube, the largest user-generated video Web site, in 2006, and DoubleClick, the foremost digital marketing company, in 2007, he goes on, Google boasted 40 percent of both the $23 billion spent to advertise online in the United States and the $54 billion worldwide online advertising. He adds that the company conducts some three billion searches a day, stores two dozen or so tetabits (about 24 quadrillion bits) of data and plans to digitize more than 20 million books.
The company’s famous motto is “Don’t be evil,” and in their early days, Mr. Page and Mr. Brin burned, in Mr. Auletta’s words, “with an idealism that sometimes bordered on messianic”: “They launched Google with a fervent belief that advertising tricked people to spend money, that the Internet would foster a democratic ethos that would liberate people.” And yet it is advertising that has made Google a 21st-century Goliath. The company’s exponential growth has fueled critics’ contention that the company’s size and power are turning it into another Microsoft, an Evil Empire that is stifling competition and sucking up talent — a digital bulldozer that is plowing under the profits of traditional media companies as it gobbles up new turf; a Big Brother-esque leviathan of data that could come to threaten consumers’ privacy and subvert copyright law.
In recent years Google has come under growing scrutiny for a number of controversial moves. Its decision to digitize millions of books — scanning and making them part of search options — upset authors and publishers, who see the plan as a threat to intellectual property rights and as an invitation to piracy, as the books stored on servers, like online music, might be vulnerable to hackers.
Google has been criticized for complying with Chinese censorship. (In 2006 its chief executive, Eric Schmidt, said, “I think it’s arrogant for us to walk into a country where we are just beginning operations and tell that country how to run itself.”) And, as Mr. Auletta observes in these pages, the company’s storage of massive amounts of data about its users raises serious privacy issues, especially when the company acknowledges that it is in the advertising business and seems eager to play matchmaker between consumers and advertisers.
Because Google “enjoys a well-deserved reputation for earning the trust of users,” Mr. Auletta says, it is “hard to imagine an issue that could imperil the trust Google has achieved as quickly as could privacy.” He adds: “One Google executive whispers, ‘Privacy is an atomic bomb. Our success is based on trust.’ ”
If users, Mr. Auletta writes, “lost trust in Google, believed their private data was being exploited and shared with advertisers (or governments), the company regularly judged one of the world’s most trusted brands would commit suicide.”
Other problems also come with the company’s sonic, often pell-mell growth. Google is constantly pushing into new territory like cloud computing, the mobile-phone business and even a Wikipedia-like encyclopedia called Knol. As it does so, it is not only taking on new competitors, but it is also risking, in some critics’ view, a loss of focus. Google is “doing too many products and peanut buttering everything,” says one former executive, referring to a famous “Peanut Butter” memo once written by a Yahoo senior vice president who contended that Yahoo was spreading its investments thinly, like peanut butter, over too many ventures.
Will Google stay focused primarily on searches and what Mr. Wu calls “an engineers’ aesthetic of getting you to what you want as fast as you can and then getting out of the way”? Or will it become more of a destination in itself, a platform and source of content? How will the founders’ aversion to bureaucracy be squared with the management demands of a rapidly growing empire? Can Google find a way to monetize YouTube and other new acquisitions and projects? Will increasingly wary rivals (from Microsoft to Verizon to Facebook) forge effective alliances to stop the Google juggernaut? Will the government threaten the company’s growth through antitrust regulation?
“Google appears to be well positioned for the foreseeable future,” Mr. Auletta concludes, “but it is worth remembering that few companies maintain their dominance. At one point, few thought the Big Three auto companies would ever falter — or the three television networks or AT&T, IBM. For companies with histories of serious missteps — Apple, IBM — it was difficult to imagine that they’d rebound, until they did.”
In short, one of the few things it is impossible to Google is the future of Google.
source:nytimes
