"The most interesting book ever written about Google" (The Washington
Post) delivers the inside story behind the most successful and admired
technology company of our time, now updated with a new Afterword.Google
is arguably the most important company in the world today, with such
pervasive influence that its name is a verb. The company founded by two
Stanford graduate students--Larry Page and Sergey Brin--has become a
tech giant known the world over. Since starting with its search engine,
Google has moved into mobile phones, computer operating systems, power
utilities, self-driving cars, all while remaining the most powerful
company in the advertising business. Granted unprecedented access to the
company, Levy disclosed that the key to Google's success in all these
businesses lay in its engineering mindset and adoption of certain
internet values such as speed, openness, experimentation, and
risk-taking. Levy discloses details behind Google's relationship with
China, including how Brin disagreed with his colleagues on the China
strategy--and why its social networking initiative failed; the first
time Google tried chasing a successful competitor. He examines Google's
rocky relationship with government regulators, particularly in the EU,
and how it has responded when employees left the company for smaller,
nimbler start-ups. In the Plex is the "most authoritative...and in many
ways the most entertaining" (James Gleick, The New York Book Review)
account of Google to date and offers "an instructive primer on how the
minds behind the world's most influential internet company function"
(Richard Waters, The Wall Street Journal).
