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.
