V I D E O • A G E JU N E 2 0 11 10 Want to know something? Google it. But when New Yorker columnist and author Ken Auletta wanted to know about Google, he had to go to the source, interviewing founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, CEO Eric Schmidt and countless others before writing Googled: The End of the World As We Know It for Virgin Books in the U.K. (418 pages, £11.99 [U.S.$20]). According to Auletta, he sought to “profile a company at the epicenter of the digital revolution.” Although Google was at first reluctant to cooperate, it eventually agreed, and Auletta made weeklong trips to the Googleplex in Mountain View, California, sat down with the founders, interviewed Schmidt 11 times, and conducted approximately 150 interviews in total. Larry Page and Sergey Brin met as graduate students at Stanford, where they embarked on a project to build an efficient search engine that didn’t waste users’ valuable time. Google was incorporated in 1998, and the founders and their few employees worked out of a garage they rented from their friends in Menlo Park. But as the company grew, adding more employees, their makeshift desks grew impractical, and they eventually moved to the Mountain View campus. The author explains that being hired by Google is not an easy feat. A potential employee is required to meet with each of the founders and pass what is known as the “airplane test,” in which Googlers are asked: “How would you feel if you were stuck next to this person [the candidate] on a plane for several hours?” Anyone who fails the test is considered unlikely to work well as part of a team. The hiring process, which champions the idea of a cooperative working community, reflects Google’s corporate culture. The founders provide their employees with extraordinary benefits — a daycare center exists on the Google campus, and employees don’t have to take time off for doctor visits; they can tend to their health needs by visiting a doctor on campus. They can even bring their cars for oil changes, and Google provides them with bikes and buses to travel throughout the campus and to and from home. Employees can also relieve stress with professional massages at work, as the founders believe that happy and stress-free employees are freer to exercise their creativity, thereby benefiting the company. Brin and Page’s preoccupation with efficiency led them to worry that if Google workers had to leave the Mountain View campus to purchase lunch, they would waste valuable time standing in line waiting for their meals. Thus, the founders justify their lavish cafeteria, with food prepared by Charlie Ayers, a chef who once cooked for The Grateful Dead. In addition, Googlers have generous stock options, and when employees’ Google stock declined in 2008 due to the economic downturn, they were allowed to exchange that stock for new options, demonstrating Brin and Page’s dedication to the company and its employees. The 20 percent time the founders allot to all Google engineers and that is “parceled out selectively by management to nonengineers,” during which employees can devote one day per week, or 20 percent of their time, to a project that interests them, is truly innovative in business. The freedom to pursue individual projects, the extensive Mountain View campus, and VP of Search Products & User Experience Marissa Mayer’s open office hours for employees to discuss their special projects may sound like graduate school life rather than business culture (Stanford’s culture was a huge influence), but these privileges promote the creative and open environment vital to Google’s success. In fact, many of Google’s innovations were born of this 20 percent time: Google News resulted from engineer Krishna Bharat’s 20 percent time, and Google Voice can also be attributed to this innovative business practice. While Google was busy innovating, and as technology continued to move forward, it created a wave that, according to Auletta, has crashed into and even drowned some old media companies. Google’s AdWord and AdSense have threatened traditional advertising companies. Newspapers suffer due to Google News, as more and more people abandon their subscriptions to read the news articles Google links to. Book publishers, citing copyright infringements, took on Google’s endeavor to digitize every book ever published through Google Books. Google’s acquisition of YouTube prompted many television and film executives to draw their swords against the offending company. The author explains that television companies were not only worried that sites such as YouTube would rob them of viewers, but that they would rob them of content as well, devaluing content by making it available for free online. While NBC couldn’t deny that clips of Saturday Night Live posted on the Internet increased the show’s ratings, many content providers felt threatened, and in late 2006 and early 2007, Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone demanded that YouTube remove 100,000 clips of Viacom’s copyrighted content from the website. In 2007 Viacom filed a lawsuit against Google in federal court for “massive intentional copyright infringement.” But there were those, such as Viacom’s CBS CEO Les Moonves, who saw YouTube as a platform. CBS partnered with YouTube in 2006, allowing the website to air short-form clips of CBS content, with both companies sharing advertising revenues. These incidents indicate that old media companies must learn to coexist with new media companies that make waves like Google, rather than be drowned by them. Auletta’s book is balanced, exposing both the positives and not-so-positives of Google. He points out that the founders’ minds are so focused on algorithms and mathematical equations of efficiency that they sometimes lose sight of what their customers might want, at times resulting in concerns about user privacy. When Gmail was first launched, there was no “Delete” button. This omission caused an uproar, as users were afraid that Google might look through the messages they were unable to delete; however, Page and Brin defended the lack of a “Delete” button. The founders argued that the presence of a “Delete” button would require Gmail users to decide whether they should keep or erase a message, and the time spent making that decision could be used for more productive endeavors. It hadn’t even occurred to them that users might complain. The company’s goal is to gather enough information about its users that a Google search will be able to quickly and efficiently generate one answer to a query. Although Google’s cookies collect information about users in such a way that allows users to remain anonymous, privacy is a real concern. Besides, do users actually want Google searches to be that exact? Another potential internal threat that Auletta identifies is the possibility that Google may believe “too much in their own virtue and [lose] the humility that is a counterweight to hubris.” He cautions that Google’s self-proclaimed mission, “Don’t be evil,” could blind the founders and employees to the potential harm some developments could cause. An existing example is Google’s rush to digitize every book: while the company’s intentions were noble and its goal to provide more complete search results to queries, book publishers saw the copyright infringements as Google doing evil. Although it is a comprehensive investigation into an important player in the future of media, the book at times provides unnecessary information. Auletta offers a physical description of those whom he interviewed in person, and while these descriptions can be helpful in demonstrating the informal and relaxed nature of those who work at Google compared to executives at stuffier old media companies, the descriptions were only helpful to an extent. While the fact that Page and Brin arrive at important meetings in T-shirts, sporting roller blades or bright red Crocs compared to old media executives’ dark suits speaks volumes about their personalities and the company’s culture, their eye color and hair texture do not. Overall, though, the book is a thorough evaluation of the company, supported by interviews and quotes from new and old media executives who are knowledgeable about the subject. The extensive 34 pages of notes at the end of the book are evidence of Auletta’s wide-ranging search to gather accurate information. Googled is a valuable read for a generation that has been Googled. SA From TV Foe to TV Friendly: Googling To Heart’s Content B o o k R e v i e w
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