Googled: The End of the World As We Know It | 
| Author: Ken Auletta
Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The
Category: Book
List Price: $27.95
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Rating:  55 reviews
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 400
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Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.5 x 1.3
ISBN: 1594202354
Dewey Decimal Number: 338.76102504
EAN: 9781594202353
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| • | ISBN13: 9781594202353 | | • | Condition: NEW | | • | Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark. |
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Product Description
A revealing, forward-looking examination of the outsize influence Google has had on the changing media Landscape.
There are companies that create waves and those that ride or are drowned by them. As only he can, bestselling author Ken Auletta takes readers for a ride on the Google wave, telling the story of how it formed and crashed into traditional media businesses-from newspapers to books, to television, to movies, to telephones, to advertising, to Microsoft. With unprecedented access to Google's founders and executives, as well as to those in media who are struggling to keep their heads above water, Auletta reveals how the industry is being disrupted and redefined.
Using Google as a stand-in for the digital revolution, Auletta takes readers inside Google's closed-door meetings and paints portraits of Google's notoriously private founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, as well as those who work with-and against-them. In his narrative, Auletta provides the fullest account ever told of Google's rise, shares the "secret sauce" of Google's success, and shows why the worlds of "new" and "old" media often communicate as if residents of different planets.
Google engineers start from an assumption that the old ways of doing things can be improved and made more efficient, an approach that has yielded remarkable results- Google will generate about $20 billion in advertising revenues this year, or more than the combined prime-time ad revenues of CBS, NBC, ABC, and FOX. And with its ownership of YouTube and its mobile phone and other initiatives, Google CEO Eric Schmidt tells Auletta his company is poised to become the world's first $100 billion media company. Yet there are many obstacles that threaten Google's future, and opposition from media companies and government regulators may be the least of these. Google faces internal threats, from its burgeoning size to losing focus to hubris. In coming years, Google's faith in mathematical formulas and in slide rule logic will be tested, just as it has been on Wall Street.
Distilling the knowledge accrued from a career of covering the media, Auletta will offer insights into what we know, and don't know, about what the future holds for the imperiled industry.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 55
 Much more than I expected September 26, 2009
Anthony Lawrence (Middleboro, MA USA)
23 out of 27 found this review helpful
As I started reading this earlier today, I thought it would be a glossy recounting of Google's history with little substance. I deliberately ignore the author's name when I first pick up a new book so that I won't be influenced by my previous experiences - had I known that Ken Auletta was the author, I would have known better. But I did not, and indeed the first few chapters seemed to confirm my expectation of fluff.
Honestly, I was getting bored and was very close to tossing it aside. After all, I know the history of Google and have been involved with Adsense both as an advertiser and a website publisher for many years now. I was an early adopter of Gmail, have e-books in Google Books and of course have a Google Voice account. I bought Google stock early on. I don't care very much about the personalities of the founders; I wasn't finding much to interest me.
Fortunately, I held on a few more chapters and realized that this is a much deeper examination than I thought. The wide eyed awe and admiration that seemed to be the the theme of the first few chapters started to be replaced with a closer look at wrinkles and flaws. I don't mean that the author is attacking Google - it's just a fair and balanced honest look at the reality that is Google.
Later chapters examine the gestalt of Google even more deeply. What does Google mean to other companies? What does Google's growth mean to itself? Can it really "do no evil"? These are all questions I've asked and thought about as I've watched Google grow and change. Ken Auletta has dissected the impact of Google thoroughly. I don't always agree with his conclusions, but he does hit all the stops and digs in to every angle.
Excellent analysis, very, very well done. The business and societal changes that are developing are important to understand - this book will help.
Don't Do Evil? Evil Empire? January 8, 2010
R. Hardy (Columbus, Mississippi USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
It might be that right now, a couple of guys in a garage are coming up with the next big thing, an item of software or hardware that is going to change our way of doing things or of looking at the world. This is just what Bill Gates, head of Microsoft, used to say he worried about. And then it happened. Maybe leaders at Google now worry about the same sort of thing. After all, Sergey Brin and Larry Page were just a couple of young nerds tinkering with a new idea for a search engine in 1998, and now everyone knows what Google is and many people use it in some fashion every day. It is a hugely influential success, changing wide realms of computing and media. In fact, the subtitle of _Googled: The End of the World as We Know It_ (The Penguin Press) is only partly hyperbole. Ken Auletta, who writes for the _New Yorker_ and has written other books on media businesses, had access to the company's eccentric founders and their Silicon Valley campus. He has written a book that is essential for understanding what the company has achieved so far, how it is continuing to change the media world, and whether it is going to be able to maintain high standards of customer service and lofty ideals of free information. This is by no means an authorized biography of the company, but includes plenty of episodes that would seem to violate Google's jocular but earnest motto, "Don't Be Evil."
Google is a well-loved company, at least by consumers. Google gives away many of its services to those who use them, getting paid in other ways. Google is well known to have a conscience, funding renewable energy concerns and exercising epidemiological philanthropy. To media industries, though, Google has become an enemy. Google's reach is getting wider every week, changing the very basics of advertising, telecoms, newspapers, navigation software, and book publishing. Google, in its first decade, went from a garage-based company to one with over twenty billion dollars in revenue in 2008, and an eagerness to acquire. Google shelled out $1.65 billion for YouTube in 2006, for instance. It has yet to make it pay, but the acquisition is typical of its act first, ask questions later approach. The approach, of course, has resulted in astonishing success overall. The founders, Page and Brin, are not only odd and funny, they are devoted engineers who deal in facts and numbers, a "thirst to quantify everything." If you can tabulate it and turn it into numerical data, Google will work with it and plan for it; but real although subjective factors like emotion and sympathy are not quantifiable. Neither are concerns about copyright, privacy, or monopoly. Income is quantifiable, but it was not something Page and Brin put as a high priority, thus endangering Google at the beginning. Much of this book is about the give and take between managers and the founders, and it seems as if they are all working together well. That doesn't keep them from making decisions that the public might regard as violations of the "Don't Be Evil" maxim. When the company eventually agreed to censor such searches as "Free Tibet" from its Chinese-language version in 2002, it might have been a good, practical business decision, but it gave ammunition to those who fear Google as the next evil empire.
Google's success is inarguable, but success might not be its long-term destiny. Auletta reminds us that Google has been in existence for barely a decade, and that years ago General Motors, IBM, AOL, and the television networks were regarded as failsafe. Part of Google's great difficulty, and its merit, is that it strives to provide free services. "You can't beat free" is something anyone connected with the Google organization constantly hears. A search is free, but it is powered merely by advertising, the small ads showing up based on what you are interested in searching for (even if you are not doing anything remotely commercial). One of Google's first investors notes that when the founders were at Stanford, they were idealistically opposed to advertising. They cannot be opposed now. They haven't figured out how to make YouTube pay, and they are venturing into "cloud computing," whereby programs for word processing or other functions now on your hard drive are stored online instead. Will it pay? It will make Microsoft furious, but will it cost Microsoft and enrich Google? Will Google be able to avoid competition from other search engines, which might use algorithms that are more effective in producing accurate results? Will Google avoid governmental oversight as a monopoly? Will it be a victim of its own success and size? Google has so profoundly disturbed the world's business landscape that no one knows what is going to happen. Auletta's book, which because of the personalities he profiles and anecdotes about them is good reading even for people who are not interested in business, can't give the answers, but it is asking all the right questions.
Googled: somewhat predictable but quite fascinating January 29, 2010
John Williamson (Bucks County, PA USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Ken Auletta's new book Googled: The End of the World As We Know It takes us for a fascinating look behind the scene as he shows us the growth of Google from its simple beginnings within the labs of Stanford University to its becoming what is perhaps the most influential technology company in Silicon Valley today. Author Auletta is a technology journalist and media critic for The New Yorker, and was one of the first to popularize the concept of the so-called "information superhighway" with a 1993 New Yorker profile of Barry Diller, in which he described how Diller used his Apple PowerBook to anticipate the digital future. In his new book he has interviewed many key players to tell this fascinating story as only he is able. Full of interesting tales, insight and remarkable scrutiny, this comprehensible book explains how and why Google matters to a lot of us, from basic Internet neophytes to business decision makers.
Mr. Auletta stands out at writing Google's company history in a solid chronological style. Individual chapters are focused on the years of its growth from 1999 through 2008. We get an intimate look at Google's highly-private founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, a pair of indisputably brilliant (but socially-awkward) individuals who have remained focused on their vision of making information accessible to the world, like so many Internet success stories of today. The author illustrates how Google's focus on perfecting its own proprietary search algorithms has proven to be equally unsettling to media and technology companies, while its control of information has gained often unwanted attention from governments and non-governmental organizations who are concerned about issues of personal privacy and corporate power.
Google's growth has posed internal challenges to its management, corporate culture and strategy, and while praising Page and Brin in general for their decisions, Mr. Auletta shows his concern that Google's founders, who have yet to be confronted with the kind of difficulties that affect most business owners, could be overlooking some of the external threats to the company's enduring capabilities. The author believes there are legitimate public concerns about the use of private information for profit, yet it's clear from his thoughtful examination that the data Google collects has positioned the company to continue to take advantage of and perhaps even define the technology and media backdrop for our own probable future.
Ken Auletta's book does an excellent job with its explanation of what Google actually is and what it does so well. It's significantly different from other books such as What Would Google Do?, by columnist and media blogger Jeff Jarvis, or Planet Google, by college business professor Randall Stross, who writes the New York Times column "Digital Domain." Mr. Auletta focuses some of the discussion from the point of view of the advertising industry. While that doesn't provide a significantly different perspective, it does provide for interesting reading. Just keep in mind that if you understand Google's revenue streams, you already knows it's in the advertising business.
For the beginner first looking at the Google story, this book will answer many questions. The author Auletta does raise significant issues, and some have been covered by others as well. The discussion on Google books and copyright issues is quite notable. The arrogance portrayed by traditional media companies during Google's early days is amazing and amusing, and well covered in the book.
The business and community changes that are developing in our world are important to understand, and this book will help. It's an honest and balanced look at the reality that is Google. Overall it's an excellent 5-star read, and highly recommended.
What Google actually did December 24, 2009
G. M. Arnold (Palo Alto, CA USA)
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
Last winter I reviewed Jeff Jarvis' "What Would Google Do?". I described it as "Superficial" and gave it one star; to my amazement, it seems to have gathered a load of four and five star ratings. Well, that showed ME! Now we have Ken Auletta's excellent account of what Google actually did to get where they are. The author captures the gestalt of Silicon Valley to a T, and I particularly chuckled over the portrait that he painted of my old boss, Eric Schmidt.
I enjoy books like this because they help me to make sense of the unexpected contingency and bizarre events that make up the world of business. The best of them are not deeply analytical: don't expect to learn how to replicate the success of others by learning their "secrets". I just read them because they are fascinating, the "now it can by told" gossip of our incestuous little world and its celebrities. Why not?
BEST BOOK ON GOOGLE December 5, 2009
Advanced Buckle Technology (Falmouth, Maine)
Ken has done a superb job on telling the Google story.
The humor of Mel Kamazan joking about buying Google was a riot.
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MSN is once again a day late and a billion dollars short.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 55
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