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“The internet makes information available. Google makes information accessible.” -- Hal Varian, Google Chief Economist.
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Media executives in music, movies, books, newspapers, “believe their companies were murdered by technology forces beyond their control. In fact, they committed suicide by neglect.” p. 230
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Founded and run by geeks with notoriously weak social awareness,“Google juggles nuclear issues – privacy, concentration of power, copyright – that could explode at any moment.” p. 329
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Recommendation: five stars 
Author Ken Auletta [see wikipedia neutral POV bio] has written extensively on communications and 'The New Media' since 1992. Auletta gained deep and wide access to Google to construct a book about digital business, aggressive techno-leadership, and the Creative Destruction of old media business models.
At the surface, this is 21st Century corporate history: the inside story of Larry Page and Sergey Brin, from Stanford to garage startup, to Mountain View colossus.
- very light on search algorithms, zero on data mining
- good on egalitarian/ elitist / naive geek culture, straight out of grad school
- heavy on historical narrative, one chapter per year
Written with open cooperation of Larry, Sergey, CEO Eric Schmidt and 150 current and former employees, the book is chock full of anecdotes, incidents, and attributed quotes. Interviews with Silicon Valley icons Marc Andreessen, John Doerr, Facebook’s Marc Zuckerberg, Stanford computer scientist Terry Winograd, add welcome critical distance, so the history is not simply a PR puff piece. You could spice up a lot of leadership courses with excerpts and stories from this book, and I am sure many consultants will do just that.
At a second level, the book is an in-depth examination of technological disruption: old media floundering and groping its way blindly with new digital media. Ken Auletta is a well regarded author of books (eight) and New Yorker columns (since 1992) in the communications revolution. He himself is a product (hero?) of the old print culture, and longtime observer of the media industries: advertising, movies, books, newspapers, and music. Auletta is most sure-footed in the inside baseball interviews with media moguls, ad execs, TV network mavens. The business model in the good old days was built on expensive advertising of dubious value, sold by fast talking salesmen on commission. (Hence the famous quip, “Half my marketing money is wasted ... if I only knew which half.”) In a crisp Fortune Mag article, Auletta has identified the ten key lessons he finds for modern digital business, coming out of the Google success.
The subtitle of Googled, “The End of the World as We Know It,” applies quite well to the world of old media. The arrival of AdWords and AdSense was totally disruptive in transparency, total cost, and most dramatically in efficiency: you only pay for click-through traffic from real consumers. The geek love of efficiency just dis-intermediated the bulk of the advertising industry, and for some firms, threatened the need for an internal sales force. The college kids from Google “are messing with the magic,” in the words of the old line media players.
With the narrow focus of “what is the most efficient way to do X ?” the Google engineers do not ask, nor particularly care, what happens to the existing incumbents, markets, employees, business models in the industry that now does X. For all the wonderment of (no cost) G-mail, Google Images, YouTube, Google Voice, Google Books, and the search engine itself, it is the revenue gushers of AdWords and AdSense that drive the profitability of Google.
At the highest level, Googled touches on a range of public policy issues:
- implications of massive databases for user / consumer privacy
- Google Search appears free to users ($$) but is not free (surrender of info)
- copyright issues for book authors, publishers [recommended readings here]
- contingent issues of long term incentives for creative work
- concentration of information power, economic power, in un-regulated markets
- anti-trust boundaries as a public good, despite proven engineering efficiency
- trust in Google altruism, for now and for the long haul, when corporate heirs and assigns may represent very different individuals and interests
The well documented engineering culture of Google, carefully embedded and nurtured from its earliest days, does have characteristic strengths that have brought society many good things, and brought significant wealth to a number of Googlers. At the same time, the single-minded worship at altar of efficient solutions made Google blind to its exposure in government, regulation, and public policy. Like Microsoft before it, Google is forced to make up for lost time in this broader game. Recent events in the freedom of search in China, and the lack of support when Google turned to its industry frenemies, illustrate the choppy waters ahead for such a huge player in global consumer affairs.
Weaknesses in the book? At least one reviewer has asked (and the chrono format of Googled does invite the question), “So what is next? Where are we headed?” Auletta is cautious here, and rightly so. “The questions [re. future] are more apparent than the answers.” A serious gating factor is whether existing content owners use their copyright positions to partner with Google, or join forces against it (Chapter 13). As to drivers, Google is credited as a ‘maker of waves’ and not just ‘a rider of waves.’ [p. 281ff.]
Google has enormous potential to make and re-make markets: Google Earth & Maps, G-mail, Google Finance, Google Docs and the cloud next time, Google Finance ... the list goes on. The speed, ubiquity, accuracy of search alone has transformed everyday life and will continue to do so as search rapidly moves to mobile platforms. But as for Google's current string of products, the company has yet to figure out a workable business model for each [ p. 335]. A little modesty is a good idea until we know more.
The book helps outline the playing field as to public policy, envy of business rivals, new disruptive waves lurking in new garages in Silicon Valley, but otherwise is wary of sweeping prognostications. Ken leaves the fate of humbled old media, surging new media, Google as a maturing and no-longer-small firm, as an emerging drama. He is wise to do so, in light of the quick rise and fall of Lycos, Netscape, AOL, and before that DEC. ‘Predictions are difficult, especially about the future.’ [Niels Bohr]
On a personal basis, I wish Auletta would have taken us one level deeper into the algorithms that power targeted ads, the gold in huge databases extracted by data mining. Show me the magic and (a bit of) how it works. That may be asking too much of a generalist book, however, and in any event may not be reasonable for Google to reveal much in this core competency.
