Googled: The End of the World As We Know It
Googled: The End of the World As We Know It
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.
User Ratings and Reviews
3 Stars Efficiency
Ken Auletta’s book, Googled: The End of the World As We Know It, presents the creation and explosive growth of the company that is also a verb: Google. This is a well-written account of the people and the culture, and shows off fine writing following significant access to key people. This is a story of the impact of efficiency: smart engineers who make things better. The success from their work is obvious; the fallout for others, especially traditional media companies (that Auletta knows well), would be less well done in the hands of a different author. Auletta excels at description, examples and insight. Googled melds personal stories with corporate culture and competitive behavior in ways that will interest many readers.
Rating: Three-star (Recommended)
5 Stars Very Informative
I thought it was a great book. I used the book to do research on Google for a class but i really got into the book. There is probably everything a person would want to know or learn about Google in this book.
4 Stars Fascinating look at the history of Google
Googled is a well-written, engaging look at the history of Google and the key people who have made, and continue to make, Google what it is: a powerful, game-changing global company with seemingly good intentions. Auletta gave me some great food for thought. I, like millions of people across the globe, trust Google with my information as a Gmail, Reader, and Docs and search user. Google uses the information it gathers to increase their coffers with money it makes as an advertising giant. What will Google use this information for in the long-run? Are we at risk?
The subtitle, “The End of the World as We Know It,” refers to Google’s game-changing practices. Information, be it what people search for on Web sites, found in books, in newspapers, etc., empowers people and is, according to Google, meant to be free. This practice informs many of Google’s choices, disrupting the business-as-usual of old media and forcing them to make some really tough choices or doom themselves to an early grave. The future, therefore, is Google, and it will be a brave new world.
3 Stars Slow Reading on a Fast Medium
The thought that ran through my mind in reading Ken Auletta’s GOOGLED is that it was like a Saturday Night Life sketch that was fine in and of itself, but weakened when made into a full length movie. The chapters that sparkled were those right out of the gate on Google creators Larry Page and Sergey Brin. After that, the narrative was consistently the same–Google doesn’t want to be like others, it is and isn’t concerned about revenue, it is tearing down the old media. Interesting in places, but not enough new content to fill up a book over 350 pages.
5 Stars Google - An Investment Fluke
This is a verbose, chatty book about the yearly decline of the media. It also covers, in considerable detail, the founding of that Evil Empire named Google in the U.S. but known as Jewgle in Moslem countries. It describes how two Silicon Valley venture capital firms took a huge and irresponsible risk of investing their client’s money with two average Stanford students who had a run-of-the-mill search engine in their garage and who had no business plan, or even a remote idea, of how to monetize their activities.
In fact there was a long period of losses before finally Google copied (stole?) the Pay Per Click concept from a company called Overture. Overture’s Pay Per Click concept is truly a stroke of creative genius and has rescued Google from oblivion. It has produced a growing stream of revenue for Google which the founders have chosen to spend on 150 different Mickey Mouse ‘products’, many of which add no value to the net worth of the company but serve to enhance the self-esteem of the founders. Notable in this class was the purchase of YouTube for $1.65 billion and which contributes nothing to the revenue stream (where is Overture when we need them?). The book describes how the founders decided to take some of the stockholders’ money and buy themselves each a large jet airliner to fly around the world on fun trips with their new wives (one of which is rumored to be a beautiful white girl).
The big fault of this book is the omission of any discussion of the huge vulnerability of Google. Google is, as has been remarked by many observers, a one-trick pony. It depends almost entirely on revenue obtained from placing small text advertisements on web pages and collecting a fee each time an advertisement is clicked by a viewer. The vulnerability lies in the fact that there are browsers, such as Mozilla Firefox, that are superior to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, that are free and that possess a free option, Adblock, that completely wipes these hideous advertisements off the computer screen of the user, never to be seen again. In this way the user obtains a pristine and beautiful screen free of the ugly, repulsive advertisements created by Google. Having these advertisements placed on one’s screen is like having a group of drug dealers set up house in one’s garden.
I am happy to say that I have not seen an advertisement of any kind on my Firefox browser for many years and have never contributed a single ‘click’ to Google. I am very happy with my clean, green, browser environment. The Mozilla Firefox browser has been downloaded 100 million times and the Adblock option has been downloaded 74 million times. If the Firefox-Adblock combination continues to spread it will put Google out of business. In Europe, Microsoft is no longer allowed to make the Internet Explorer an integral part of Windows. Microsoft must offer 12 different browsers for the user to choose from (one of which is Firefox). When the choice is made, the browser is automatically installed.
The book describes clearly some of the idiosyncrasies of the Google management paradigm. There are the two founders whose life philosophy correlates well with that of the typical teeny-bopper. There is a CEO, hired from a failed company Novell, who has no real decision making power but is in charge of keeping all the routine stuff rolling along. There is a football coach who is not a member of management and who does not have any technical qualifications or background but who appears, according to the book, to act as a ‘nanny’ to senior members of management during times of stress. There are 60 vice-presidents who have each survived a grueling interview process with the founders, described well in the book, that takes several weeks to complete. At this point, only the most desperate candidates, with poor qualifications and no other options, would remain interested.
One interesting tableau in the book described a meeting between Barry Diller and one of the founders. Diller had come a long way and wanted an intense, face to face meeting but the founder in question refused to look up from his PDA and make eye contact during the entire time Diller was trying to talk to him. Diller objected to this autistic behavior and told the founder to “Choose”.
The book is well written and well worth reading but could use some serious redaction in the parts describing the demise of broadcast and print media.
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