Planet Google: One Companys Audacious Plan to Organize Everything We Know

Product Details

As ambitious as Google's goal is, with 68 percent of all Web searches (and growing), profits that are the envy of the business world, and a surplus of talent, the company is, Stross shows, well along the way to fulfilling its ambition, becoming as dominant a force on the Web as Microsoft became on the PC. Google isn't just a superior search service anymore. In recent years it has launched a dizzying array of new services and advanced into whole new businesses, from the introductions of its controversial Book Search and the irresistible Google Earth, to bidding for a slice of the wireless-phone spectrum and nonchalantly purchasing YouTube for $1.65 billion.

Google has also taken direct aim at Microsoft's core business, offering free e-mail and software from word processing to spreadsheets and calendars, pushing a transformative -- and highly disruptive -- concept known as "cloud computing." According to this plan, users will increasingly store all of their data on Google's massive servers -- a network of a million computers that amounts to the world's largest supercomputer, with unlimited capacity to house all the information Google seeks.

The more offerings Google adds, and the more ubiquitous a presence it becomes, the more dependent its users become on its services and the more information they contribute to its uniquely comprehensive collection of data. Will Google stay true to its famous "Don't Be Evil" mantra, using its power in its customers' best interests?

Stross's access to those who have spearheaded so many of Google's new initiatives, his penetrating research into the company's strategy, and his gift for lively storytelling produce an entertaining, deeply informed, and provocative examination of the company's audacious vision for the future and the consequences not only for the business world, but for our culture at large.

Product Reviews

(5 stars) - A Snapshot In Time
"Planet Google" was a fast and enjoyable read. Having been an Internet aficionado since its early beginnings as the World Wide Web, I was able to relate my place in time to the stages of evolution of Google as a vision and as a company. The book was fun because it is like revisiting the Route 66 "the Mother Road" of the free, world wide search engine and seeing early artifacts brought out of the "attic", dusted off, and then discussed as to what worked, how it worked and why it succeeded or failed. But, this is all in layman's terms and - as another reviewer said - it is more like a magazine article, albeit a long one, than an in-depth book. The book does a good job of projecting the sense of adventure, urgency, "point-of-the-spear" thinking that is required in order to launch a new "information age" enterprise. Where it is lacking is that it does not provide enough hard knowledge about the sacrifices made at the personal and family level to get this enterprise off the ground. It is also lacking in technical detail about how the search engine algorithms are created and validated, but then, one can hardly expect Google to open the doors to the kingdom. Overall, the book has potential to enable the reader to become a more informed and satisfied user of Google and to have more savvy about the workings of the Internet. I found the sections on server installations - the sheer massiveness, investment and safeguarding to be fascinating - ie the hardware that moves the bytes that make up the information in all forms. The author's thoughts on where Google might go next in its evolution were also interesting to me. I plan to read this book one more time - having now become a more adept user of Google's offerings - in order to see if I can dig out more ways to improve. I give this book 5 stars because of its readability and coverage of a tough topic. I came away smarter for reading it and plan to read it again soon. A fast read.

(4 stars) - Solid overview
I very much enjoyed this book. I had read Stross' "The Microsoft Way" a few years ago and also found it to be very informative. This time, he covers the "it" company of the last ten years. Other than Apple, no company has enjoyed such a meteoric rise in the past decade.

The chapters cover Google's main endeavors, from Google Book Search (formerly Google Print) to Google Voice to Google Docs. Each product or product group is covered in a reasonable level of detail. Stross also provides a solid historical context of Google's challenges, especially in relation to other computing stalwarts (read: Microsoft). In other words, Stross is not so glossly-eyed over Google's success that he overlooks some comparable historical precedents.

Stross is also not afraid to call a spade a spade: he apologetically calls Google out for some missteps over privacy, copyright infringement, and other snafus. His writing style is very digestible and I never felt lost reading about more technical concepts, such as cloud computing, indexing the web, or Google's legendary algorithm.

I do have a few complaints but they're pretty minor. I would really have liked to see more about the two company's founders. Larry and Sergey are given short shrift. I feel like I don't know that much more about them. This book easily could have used another 30 to 50 pages on two of the most intelligent and important business figures of their era.

In the end, this is an excellent book with a great deal of well-written content. I'll be picking up some of Stross' other books pretty soon.

(4 stars) - Interesting story of business ventures
If you want to know the origins of many of the Google features popular today, this is the book to read. If you are looking for a behind the scenes look at the people and personalities behind the company, this book is probably not for you. The author is clearly an outsider who knows a lot of the details of the company, but not much more than anybody who had dedicated time to studying it. There is very little intimacy with the Google founders or key players. However, the details of the different 'business ventures' of Google provide an effective 'behind the scenes' view of what Google was thinking when rolling out features like mail, and why it had to buy Youtube after being beat out in video.

(2 stars) - Little coverage, poor writing, repetitive.
This book is a fluffed out magazine article. With a good editor, this would have made a great New York Times magazine article.
But the author wanted a book, not a newspaper article, so here's the result.

The writing is repetitive, making the same obvious points over and over again. Ideas presented in previous chapters are slightly reworded and presented again, in long, multiple paragraphs. Sentences ramble, adding clauses of useless, obvious description. While reading the book, i kept thinking the author was trying to fill a quota of pages, instead of creating a dense, solid analysis.

The author delves into three services: Google Books, Google Maps/Earth and gMail. The author interviews Google's PR executives, attends a few trade shows, and dutifully presents the results. He tries to make mountains out of molehills. For example, he discusses privacy issues with gMail. I agree their are some privacy issues, but the idea doesn't justify 30 pages of the book. The author presents the viewpoints of tech conference gadflies declaring "Why should Google "read" my email to present ads?". Instantly, i thought 'Hey, if you don't like their free product, use something else. This isn't the IRS. You do have a choice.'.

It would have been much more interesting to hear more about Microsoft's, Yahoo's, IBMs responses to Google. He talks a little about it, but not much. I don't think he has the chops to do a penetrating, creative analysis. He basically just presents the ideas of others, all of it just a collection of news articles found in other published sources.

(4 stars) - Don't be evil

The phenomenon known as Google had its beginnings in a Stanford University dorm room. Graduate students Larry Page and Sergey Brin intended at first only to search web pages and index them. From the beginning, Google had no air of the corporate world about it. Their model is based in the engineering world: define a problem and it can be solved. Their informal company slogan? "Don't be evil."

Brin's and Page's vision was to organize all the world's information, and to do it strictly according to computer code that weights and ranks web pages to determine their places in search results. Google relied from the beginning on the principle of letting the computer program -- "the algorithm" -- do the ranking of pages. Strict reliance on the algorithm has allowed Google to "scale" rapidly -- that is, index huge amounts of new information and accommodate rapid spikes in the number of searches performed by users. Three years ago the company revealed that it had crawled and indexed 8 billion pages, but no updates have been forthcoming since then.

How do they pay for it? Advertising. Brin and Page initially believed that advertising was a sure path to biased results and wanted no part of it for their search engine. In 2000, however, they began to experiment with text ads targeted to the search terms, contracting with advertisers who would pay a price per click. The money rolled in, funding enormous expansion. The company approach to insuring capacity has been unique and uniquely successful; they are the McDonald's of the tech world; all in the name of scalability.

Planet Google: One Company's Audacious Plan To Organize Everything We Know is organized along product lines. Chapters are devoted to the following initiatives: (1) The mission to digitize all books in and out of print, a product now known as Google Book Search (the company's self-described "moon shot"); (2) The foresighted acquisition of YouTube; (3) The product line containing Google Maps, Google Earth and Google Street View; and (4) "Cloud computing."

"Cloud computing," or Software as a Service, refers to the concept of standard personal and office-type applications residing "in the cloud" -- on the web -- rather than on the user's PC. These are the applications that Microsoft "owns" and Google has begun going head to head with the giant: Google Calendar, Google Documents and Spreadsheets, and especially Google Mail. A full gig of storage ensured that users could save all their e-mail, all searchable. How to pay for it, and for the redundancy to avoid loss of data? Google Ads, of course. Consumers quailed at the targeted text ads, so closely linked to the content of their e-mails, but a bigger barrier to mail and apps "in the cloud" is the legal requirement on companies to preserve and manage all e-mail and internal documents. This one is still evolving.

New York Times columnist Randall Stross gives a good flavor of the company culture, and of the principles that have paid off so hugely: organization of ALL of the world's information, reliance on the algorithm, scalability, targeted text ads, and an engineering rather than a business paradigm. He also covers the relationship between Google and its main competitors, Microsoft and Yahoo. I would not call this book a history of the company, nor an analysis, but rather a snapshot or a canvass of the current issues with some interesting background. Ten years from now what will a book about Google look like? Will it be made of paper and ink?

Google knows more about us than we may be comfortable with, but is it too much? As we place more of our lives "in the cloud," here's hoping they really mean it when they say "Don't be evil."

Linda Bulger, 2009

Popular Searches in Books