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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #291 in Books
• Published on: 2009-11-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 400 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781594202353
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Publishers Weekly
Two Googles emerge in this savvy profile of the Internet search octopus. The first is the actual company, with its mixture of business acumen and naïve idealism (Don't Be Evil is the corporate slogan); its brilliant engineering feats and grad-students-at-play company culture; its geek founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, two billionaires who imbibe their antiestablishment rectitude straight from Burning Man; its pseudo-altruistic quest to offer all the world's information for free while selling all the world's advertising at a hefty profit. The second Google is a monstrous metaphor for all the creative destruction that the Internet has wrought on the crumbling titans of old media, who find themselves desperately wondering how they will make money off of news, music, video and books now that people can Google up all these things without paying a dime. The first Google makes for a standard-issue tech-industry grunge-to-riches business story, its main entertainment value being Brin's and Page's comical lack of social graces. But New Yorker columnist Auletta (World War 3.0: Microsoft and Its Enemies) makes the second Google a starting point for a sharp and probing analysis of the apocalyptic upheavals in the media and entertainment industries. (Nov. 3)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About the Author
Ken Auletta has written the "Annals of Communications" column for The New Yorker since 1992. He is the author of ten books, including four national bestsellers. These include Three Blind Mice: How the TV Networks Lost Their Way, Greed and Glory on Wall Street: The Fall of the House of Lehman, and World War 3.0: Microsoft and Its Enemies. In naming him America's premier media critic, the Columbia Journalism Review said, "no other reporter has covered the new communications revolution as thoroughly as has Auletta."

Customer Reviews

Google story (re)told well......not much intrepretive/predictive analysis
For a book that bills itself as something that will "offer insights into what we know, and don't know, about what the future holds for the imperiled industry", it does an excellent job with the first part, hard to say what was unique about the take of the author that was significantly different from other books such as What Would Google Do?and The Google Story: Inside the Hottest Business, Media, and Technology Success of Our Timeand hardly does justice to the last portion (what future holds). The story of the beginnings and rise of Google, its famed work culture, unconventional approaches of its founder are all well told - in this book as well as previous ones. Auletta tries to cast the discussion from the viewpoint of the advertising industry - and while that in itself doesn't provide a significantly different perspective (Anyone who understands Google's revenue streams already knows it is in the advertising business....), it does provide for interesting reading. For an initiate in the Google story, this book will do full justice. If you are already familiar with the Google story and thought that the author will focus on the future of advertising media and related topics, you are likely to be disappointed. A recent book The Curse of the Mogul: What's Wrong with the World's Leading Media Companies actually does more justice in that regard.

Auletta does (re)raise significant issues - the discussion on Google Books and copyrights is a clear standout in the book. The "hubris" as portrayed by traditional media companies during Google's infancy is mind-boggling and amusing (of course, with the benefit of hindsight). Other than the framing of the discussion in the viewpoint of media/advertising, a Google-buff is not likely to realize significant benefit from this book. That focus also forces the author not to be able to discuss products such as Google Health - which has the potential for being a disruptive solution in itself. Overall, an excellent read for the Google-newbie, but an OK addition for a Google-phile.

Why Google matters
"Googled" by Ken Auletta chronicles the rise of Google from its auspicious origins within the labs of Stanford University to its becoming perhaps the most influential technology company in Silicon Valley today. Mr. Auletta, who has covered the media and technology industries for many years, has drawn on his many dozens of personal interviews with key players to tell this remarkable story as only he can. Full of interesting anecdotes, insight and analysis, this highly readable book explains why Google matters a lot to consumers, businesses and policy makers.

Mr. Auletta excels at writing Google's corporate history, dedicating individual chapters to each year of its development from 1999 through 2008. Like many Internet success stories, we become acquainted with Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two (more or less) socially-awkward but undeniably brilliant persons who have remained true to their vision of making information accessible to end users via the Internet. Mr. Auletta explains that Google's focus on perfecting its proprietary search algorithms has proven to be widely disruptive to technology and media companies alike; while its control of information has garnered attention from governments and non-governmental organizations who are concerned about issues of corporate power and personal privacy.

Mr. Auletta discusses how Google's growth has posed challenges within to its management, corporate culture and strategy. While generally praising Page and Brin for their decisions, Mr. Auletta is concerned that Google's founders, who have yet to be confronted with the kind of adversity that afflicts most business owners, could be overlooking some of the external threats to the company's long-term viability; chief among these are what Mr. Auletta believes are legitimate public concerns about the use of private information for profit. Yet, it is clear from the author's thoughtful analysis that the technology and data Google collects has uniquely positioned the company to continue to take advantage of, if not define, the media/technology landscape for the foreseeable future.

I highly recommend this book to everyone.

Title and Content Mismatch
When I saw the title of this book, I thought that it would tell me about all the fantastic new projects Google is working on, and how they will change how we do everything. However the majority of the book is retrospective, telling us how Google got to where it is now. It is a well written corporate history, with a lot of detail and insider perspectives. It describes how Google came to be the dominant player in the online advertising market with AdWords. It describes how Google News is hastening the extinction of most of America's newspapers. It talks about Android, Google's alternative OS to the iPhone. It covers the exciting but mismanaged Google Books project. But when it comes to describing Google's latest initiatives, like the Google Chrome OS, or the latest exciting and slightly scary developments in the Google Maps/Google Earth platform,the book falls woefully short.

Perhaps the author could not expand on what exciting new initiatives Google has is because all the really exciting news lately has been from other companies. The most life-changing products to hit the market lately have been Facebook and Twitter, neither of which are Google products. It is also worth noting that while search will never go away, Twitter, and to a lesser extent Facebook, have gone a long way to changing the way we access data. Instead of simply searching for things, people can now share links quickly and easily with their network of friends. Android has yet to make a significant dent on the iPhone's market share. Perhaps if Google made a more concerted push to support and develop Augmented Reality technology for Android phones, because AR certainly seems to be where the next wave will come from, and their are no dominant players in that field yet.

In the end, I was misled by the subtitle of the book, "The End of the World as We Know It," into hoping it offered a view of the future. Given the fact that I read the book in paper format, I should have known that this was a long shot. Our view of the future is constantly changing, and it is an unrealistic expectation to hope that a book author can make predictions that will a) stand up to the delay between idea formulation and publication and b) avoid being leaked and widely distributed on the web prior to publication.