In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives Review

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(More customer reviews)Among recent great books describing the business and impact of information technology, In the Plex is one of the best. As impactful as Pulse: The New Science of Harnessing Internet Buzz to Track Threats and Opportunities, and with story-telling as engaging as Idea Man: A Memoir by the Cofounder of Microsoft this book will be on the shortlist of 2011 "must reads" in the business of technology.
One of my favorite writers, Steven Levy of Wired, gained what may be unprecedented access to the employees and upper management of Google in order explore the history, the work environment key management decisions of one of the most innovative and culturally-influential companies of all time. Google manages this with 24,000 employees who see Google as the perfect employer for them. Levy describes Google as a place for the "unspeakably brainy", a kind of "geek never-never land" - just the right kind of environment to maximize innovativeness. Among the perks is the requirement for every engineer to spend a share of their time on personal projects. And as daunting as it sounds, Levy says Co-founder Larry Page actually still signs off on every single hire.
The co-founders Sergey Brin and Page literally started Google from a garage. (The name was a misspelling of the mathematical term for 10 to the 100th power - Googol. But the name stuck.) Their big idea: efficient searches and how to make money at it by selling keywords. Levy then leads us through Google's history of fantastic growth and innovation focusing mainly on big decisions in the firm. Among them the mistakes of handling the special case of China where media access is more controlled than Google would prefer and where management style of the China-based executives were more like a stodgy, old IBM than the free-thinking Google. The company with the motto "Don't be Evil", ultimately decided to leave the China market.
The rapid growth of the firm was itself a major challenge. That many smart people with the freedom and resources to chase many ideas could spread themselves thin. Some of the ideas could be technically possible because of the clever solutions Google staff would develop, but some ideas had other obstacles the engineering-oriented firm didn't anticipate. For example, Google's plan to scan in millions of books and offer them online ran into what should have been entirely foreseeable legal obstacles from authors. But as Levy describes in the first pages of the book, "To Google, it was a boon to civilization." It is this story that frames much of the rest of the book: visionary and cash-rich but somewhat naïve technologists struggle with practical realities of the rest of the world.
Some of the employee perks are drying up as economic hard times have even hit Google. The sheer size of the firm has required some amount of long-avoided bureaucracy and rapid acquisitions of firms the engineers thought were cool has slowed down. As Levy says, even the "Don't Be Evil" motto is now used as ironic humor by Google's detractors. But Google, with a $180+ billion dollar market capitalization is an example of a massive creation of wealth from one of a few areas where US exports lead the world: world-changing innovation.
Levy's telling of the Google story is based on access no other author had and, as a result, it is the best story about Google written to date.

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