Product Description

This is a revelatory expose of Google and its ambition to become the controller of 'all the world's information'. "Planet Google" explores the profound implications of that strategy for the business world, and for us all. Google has a dream: to manage the entire world's information. The company wants to access every single bit of it it can - from news, to financial and historical data; from the content of books, films and TV, to a complete record of the Earth's surface; and most controversially, the statistics of our personal lives - from what we have been reading, to who we have been talking to, to what we have been buying and where. If information is power, then Google are a force to be reckoned with. Google is almost evangelical in its belief that by realizing its vision it will be fulfilling the promise of computing, as envisioned by its founding developers. Others, however, are increasingly alarmed by the invasion of privacy that Google's vision might both entail and enable. With unprecedented access to the key players at Google HQ, "Planet Google" is a revelatory - and often alarming - behind-the-scenes investigation into Google's plans, and the implications of its mission for our future.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #163213 in Books
• Published on: 2009-05-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Review
"'Sharp-eyed... A restless examination of Google's strengths and weaknesses, and contradictions... The company that emerges from this book is a more rickety and interesting enterprise than non-geeks might imagine.' Guardian"

About the Author
Randall E. Stross is one of the most respected reporters covering Silicon Valley. He is the New York Times columnist from the Valley, and teaches business history at San Jose State University. He is the author of several previous books, including The Microsoft Way, Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing, and eBoys: The First Inside Account of Venture Capitalists at Work. He lives in Menlo Park, California.

Customer Reviews

Informative, insightful, and candidly written
In the book which addresses the general reader, the two capacities of the author namely the New York Time columnist and the professor of business history meld seamlessly. The book is an entertaining and easy read and often conveys an air of suspense, traits which point to the columnist. But behind the entertaining facade there looms the professor of business history with his sense of the significant in tracing the evolution of this phenomenally successful company, in analysing the unique elements that contributed to its success but also pointing to the difficulties and the occasional blunder in its path and in describing the proliferation of its activities from the initial single activity of web search to its present culmination of 'cloud computing'.

And from the flavour to the substance of the book.

The profound vision and awe inspiring ambition of the founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, articulated few months after the establishment of Google in 1998 was to 'organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful'.

The first and still by far the most successful activity of the company was web search. The key to the success was hardware and software technology that was designed to scale up fast and inexpensively. It was able to acquire market capitilization that exceeded all other Internet companies because it chanced upon text ads linked to the keywords of a search phrase, ads that turned out to be highly efficient means for advertisers to reach prospective buyers.

To the present day ninety-nine percent of its revenues is still generated by these simple text ads which in 2007 amounted to $16.5 billion. In May 2008, Google fielded 68.3 percent of all U.S Internet searches compared to Yahoo's 20 percent and Microsoft's MSN 5.9 percent.

In ten short years after its establishment Google moved boldly to add to its collection of web pages, indexes of published items in a variety of formats including news, books, scholary journals, street maps, satellite images, corporate financial information and video, the Google YouTube which it acquired at $1.65 billion.

More recently it has created the infrastructure to perform more tasks than search, such as creating documents like those that Microsoft Office's Word, Excel and Power Point applications produce. Google also has begun to offer 'software as service' using its own software and storing and processing users' data on remote servers run by its company. The computer industry has adopted a new phrase, 'cloud computing', for this model of highly centralized computing. A user's document will seem to float in cyberspace, accessible from anywhere with an Internet Connection.

The preceding model of centralised computing creates enormous posibilities but to some looks ominous as potentially infringing privacy.

Competent but Lacking the Insider View
Randall Stross's earlier eBoys (a profile of Benchmark, the Silicon Valley venture firm) is a hard act to follow and, to be frank, Planet Google falls short in a number of areas. Whereas the Benchmark Partners gave Stross frequent and unrestricted access to meetings with both prospective and actual investments and, most revealingly, internal partnership meetings, it's clear that he simply didn't get the same intimate contact with Brin, Page or Schmidt at Google. That said, Stross is a shrewd observer of business and manages to extract some worthwhile insights into how the Google business model has evolved and where it's going in the future. A solid, workmanlike book of 200 pages (with 60 pages of somewhat spurious notes!)