If you think that Google is simply a search engine, think again. Whether you like it or not, Google has grown to be one of the largest companies in the world in less than a decade, and you’d be wrong to think it’s all because of search.
But even an Internet behemoth has to start somewhere. Googled: The End of the World As We Know It was the result of Ken Auletta’s attempt to spell out the transition from, as he terms it, “old media to new media”, and he used Google as his “chosen vehicle”. Although, as he points out in his acknowledgements, the company’s founders weren’t all that happy about it.
Auletta’s title may seem melodramatic, but you soon discover, as you read through the chapters of Google’s history, that “the end of the world as we know it” is no exaggeration.
Auletta chronicles the company’s metamorphosis from search engine to media giant, gaining unprecedented access to the two notoriously private co-founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page. For them, Google began life as a university project. Their goal was to make the Internet more user-friendly. Now, they are left with a company that makes billions of dollars each month from a plethora of gadgets and web products.
But this metamorphosis was not always a smooth one. For Auletta, the rocky road Google has travelled was due to the company’s lack of business savvy as it expanded. Made from a bunch of engineers, Google fell into traps that any other media company would have seen a mile away. At the end of the first chapter, Auletta spells out his feelings on the lack of managerial know-how: “That Larry Page and Sergey Brin – and many Google employees – are brilliant is a conclusion cemented by the tale of Google’s rise. Whether they are also wise is not as clear-cut.”
The book can be pretty dense at times, filled with facts, figures and names that are impossible to keep track of. Clearly emanating from the pen of a journalist, the writing is succinct, to the point and bereft of flab. Every anecdote is there for a reason, every quote has something to say, and every chapter is bursting with reportage.
When speaking about a meeting the Googlers had with Mel Karmazin, the head of Viacom – one of the big media companies in the US - Auletta explains that, “unlike Karmazin, Google engineers don’t make gut decisions”. It was in this meeting that Karmazin told the Google executives that they were “fucking with the magic”. The magic was the big bucks on offer in the un-quantifiable world of advertising, and, of course, Google had found a way to quantify it. Instead of relying on selling the popular TV slots or full-page spreads in national newspapers, Google would sell the clicks the ads generated. In essence, advertisers only paid for what they got, and this was most definitely “fucking with the magic”.
But that is why Google has become so successful. They don’t care if they are messing up the magic, and they certainly don’t care if other media companies lose profits as a result. “Don’t be evil”, the company’s motto, is a phrase often uttered to cement Google’s reputation as a user-friendly product – to prove that whatever they do, they do it to make a person’s virtual world a more efficient place to be.
However, this is not always as good as it sounds. Auletta clinically evaluates many of Google’s side-projects, such as video cameras that film you as you watch TV, documenting your facial expressions and reactions to different advertisements in order to establish what methods will work best to make you buy. Scary stuff. But as Auletta points out, it’s not all that big a leap from the monitoring methods already in place across the web, which Google uses to improve their web searches.
Whether Google really is a force for good or a dreaded disrupter is hard to say. Yet it is clear that the change the company has had in the media world is a big one. Auletta concludes: “No one can predict with certainty where Google and the digital wave is heading, when it will crest, or who it will flatten.” But, if nothing else, Auletta certainly is right about one thing: his choice of book title.
Other Elements articles in which you might be interested:
What people are saying