
In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
Business biography, Business and economics
Synthetic audio, Automated braille
Summary
&“The most interesting book ever written about Google&” (The Washington Post) delivers the inside story behind the most successful and admired technology company of our time, now updated with a new Afterword.Google is arguably the most important company in the… world today, with such pervasive influence that its name is a verb. The company founded by two Stanford graduate students—Larry Page and Sergey Brin—has become a tech giant known the world over. Since starting with its search engine, Google has moved into mobile phones, computer operating systems, power utilities, self-driving cars, all while remaining the most powerful company in the advertising business.Granted unprecedented access to the company, Levy disclosed that the key to Google&’s success in all these businesses lay in its engineering mindset and adoption of certain internet values such as speed, openness, experimentation, and risk-taking. Levy discloses details behind Google&’s relationship with China, including how Brin disagreed with his colleagues on the China strategy—and why its social networking initiative failed; the first time Google tried chasing a successful competitor. He examines Google&’s rocky relationship with government regulators, particularly in the EU, and how it has responded when employees left the company for smaller, nimbler start-ups.In the Plex is the &“most authoritative…and in many ways the most entertaining&” (James Gleick, The New York Book Review) account of Google to date and offers &“an instructive primer on how the minds behind the world&’s most influential internet company function&” (Richard Waters, The Wall Street Journal).