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

"The new University of the XXIst century?" according to Herve Lebret. In the Plex is an(other) amazing book about my favorite company. Google is the reason why I wrote a book about start-ups: When I did a PowerPoint presentation in 2006 gathering what I knew about the Mountain View start-up, some friends told me to write a more general book about start-ups. Which I did in 2007. And then a blogI have read already . Hackers insight into Google Bas Vodde If you'd ask me, which technology journalist should write a book about Google, then Steven Levy would be high on my list. Steven's been around for a long time and wrote the excellent "Hackers" and the not so excellent "The Perfect Thing." He is able to write about technology in an engaging way, making "In the Plex" and insightful book about how. "I thought the best parts of the book were the "China Chapters" according to Raskolinkov. I just finished this book. It contains a wealth of information, from Larry Page and Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt and Marrisa Mayer and Salar Kamangar and so many others. There are hundreds of people included here, computer engineers, many, many people. While reading, it is neat to keep Google Search close, ha. You can look up the various people

He has also written about Apple (Insanely Great and The Perfect Thing) and is the author of the classic book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. . He lives in New York with his wife and son. STEVEN LEVY has covered Google for more than a decade, first at Newsweek, where he was senior editor and chief technology writer, and

With this cash cow (until Google’s IPO nobody other than Google management had any idea how lucrative the company’s ad business was), Google was able to expand dramatically and take on other transformative projects: more efficient data centers, open-source cell phones, free Internet video (YouTube), cloud computing, digitizing books, and much more. But has Google lost its innovative edge? It stumbled badly in China—Levy discloses what went wrong and how Brin disagreed with his peers on the China strategy—and now with its newest initiative, social networking, Google is chasing a successful competitor for the first time. The key to Google’s success in all these businesses, Levy reveals, is its engineering mind-set and adoption of such Internet values as speed, openness, experimentation, and risk taking. Can the company that famously decided not to be evil still compete? No other book has ever turned Google inside out as Levy does with In the Plex.. How has Google done it? Veteran technology reporter Steven Levy was granted unprecedented access to the compa

From Publishers Weekly The contradictions of the Internet search behemoth are teased apart in this engaging, slightly starry-eyed business history. He offers a smart analysis of the tensions between Google's "âÇÿDon't Be Evil'" slogan and its censorship of its Chinese Web site and the privacy implications of its drive to sponge up all information—but he accepts Google's blinkered conception of e-ethics and its demands for huge tax breaks with too much complacency. He also regales readers with the "Googley" corporate culture of hip techno-capitalism: the elitist focus on braininess, the campus game rooms, the countercultural rectitude of billionaire founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin (which can read more like puerile arrogance as they roller-