Name: Coleman McCormick's review of In the Plex by Steven Levy
Item: In the Plex
Rating: 4
Author: Coleman McCormick

Steven Levy

Written with full cooperation from top management, including cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, this is the inside story behind Google, the most successful and most admired technology company of our time, told by one of our best technology writers. Few companies in history have ever been as successful and as admired as Google, the company that has transformed the Internet and become an indispensable part of our lives. How has Google done it? Veteran technology reporter Steven Levy was granted unprecedented access to the company, and in this revelatory book he takes readers inside Google headquarters—the Googleplex—to show how Google works. While they were still students at Stanford, Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin revolutionized Internet search. They followed this brilliant innovation with another, as two of Google’s earliest employees found a way to do what no one else had: make billions of dollars from Internet advertising. With this cash cow, 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. 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. After its unapologetically elitist approach to hiring, Google pampers its engineers—free food and dry cleaning, on-site doctors and masseuses—and gives them all the resources they need to succeed. Even today, with a workforce of more than 23,000, Larry Page signs off on every hire. But has Google lost its innovative edge? With its newest initiative, social networking, Google is chasing a successful competitor for the first time. Some employees are leaving the company for smaller, nimbler start-ups. 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 Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives

In the Plex

Paula Alonso Ishihara

Coleman McCormick

The in-depth history of Google, product by product, was fascinating. Their product development process is something I've been interested in for a long time -- how do they decide what to do next? When do they abandon an effort and move on to something else? (turns out that these days they rarely do the latter).

The book did seem a little heavy on the pro-Google "don't be evil" mantra. Not that I don't respect Google's goals of world peace, saving the whales, etc, etc, but they are a multi-billion dollar multinational business with a lot of investors -- that mantra only goes as far as the profit they can turn.

As a cartographer / mapping guy I would've liked to hear a little more deep dive on Google Maps and their other geo products... Time for someone to write the story of those!

H. Kamran

Learn how Google, internet search company turned jack-of-all-trades of modern technology, works. Meet Larry Page, from Michigan, and Sergey Brin, a Russian who grew up in America. These mathematical people went on to create a search engine that was better than DEC’s AltaVista and Excite. They got funding from the Jeff Bezos, Ram Shriram, and other notable CEOs and VCs. Google crashed within a day of its release to the public, especially around noon, due to high amounts of HTTP GET requests. One thing to note, the timeline in the book is messed up because of how many projects Google has going on at once! Read “In the Plex” and learn how Google thinks, works, and shapes your life.

Bryan Alexander

A very useful book on recent technological history, In the Plex takes us through the history of Google. The subject is obviously important to anyone seeking to understand cyberspace and the digital world.

It's a very engaging book as well, balancing neatly between technical details and human lives. It renders computer science problems accessible to the nonspecialist. And Levy sometimes pulls out entertaining, or at least humanizing, elements:
"I hate ads," says Eric Veach, the Google engineer who created the most successful ad system in history. (83)

These characters and technologies appear within the unusual Google culture, which Levy probes throughout the book. We see the famous playfulness and company-supplied pleasures, along with stresses and war rooms. 

Levy organizes the book into large chapters, each of which addresses several years of Google (which are akin to decades elsewhere). For example, one covers the development of the very lucrative ad services, while another follows the messy China involvement. Each chapter takes the company further along in wealth, global reach, and digital development. We watch as the little company offering a single service - search - spreads into a sprawling empire: Google Earth, Google Maps, Web office (Google Docs, etc), the Android phone operating system plus the occasional phone plus telephony service, book scanning, self-driving cars, Google+. We see projects appear and flop: Buzz, Lively, Wave, OpenSocial. 

The ultimate part of that arc is worried rather than triumphant, as Levy ends on a questioning note. There's no sense that the impending (as of the book's publication) launch of G+ will help organize the overflowing number of services. Larry Page takes the reins, but problematically, not as the logical heir apparent, still too much Prince Hal.

At first read Levy treats Google with balance, rather than awe. The company's technical achievements appear in an admiring light, but the public antics of Brin and Page look simply embarrassing. The major IPO looks foolish, showing Wall Street to have easily corralled the Google upstars. In the Plex depicts Google's putative attempt to, famously, not be evil in a way which would please neither Google celebrant not its detractors. 

Some topics were missing or underemphasized. There's no discussion at all of the late, lamented Google RSS Reader. Lively appears only in a single sentence (and there to be killed), without mention of the contemporary virtual worlds brouhaha. Web associations don't appear (HTML 5 shows up once, 212). The Apple versus Google battle does appear, but in a minimal fashion. We don't see, for instance, discussion of conflicting models of the internet, Web vs app.

Otherwise, this is an important and exciting book. It is already dated, of course, and will continue to recede into the past. But what Levy describes is what makes the world-striding Google colossus, and his work helps us understand it.

Tyler Jefford

Fascinating book how Larry Page and Sergey Brin started a search company and fostered the best people to grow the business. Google has been into so many different industries, buying youtube, scanning all the worlds books to make them searchable, analytics, advertisements, etc. This book goes into the thought, difficulty and success behind many of the ventures.

anjali

Jeff Borton

Bradley

Emre Tekisalp

D VA

Satyajeet Pal

Lisa

In The Plex

Gabriel Ayuso

Daniel Rojkind

René Buchholdt

Sang Park

tiff

Ian Betteridge

Sarthak Choudhary

“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).

Paula Alonso Ishihara &
In the Plex by Steven Levy

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In the Plex by Steven Levy