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Google Speaks: Secrets Of The Worlds Greatest Billionaire Entrepreneurs, Sergey Brin And Larry Page (2009)

by Janet Lowe(Favorite Author)

3.41 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

047039854X (ISBN13: 9780470398548)

languge

English

genre

Nonfiction

publisher

John Wiley & Sons

review 1: Well it was interesting, but a little bit boring too..Its good to know all the history behind Google's evolution but i didn't find anything particular which is inspiring. Its more of a Google history book, compiled from online resources. Most of the time, the author seems to repeat the same stuff again & again such as privacy issues, legal battles etc..But overall a good reading experience..
review 2: It sounds funny – ‘Google Speaks.’ Until one considers that writer Janet Lowe has spent the last half-decade developing what has come to be known in business book circles as the ‘Speaks series.’ Lowe is the same business profiler who has given us overviews of several of America’s top companies through the eyes of their founders, such as Jack Welch Spea... moreks, Bill Gates Speaks and Warren Buffett Speaks as well as similar volumes on Oprah Winfrey and Michael Jordan. (In fact, she came to this series via the Buffett book after many years of publishing titles around value investing and documenting the investing philosophies of Buffett, Berkshire’s Charlie Munger and the man that inspired them all, Benjamin Graham.)It is precisely her experience with this company founder profiler series, that gives Lowe the background to assemble (or should we say, re-assemble) the pieces of a company’s development and put the puzzle pieces back together in book form.In ‘Google Speaks’, Lowe covers the entire range of the company’s history from the Stanford period of Sergey and Brin before they even arrived at the Google concept, to the first $100,000 invested in the firm (they didn’t even have a Google bank account to deposit the check!), to the duo’s pitch of their search technology to Yahoo! (reminiscent of Gates and Paul Allen’s attempt to get IBM to license the Microsoft DOS system) and their subsequent rivalry relationship with Yahoo!, their unusual ‘Dutch auction’ IPO, to the fabled ‘Google culture’ as well as all the myriad of issues that have peppered Google’s high-profile existence. For many reasons, stemming both from Google’s sheer size to their stated mission of organizing the world’s information, Google attracts more than it’s share of scrutiny, controversy and lawsuits. Lowe deals with many of these (Viacom/YouTube, keyword claims, privacy issues, etc.) but generally in either a surfacy or somewhat superficial level, appearing to be more interested in the motivation of the people behind the decisions, rather than the implications of the decisions themselves.Unfortunately, as critics have pointed out, Lowe lifts much of her research from a variety of previously and easily available published articles (just ‘Google’ them!) and seems to get a number of glaring facts wrong (i.e. Flickr, the photosharing website, was acquired by Yahoo!, not Google, as well as the misstep with Ken Aulutta’s New Yorker article outlined below, and others.) Critics of Lowe’s contend that she at times is neither insightful nor critical enough in her reporting nor does she go deep enough to excavate the hidden meanings of just what controlling all the earth’s information really means (“evil happens” she says) and the plotting that informs that quest. Though ‘Google Speaks’ contains a company timeline in the back, it lacks an index, making it somewhat deficient as an authoritative business book.For a more theorized view of just what the Google experience means to us now and in the potential future, readers are well advised to pick up both Ken Auletta’s ‘Googled’ (In fact, much of Lowe’s research stems from Auletta’s groundbreaking article in the New Yorker, ‘The Search Party’ – which Lowe mistakenly confuses with another New Yorker article written by someone else called ‘Search and Destroy’) as well as Jeff Jarvis’ “What Would Google Do?’ For an overview of what goes on in the Google of today and how it came to be, Lowe’s somewhat lightweight book is an acceptable starting point, but certainly not the definitive text. less

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