Google beyond the Plex

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

Stephen Levy knows Google almost as well as many veteran employees of the Silicon Valley giant. Currently, Editor at Large for Wired, Mr Levy started covering the search start-up and the “Google boys” in 1998-99 when he was writing on technology for Newsweek. He had heard about a new search engine and tried it out in 1997 — this was an era when Yahoo still ruled the Internet and search was seen as a small portion of the “portals” that influenced how you found websites.

Over the years, he wrote multiple Google features, including cover stories and his coverage was consistently superior to those of most other profilers for two reasons — one, he understood tech and could write about it better than many of his peers and, two, because the Google top management were comfortable with him and gave him unprecedented access.

Then in 2007, he was given the unprecedented opportunity to accompany a team of Google associate product managers — the best and brightest young executives slotted for the fast track — when they toured China, Japan, Israel and India among other countries. Marissa Mayer, then one of the senior management, was shepherding the APMs. Ms Mayer would depart a few years later to become CEO of Yahoo.

The decade-plus of covering Google would result in the original volume of  In the Plex,  which came out in 2011. The current edition is a vastly updated version covering much of the past decade, and the final departure of the founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, first from Google to Alphabet, and then from Alphabet.

The book is one of the best volumes on how Google worked — I say worked because Mr Levy captures the early days and culture of the firm beautifully, detailing the contributions of some of the best brains in information technology who joined the start-up before it began its explosive growth phase. But as Mr Levy admits at one point, Google is now an enormous, far-flung organisation and very different from its early days. Many early recruits who shaped its products have departed because they no longer felt the excitement of the early years. Even the founders stepped back and then away. Google had become a very well run, highly profitable firm — but no longer the hotbed of original thinking. It is no longer creating products that are a zillion times better than competition.

Mr Levy, who has also written a book about Facebook among others, tries his best to capture Google warts and all, but his sympathies show up in several chapters. The chapter on China, one of the most interesting ones in the book, sees things entirely from Google’s perspective. It fails to examine why, despite hiring some of the best tech brains, the Silicon Valley giant initially lagged Baidu in many search results or how it was smartly gamed in its results sometimes.

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

Author: Stephen Levy

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Pages: 410; Price: Rs 699

And though the book looks at Google’s missteps — including how it lost out in the social media game despite launching Orkut which became a leader quickly before Facebook overtook it — the book doesn’t examine them in great detail. Even the off-on flirtation with mobile hardware is dealt with cursorily.

Mr Levy is also overly sympathetic with the fiasco over scanning of books which led to a court case and a stand-off with publishers. He is clearly also on the side of Google in its battles with the government. He glosses over the fact that while Google and the boys — Messrs Page and Brin — talked incessantly about transparency, the company disclosed as little as it could to the government or even investors. Its current privacy spats with different regulators and governments around the world are also either dealt with sketchily or not at all.

Apart from the chronicle of the China misadventure, the most interesting portions come early — especially where Mr Levy painstakingly details how Google took ideas that had originated outside and been executed badly and then turned them into killer products or applications. This included the famous Google ad auction model, which was actually an improvement over the ideas of another Silicon Valley entrepreneur and led to a spat on patents.

In the early chapters, you get to meet some brilliant tech minds who shaped many Google products. But you sometimes wonder how they would have contributed if they had continued some of their original research instead of joining a fast growing company. In these early chapters, you get the impression that their contribution to Google products and the company was as much, if not more, than the founders themselves.

The trouble with any book on Google is that the company has not even reached middle age. So the story keeps growing while the book ends at a point. Current work being done in Google on AI and Quantum Computing is not covered in great detail, nor some current controversies. Even so, it is a great read, especially for anyone interested in the first decade and a half of the Google story.