way citizens read and process information is being altered, and when most traditional media models are being reconfigured by digital companies like Google—all this means that it’s important to put Google under the microscope.
Brilliant engineers are at the core of the success of a company like Google. Drill down, as this book attempts to, and you’ll see that engineering is a potent tool to deliver worthwhile efficiencies, and disruption as well. Google takes seriously its motto, “Don’t be evil.” But because we’re dealing with humans not algorithms, intent sometimes matters less than effect. A company that questions everything and believes in acting without asking for permission has succeeded like few companies before. Unlike most technologies that disrupted existing business—the printed book that replaced scrolls, the telephone that replaced the telegraph, the automobile that replaced the horse and buggy, the airplane that supplanted cruise ships, the computer that supplanted typewriters—Google search produces not a tangible product but something abstract: knowledge. This makes Google both less and more vulnerable to challenge. Less because Google’s prodigious Mount Everest of data is unrivaled. More because Google depends for its continued success on users and governments that trust it will not abuse this knowledge. Whether one applauds or fears this eleven-year-old company, there is no question that Google demands our attention.
PART ONE
Different Planets
CHAPTER ONE
Messing with the Magic
With his suit and tie and closely cropped gray hair, Mel Karmazin stood out as he crossed the Google campus in Mountain View, California, passing people in baggy T-shirts holding their laptops before them like waiters’ trays. On this sunny June day in 2003, Google was nearly five years old, and Karmazin was among the first major executives from the old media to visit its headquarters. As the CEO of Viacom, he represented the world’s then fourth-largest media company—the owner of the CBS network, of TV and radio stations, Paramount Studios, MTV and its sister cable networks, Simon & Schuster publishers, Blockbuster video, and an outdoor advertising concern, among other holdings. Short and pugnacious, Karmazin was by his own admission “always paranoid” about competitors. Two of Viacom’s biggest competitors, AOL and Time Warner, had merged to forge the world’s largest media conglomerate, and Karmazin was on the prowl for new business partners.
The son of a Queens cab driver, Karmazin, then fifty-nine, had begun his career at age seventeen selling radio advertising. He was said to be so pushy that advertisers capitulated just so he would leave their offices. He became a master salesman who did not play golf or tennis or tolerate long books, and whose idea of fun was pitching advertisers and Wall Street. He was an old-fashioned, show-me-the-money guy, and he was skeptical of Silicon Valley companies that boasted of their traffic and page views, but were mum about their balance sheets. At the time of his visit, Google was a private company, and he had no way of knowing whether it was making or losing money, or even how many employees it had. The actual financial figures—the January before Karmazin’s visit Google’s private books revealed 2002 revenues of $439.5 million and a profit of $99.6 million—would be unimposing figures to a man accustomed to dealing in billions. Nevertheless, a trusted associate, an Allen & Company investment banker, Nancy B. Peretsman, had convinced Karmazin that Google was a wave maker. She joined him and Viacom’s then chief financial officer, Richard J. Bressler, on the trip.
Karmazin’s destination that day was Building 21 at 2400 Bayshore Parkway, offices Google had acquired from the giant computer and software vendor Sun Microsystems. The two-story building shaded by trees was called the Googleplex, home to the company’s engineers and separate from the building housing Google’s finance and sales staff. Just outside the conference room on the second floor the visitors paused before a twenty-one-inch CRT monitor resting on a small table, which displayed a rotating three-dimensional globe flashing with bursts of colored light, each burst representing millions of Google searches being conducted all over the world. The screen was dark only in places like central Africa and Siberia, where the lack of electricity precluded searches. A second monitor showed samples of the search queries being conducted around the globe at that moment. “You realized the power of it,” said Bressler. “And at the same time, you walked into this ratty conference room.”
Waiting to greet them in the cramped Yellow Room was Google cofounder Larry Page, then thirty. With jet-black eyebrows, short black hair pushed down on his forehead, a permanent five-o‘clock shadow,