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Home » Feature » Art and Culture
Revealing look into Google's free world
By Nicholson Baker |
November 29, 2009, Sunday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
I'M fond of Google, I have to say. I like Larry Page, who seems, at least in the YouTube videos I've watched, shy and smart, with salt-and-pepper bangs; and Sergey Brin, who seems less shy and jokier and also smart.
Ken Auletta, the author of this absorbing, shaggy, name-droppy book, doesn't seem to like either of them much - he says that Page has a "Kermit the Frog" voice, which isn't nice, while Brin comes off as a swaggering, efficiency-obsessed overachiever who, at Stanford, aced tests, picked locks, "borrowed" computer equipment from the loading dock and once renumbered all the rooms in the computer science building.
"Google's leaders are not cold businessmen; they are cold engineers," Auletta writes - but "cold" seems oddly wrong. Auletta's own chilliness may be traceable in part to Brin's and Page's reluctance to be interviewed.
"After months of my kicking at the door, they opened it," he writes in the acknowledgments. "Google's founders and many of its executives share a zeal to digitize books," he observes, "but don't have much interest in reading them." They'll probably give more than a glance at "Googled."
I read the book in three huge gulps and learned a lot - about Google's "cold war" with Facebook, about Google's tussles with Viacom, about Google's role in the "Yahoo-Microsoft melee," and about Google's gradual estrangement from its former ally, Apple.
Auletta is given to martial similes and parallels, from Prince Metternich in 19th-century Europe to Afghanistan now: "Privacy questions will continue to hover like a Predator drone," he writes, "capable of firing a missile that can destroy the trust companies require to serve as trustees for personal data."
And he includes some revealing human moments: Larry Page, on the day of Google's hugely successful stock offering, pulls out his cellphone and says, "I'm going to call my mom!"
But what Auletta mainly does is talk shop with CEOs, and that is the great strength of the book. Auletta seems to have interviewed every media chief in North America, and most of them are unhappy, one way or another, with what Google has become.
Gargantuan
Google is voracious, they say, it has gargantuan ambitions, it's too rich and smug, it makes big money off of OPC - other people's content. One unnamed "prominent media executive" leaned toward Auletta at the 2007 Google Zeitgeist Conference and whispered a rhetorical question in his ear: what real value, he wanted to know, was Google producing for society?
Wait. What real value? Come now, my prominent executive friend. Have you not glanced at Street View in Google Maps? Have you not relied on the humble aid of the search-box calculator, or checked out Google's movie show times, or marveled at the quick-and-dirtiness of Google Translate?
Have you not made interesting recherche 19th-century discoveries in Google Books? Or played with the amazing expando-charts in Google Finance? Have you not designed a strange tall house in Google SketchUp, and did you not make a sudden cry of delight the first time you saw the planet begin to loom closer in Google Earth?
Surely no other software company has built a cluster of products that are anywhere near as cleverly engineered, as quick-loading and as fun to fiddle with, as Google has, all for free. Have you not searched?
Now Page and Brin fly around in a customized Boeing 767 and talk sincerely about green computing, even as the free streamings of everyone's home video clips on YouTube burn through mountaintops of coal.
They haven't figured out a way to "monetize" - that is, make a profit from - their money maelstrom, YouTube, although I notice that Coffee-mate and Samsung banners appear nowadays in Philip DeFranco's popular video monologues.
"The benefit of free is that you get 100 percent of the market," Eric Schmidt, Google's chief executive, explained to Auletta.
"Free is the right answer." For a while, perhaps - but maybe free is unsustainable. For newspapers, Auletta writes, "free may be a death certificate."
Maybe in the end, even on the Internet, you get what you pay for.
Ken Auletta, the author of this absorbing, shaggy, name-droppy book, doesn't seem to like either of them much - he says that Page has a "Kermit the Frog" voice, which isn't nice, while Brin comes off as a swaggering, efficiency-obsessed overachiever who, at Stanford, aced tests, picked locks, "borrowed" computer equipment from the loading dock and once renumbered all the rooms in the computer science building.
"Google's leaders are not cold businessmen; they are cold engineers," Auletta writes - but "cold" seems oddly wrong. Auletta's own chilliness may be traceable in part to Brin's and Page's reluctance to be interviewed.
"After months of my kicking at the door, they opened it," he writes in the acknowledgments. "Google's founders and many of its executives share a zeal to digitize books," he observes, "but don't have much interest in reading them." They'll probably give more than a glance at "Googled."
I read the book in three huge gulps and learned a lot - about Google's "cold war" with Facebook, about Google's tussles with Viacom, about Google's role in the "Yahoo-Microsoft melee," and about Google's gradual estrangement from its former ally, Apple.
Auletta is given to martial similes and parallels, from Prince Metternich in 19th-century Europe to Afghanistan now: "Privacy questions will continue to hover like a Predator drone," he writes, "capable of firing a missile that can destroy the trust companies require to serve as trustees for personal data."
And he includes some revealing human moments: Larry Page, on the day of Google's hugely successful stock offering, pulls out his cellphone and says, "I'm going to call my mom!"
But what Auletta mainly does is talk shop with CEOs, and that is the great strength of the book. Auletta seems to have interviewed every media chief in North America, and most of them are unhappy, one way or another, with what Google has become.
Gargantuan
Google is voracious, they say, it has gargantuan ambitions, it's too rich and smug, it makes big money off of OPC - other people's content. One unnamed "prominent media executive" leaned toward Auletta at the 2007 Google Zeitgeist Conference and whispered a rhetorical question in his ear: what real value, he wanted to know, was Google producing for society?
Wait. What real value? Come now, my prominent executive friend. Have you not glanced at Street View in Google Maps? Have you not relied on the humble aid of the search-box calculator, or checked out Google's movie show times, or marveled at the quick-and-dirtiness of Google Translate?
Have you not made interesting recherche 19th-century discoveries in Google Books? Or played with the amazing expando-charts in Google Finance? Have you not designed a strange tall house in Google SketchUp, and did you not make a sudden cry of delight the first time you saw the planet begin to loom closer in Google Earth?
Surely no other software company has built a cluster of products that are anywhere near as cleverly engineered, as quick-loading and as fun to fiddle with, as Google has, all for free. Have you not searched?
Now Page and Brin fly around in a customized Boeing 767 and talk sincerely about green computing, even as the free streamings of everyone's home video clips on YouTube burn through mountaintops of coal.
They haven't figured out a way to "monetize" - that is, make a profit from - their money maelstrom, YouTube, although I notice that Coffee-mate and Samsung banners appear nowadays in Philip DeFranco's popular video monologues.
"The benefit of free is that you get 100 percent of the market," Eric Schmidt, Google's chief executive, explained to Auletta.
"Free is the right answer." For a while, perhaps - but maybe free is unsustainable. For newspapers, Auletta writes, "free may be a death certificate."
Maybe in the end, even on the Internet, you get what you pay for.
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