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And now, with its newest initiative, social networking, Google is chasing a successful competitor for the first time. Even today, with a workforce of more than 23,000, Larry Page signs off on every hire.īut has Google lost its innovative edge? It stumbled badly in China. After it's unapologetically elitist approach to hiring, Google pampers its engineers with free food and dry cleaning, on-site doctors and masseuses, and gives them all the resources they need to succeed. 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. With this cash cow (until Google's IPO, nobody other than Google management had any idea how lucrative the company's ad business was), 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. 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. While they were still students at Stanford, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin revolutionized Internet search.
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How has Google done it? Veteran technology reporter Steven Levy was granted unprecedented access to the company, and in this revelatory book he takes listeners inside Google headquarters - the Googleplex - to explain how Google works.
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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.
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