Planet Google by Randall Stross
This book is two things: boring and generic. As with so many “tell all” business books, this is nothing more than a collection of press release and business articles glued together with a not-so-insider narrative.
Stross provides us little insight and only leaves us with the rather benign self prescribed prediction from Google that it will take them 300 years to organize the worlds info.
For anyone who’s paying attention to business on the web, this book, at best, serves as a summary of Google’s well known product releases, legal bungles and proclamations. There’s no unique analysis of Google’s approach to intellectual property, no suggestion of better web crawling methods, no digging up of data center floor plans nor any interviews with users, government officials nor ex employees – any of which would have given us info would couldn’t otherwise dig up ourselves.
Google is by far one of the most difficult business set ups we’ve seen in history. Most internet users and knowledge workers depend on Google to make their living yet we all know the dangers of one company controlling so much access and housing so much data. This is a topic worth 50 books and yet we get only snippets of discussion on that in this book.
Hell, Stross doesn’t even question how it’s going to be possible for Google to last the 300 years when it only makes money by selling basic text ads. Are we all to seriously believe text ads can provide revenue to power this company for the next 15 years of technology changes, legal battles and employee costs? Much less 300 years?
This book could have easily attacked Google deeply on its complete bullying of intellectual property holders from libraries to the TV networks to Wikipedia authors. Google, for all its Don’t Be Evil, continues to thrive on the idea that if you get big enough (push enough traffic) you can do whatever you want with IP. They, perhaps, didn’t set out with that as the driving force, but it is what powers their business. Perhaps you might not even agree with this assertion. However, indirectly they have created a nasty underbelly market on the internet where lots of publishers, site operators, content “creators” all operate under that notion. Consider how much of its revenue comes from spammy, stolen content pages with Google ads on them, and you’ll see my point.
Stross doesn’t touch on any of this.
He seems to be so enamored with the idea of a company organizing the worlds info and is invites to company meetings that he doesn’t consider any of the deep implications of what it actually means to organize info, what it means to us to have a commercial operation organizing it, and how one actually can live by a motto of “Don’t Be Evil.”
I read this book in 5 hours. Don’t bother reading it. Pull up your browser, hit the business publication sites and Search Engine watch and you’ll get better insight.
Hey, and maybe for perspective use Yahoo!, Live.com, Ask.com to search. You’ll have done more homework than Stross.
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