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

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Simon and Schuster, 2011 M04 12 - 461 pages
Updated with a new afterword, the inside story behind one of the most successful and admired technology companies of our time.

Granted unprecedented access, Steven Levy takes readers inside the Googleplex, the company’s headquarters, to show how Google works. The key to Google’s success in all its businesses, Levy reveals, is its engineering mindset and embrace of such Internet values as speed, openness, experimentation, and risk-taking. But these values have not saved Google from missteps and pitfalls as it, like other tech companies, grows exponentially and comes under increasing public scrutiny. Can Google continue to compete and not be evil?

“The most interesting book ever written about Google.” —The Washington Post
 

Contents

Prologue Searching for Google
1
Cracking the Code on Internet Profits
69
How Google Built Its Culture
121
Building Data Centers That Hold Everything Ever Written
167
The Google Phone Company and the Google TV Company
213
Googles Moral Dilemma in China
267
Is Whats Good for Google Good for Governmentor the Public?
315
Epilogue Chasing Taillights
369
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About the author (2011)

Steven Levy is editor at large at Wired magazine. The Washington Post has called him “America’s premier technology journalist.” His was previously founder of Backchannel and chief technology writer and senior editor for Newsweek. Levy has written seven previous books and his work has appeared in Rolling Stone, Harper’s Magazine, Macworld, The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, The New Yorker, and Premiere. Levy has also won several awards during his thirty-plus years of writing about technology and is the author of several previous books including Facebook: The Inside StoryInsanely GreatThe Perfect Thing; and In the Plex. He lives in New York City.

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