Planet Google – Book Review

“Lofty aspirations alone are not noteworthy-they are commonplace in every start up in Silicon Valley”

Neither Larry Page nor Sergey Brin who met as graduates of computer science at Stanford never predicted that their dorm room adventure/research program would be not just the largest and fastest search engines but the most innovative, most important and most ambitious company of the Internet age. Their idea of “information to be free” was in contradictions to the traditional schools-” information was too valuable to be free” led them to create the most sophisticated hardware & software networks that could gather the info of the size of the entire universe at just a click.

The book talks about their commencement as college drop out to organize the worlds information, renting a garage as there ever expanding “research project” was too much for the university computers; the PC chips with which they scaled their own machines that increased their web page capacity cheaply, effectively and limitlessly at a time when everyone focused on hardcore software; its search algorithm that’s a result of the ever increasing competition, the smart plain text advertisements which was a historic valuation of $225 billion; the “DON’T BE EVIL” policy; company’s willingness to take risk and the ability to strike at the right time in the market .

Page once quoted,” right now you can only access the stuff on internet. You can’t access contents in libraries, magazines, newspapers or all the television programs that have ever been broadcasted. but this will happen”
Google Books was the company’s Moon Shot as it sets a 10 year timetable to digitize all the 32 million listed in the World Cat while encountering breaks by lawsuits, author’s guilds, publishers and worldwide libraries. Every Book.Every Period. A shot, worth taken by Google but given up by others.

In a deal, Google bought YouTube for $1.65billion, which the author mentions Goo Tube. Yahoo offered a 10 digit figure to Google in order to share its search results. Google also acquired the dominating advertising network by DoubleClick for $3.1billion and spent $4.71 billion for a line spectrum (which surprisingly it didn’t want). The company spent enormously on Google Earth and Google Maps at a time when most home internet users relied on Dial up modems and thus hired its backyard partner Keyhole to develop the software. Indeed, that is not a small company but for its founders, its just 2% of the world’s “organized information”.

With Google Docs and Spreadsheets, Gmail, Google calendar and PowerPoint like Google apps that its servers host categories of personal information, the company aims to develop high end specialized applications like graphics processing that would stay on desktop PC’S while rest 90% of the computing we do would be handled in a cloud, on remote servers like Google giving birth to an era of what the company calls-“CLOUD COMPUTING”.
Randall Stross have neatly and very cleverly put in place the company’s history, its disputes, its achievements and its aim for the next generation computing. Google’s capabilities will change the way we perceive information in our lives.

Buy Planet Google: One Company’s Audacious Plan to Organize Everything We Know on discount and pay cash on delivery

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