âThe most interesting book ever written about Googleâ (The Washington Post) delivers the inside story behind the most successful and admired technology company of our time, now updated with a new Afterword.
Google is arguably the most important company in the world today, with such pervasive influence that its name is a verb. The company founded by two Stanford graduate studentsâLarry Page and Sergey Brinâhas become a tech giant known the world over. Since starting with its search engine, Google has moved into mobile phones, computer operating systems, power utilities, self-driving cars, all while remaining the most powerful company in the advertising business.
Granted unprecedented access to the company, Levy disclosed that the key to Googleâs success in all these businesses lay in its engineering mindset and adoption of certain internet values such as speed, openness, experimentation, and risk-taking. Levy discloses details behind Googleâs relationship with China, including how Brin disagreed with his colleagues on the China strategyâand why its social networking initiative failed; the first time Google tried chasing a successful competitor. He examines Googleâs rocky relationship with government regulators, particularly in the EU, and how it has responded when employees left the company for smaller, nimbler start-ups.
In the Plex is the âmost authoritativeâŚand in many ways the most entertainingâ (James Gleick, The New York Book Review) account of Google to date and offers âan instructive primer on how the minds behind the worldâs most influential internet company functionâ (Richard Waters, The Wall Street Journal).