Googled: The End of the World as We Know It - Softcover

Auletta, Ken

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0753522667 ISBN 13: 9780753522660

Publisher: Virgin Books, 2010

Synopsis

There are companies that create waves and those that ride or are drowned by them. This is a ride on the Google wave, and the fullest account of how it formed and crashed into traditional media businesses. With unprecedented access to Google's founders and executives, as well as to those in media who are struggling to keep their heads above water, Ken Auletta reveals how the industry is being disrupted and redefined.

Auletta goes inside Google's closed-door meetings, introducing Google's notoriously private founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, as well as those who work with - and against - them. In Googled, the reader discovers the 'secret sauce' of the company's success and why the worlds of 'new' and 'old' media often communicate as if residents of different planets. It may send chills down traditionalists' spines, but it's a crucial roadmap to the future of media business: the Google story may well be the canary in the coal mine.

Googled is candid, objective and authoritative. Crucially, it's not just a history or reportage: it's ahead of the curve and unlike any other Google books, which tend to have been near-histories, somewhat starstruck, now out of date or which fail to look at the full synthesis of business and technology.

About this title

About the Author

Ken Auletta, one of the pre-eminent US-based business journalists of the past thirty years, has written the Annals of Communications column for The New Yorker since 1992. He is the author of ten books, including four US bestsellers: Three Blind Mice: How the TV Networks Lost Their Way; Greed and Glory on Wall Street: The Fall of the House of Lehman and World War 3.0: Microsoft and Its Enemies. He lives in Manhattan with his wife, the agent Amanda Urban.

From the Back Cover

A revealing, forward-looking examination of the outsize influence Google has had on the changing media landscape.

There are companies that create waves and those that ride or are drowned by them. Bestselling author Ken Auletta takes readers for a ride on the Google wave, telling the story of how it formed and crashed into traditional media businesses - from newspapers to books, to television, to movies, to telephones, to advertising, to Microsoft. With unprecedented access to Google's founders and executives, as well as to those in the media who are struggling to keep their heads above water, Auletta reveals how the industry is being disrupted and redefined.

Using Google as a stand-in for the digital revolution, Auletta takes readers inside Google's closed-door meetings, introducing Google's notoriously private founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, as well as those who work with - and against - them. In his narrative, Auletta provides the fullest account ever told of Google's rise, shares the 'secret sauce' of Google's success, and shows why the worlds of 'new' and 'old' media often communicate as if residents of different planets.

Google engineers start from an assumption that the old ways of doing things can be improved and made more efficient, an approach that has yielded remarkable results - Google will generate about $20 billion in advertising revenues this year. And with its ownership of YouTube and its mobile phone and other initiatives, Google CEO Eric Schmidt tells Auletta his company is poised to become the world's first $100 billion media company. Yet there are many obstacles that threaten Google's future, and opposition from media companies and government regulators may be the least of these. Google faces internal threats, from its burgeoning size to losing focus to hubris. In the coming years, Google's faith in mathematical formulas and in slide rule logic will be tested to the limit.

Distilling the knowledge accrued from a career covering the media, Auletta offers insights into what we know, and don't know, about what the future holds for the imperiled industry.

Edition details

• Publisher: Virgin Books
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0753522667
• ISBN 13: 9780753522660
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 400