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

Steven Levy

Apr 2011 · Simon and Schuster

About this ebook

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

Ratings and reviews

A. Parts of it were very tedious, to me, but I'm glad I read it. I'm not a very technically savvy person, rather I'm a former psychology student, so I had much to learn. Levy helped fill some of the gaps in my knowledge of how Google, and the web itself, actually works. Q. What parts were tedious to you? A. Well, the chapter on Google's business in China, for one, though this may be the most important chapter for people with an interest in China, which I don't have. Also, at times, Levy seemed to be glorifying the people at Google. I mean, he rarely said a negative word about any of them, only maybe that Larry was "ambitious," that's as far as he would go. It was like, he didn't want to burn his sources, and thus seemed to arise a potential conflict of interest. This repeated exaltation of Google's "heroes" was tedious after a while. Q. So you feel he was a biased observer and writer? A. Sometimes, but to be fair, toward the end of the book, Levy did note that Google's rapid growth, as a corporation, in terms of employees and capitalization, had made it the "big boy" on the block. New start-ups, and older corporations, like book publishers, all feared Google. He notes that some of Google's actions would lead to questions about their motto: "Do no evil." Nonetheless, the book is based largely on insider interviews he had with the Google principals, and these were granted, most likely, because the informants did not expect Levy to reveal much bad about them. Q. So what did you learn? A. I learned about "cloud computing," such as Google's Document service; about their largely ineffective forays into web television and social networking (Orkut); about precisely how Google Print started, with Larry taking digital photos of books held up page by page; about Android, which I knew nothing about but the name; and quite a bit more. Q. So the book is worth reading, even though you found it tedious in parts? A. Yes, I would say so. Levy was able to get his mitts around what seemed like the whole of a large corporation and give a sense of its many facets. This makes the book somewhat unique, but he does cite other authors on Google in his end notes. The documentation at the end is detailed and the book includes an index for specific reading.

Great book, really let's you peek into Google. The only downside was that I would have expected more about the "break" between Eric S and Larry / Sergey.

Great book, offers a lot of insightful stories about Google, the founders, the core values, big decisions, mistakes; really makes you believe you know a lot of Google, almost that you were present on those key meetings and can feel the joy and frustration of those meetings. The book is pretty well organized and covers the creation or adquisition of the big GProducts. Recommended for everyone that want to know how this inventive and giant tech company has growth at such incredible speed. Data! data! data!

About the author

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 Story; Insanely Great; The Perfect Thing; and In the Plex. He lives in New York City.