Planet Google
The celebrated New York Times writer Randall Stross takes readers deep inside Google, the most significant, most inventive, and most ambitious firm of the Internet Age, based on exceptional access he got to the extremely secretive "Googleplex." His comments shed light on the strategy underlying the company's recent rush of aggressive initiatives, all of which were motivated by the pursuit of a business plan unlike any other: to become the undisputed gatekeeper of all the world's information, the one-stop shop for all of our information requirements.
Will Google be successful? What are the consequences of a single firm controlling so much data and knowing so much about us? With 68 percent of all Web searches (and increasing), revenues that are the envy of the corporate world, and a wealth of talent, Google is well on its way to achieving its aim of being as dominating a force on the Web as Microsoft was on the PC, as Stross demonstrates.
Google is no longer only a great search engine. From the contentious Book Search and the seductive Google Earth to competing for a piece of the wireless-phone spectrum and casually acquiring YouTube for $1.65 billion, it has introduced a dizzying assortment of new services and pushed into entirely new companies in recent years. Google has also gone after Microsoft's main business, providing free e-mail and software ranging from word processing to spreadsheets and calendars, promoting the revolutionary — and highly disruptive — notion of "cloud computing."
