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5 Responses to “Planet Google: One Company’s Audacious Plan to Organize Everything We Know”

  1. Thomas P. Ruark said on December 2nd, 2009 at 9:11 pm

    I was hoping for more details about the internals of the company and the founders. Some background info on their family’s, how they were raised, etc. Not just a ‘they went to school together’! How about some interviews with employees? Is it like a start up environment? Is it like a monolithic company that is hard to get things changed? Discussions of the ‘free to spend time on whatever they want’ and how google has a standard for how an employee spends their time? Etc, etc. Most of what I read it seemed like I already knew from news reports.
    Rating: 1 / 5

  2. Esteban Ess said on December 2nd, 2009 at 9:45 pm

    “Planet Google” was a fast and enjoyable read. Having been an Internet aficionado since its early beginnings as the World Wide Web, I was able to relate my place in time to the stages of evolution of Google as a vision and as a company. The book was fun because it is like revisiting the Route 66 “the Mother Road” of the free, world wide search engine and seeing early artifacts brought out of the “attic”, dusted off, and then discussed as to what worked, how it worked and why it succeeded or failed. But, this is all in layman’s terms and – as another reviewer said – it is more like a magazine article, albeit a long one, than an in-depth book. The book does a good job of projecting the sense of adventure, urgency, “point-of-the-spear” thinking that is required in order to launch a new “information age” enterprise. Where it is lacking is that it does not provide enough hard knowledge about the sacrifices made at the personal and family level to get this enterprise off the ground. It is also lacking in technical detail about how the search engine algorithms are created and validated, but then, one can hardly expect Google to open the doors to the kingdom. Overall, the book has potential to enable the reader to become a more informed and satisfied user of Google and to have more savvy about the workings of the Internet. I found the sections on server installations – the sheer massiveness, investment and safeguarding to be fascinating – ie the hardware that moves the bytes that make up the information in all forms. The author’s thoughts on where Google might go next in its evolution were also interesting to me. I plan to read this book one more time – having now become a more adept user of Google’s offerings – in order to see if I can dig out more ways to improve. I give this book 5 stars because of its readability and coverage of a tough topic. I came away smarter for reading it and plan to read it again soon. A fast read.
    Rating: 5 / 5

  3. Philip Simon said on December 2nd, 2009 at 10:19 pm

    I very much enjoyed this book. I had read Stross’ “The Microsoft Way” a few years ago and also found it to be very informative. This time, he covers the “it” company of the last ten years. Other than Apple, no company has enjoyed such a meteoric rise in the past decade.

    The chapters cover Google’s main endeavors, from Google Book Search (formerly Google Print) to Google Voice to Google Docs. Each product or product group is covered in a reasonable level of detail. Stross also provides a solid historical context of Google’s challenges, especially in relation to other computing stalwarts (read: Microsoft). In other words, Stross is not so glossly-eyed over Google’s success that he overlooks some comparable historical precedents.

    Stross is also not afraid to call a spade a spade: he apologetically calls Google out for some missteps over privacy, copyright infringement, and other snafus. His writing style is very digestible and I never felt lost reading about more technical concepts, such as cloud computing, indexing the web, or Google’s legendary algorithm.

    I do have a few complaints but they’re pretty minor. I would really have liked to see more about the two company’s founders. Larry and Sergey are given short shrift. I feel like I don’t know that much more about them. This book easily could have used another 30 to 50 pages on two of the most intelligent and important business figures of their era.

    In the end, this is an excellent book with a great deal of well-written content. I’ll be picking up some of Stross’ other books pretty soon.
    Rating: 4 / 5

  4. J. Hubble said on December 3rd, 2009 at 12:21 am

    If you want to know the origins of many of the Google features popular today, this is the book to read. If you are looking for a behind the scenes look at the people and personalities behind the company, this book is probably not for you. The author is clearly an outsider who knows a lot of the details of the company, but not much more than anybody who had dedicated time to studying it. There is very little intimacy with the Google founders or key players. However, the details of the different ‘business ventures’ of Google provide an effective ‘behind the scenes’ view of what Google was thinking when rolling out features like mail, and why it had to buy Youtube after being beat out in video.
    Rating: 4 / 5

  5. bobh said on December 3rd, 2009 at 1:59 am

    This book is a fluffed out magazine article. With a good editor, this would have made a great New York Times magazine article.

    But the author wanted a book, not a newspaper article, so here’s the result.

    The writing is repetitive, making the same obvious points over and over again. Ideas presented in previous chapters are slightly reworded and presented again, in long, multiple paragraphs. Sentences ramble, adding clauses of useless, obvious description. While reading the book, i kept thinking the author was trying to fill a quota of pages, instead of creating a dense, solid analysis.

    The author delves into three services: Google Books, Google Maps/Earth and gMail. The author interviews Google’s PR executives, attends a few trade shows, and dutifully presents the results. He tries to make mountains out of molehills. For example, he discusses privacy issues with gMail. I agree their are some privacy issues, but the idea doesn’t justify 30 pages of the book. The author presents the viewpoints of tech conference gadflies declaring “Why should Google “read” my email to present ads?”. Instantly, i thought ‘Hey, if you don’t like their free product, use something else. This isn’t the IRS. You do have a choice.’.

    It would have been much more interesting to hear more about Microsoft’s, Yahoo’s, IBMs responses to Google. He talks a little about it, but not much. I don’t think he has the chops to do a penetrating, creative analysis. He basically just presents the ideas of others, all of it just a collection of news articles found in other published sources.
    Rating: 2 / 5

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