In the Plex

The most interesting book ever written about Google (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 studentsLarry Page and Sergey Brinhas 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 Googles 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 Googles relationship with China, including how Brin disagreed with his colleagues on the China strategyand why its social networking initiative failed; the first time Google tried chasing a successful competitor. He examines Googles 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 most authoritativeand in many ways the most entertaining (James Gleick, The New York Book Review) account of Google to date and offers an instructive primer on how the minds behind the worlds most influential internet company function (Richard Waters, The Wall Street Journal).