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review: Non-fiction: An exploration of how the internet giant is run - complete with ideological inconsistencies How Google Works by Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg
[September 28, 2014]

review: Non-fiction: An exploration of how the internet giant is run - complete with ideological inconsistencies How Google Works by Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg


(Guardian (UK) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) The enormously powerful global advertising corporation called Google gets a pretty bad rap these days. It is constantly beleaguered by European legal investigations, and pilloried for its attitude to data privacy. (Though it is at least much better than Facebook in this regard.) So you might almost suspect that this book by Eric Schmidt, the company's former CEO, and Jonathan Rosenberg, an adviser to the current CEO Larry Page, is a carefully designed PR exercise. The authors do make a point of seeing the funny side when Google is mocked, and even reproduce some examples concocted by employees. I liked the picture of a dog wearing Google's nerdy computerised spectacles, captioned: "OK Glass, show me a squirrel." As it turns out, How Google Works is not about the technical functioning of its search or email services, but how the company is managed. The promise is that if you too run a company (or aspire to do so), you will learn the secrets of Google's success. So, you should employ "smart creatives", because they are creative but also, you know, clever. (In one peculiar aside, Shakespeare's Othello is called a "smart creative", which I guess we are not supposed to take as an excuse for homicidal tantrums on the part of tech entrepreneurs.) You should also encourage people to disagree in meetings, experiment relentlessly (the Silicon Valley mantra is "ship and iterate"), and focus on the user's experience. The authors even throw out a (predictably unfulfilled) promise to teach you "how to imagine the unimaginable", just like the French Nescafe adverts I remember that used to exhort the viewer to seize the unseizable (and, by implication, drink the undrinkable). An "innovation bureaucracy", the authors pertly point out, is an oxymoron, so you should just let your smart creatives be, er, smartly creative.



Sprinkled with Googley glamour as it might be, and dense with minor but interesting details - on, for instance, the early days of Google Maps, or the internal arguments about whether Google should withdraw its censored websearch from China - this is not quite as unlike other business books as its authors hope. They mock the wilder examples of business jargon in conventional corporate "mission statements", yet they also sincerely write things like: "He asked Eric to rally the team and create a plan that would establish clear deliverables." There is, too, the odd flash of quite alarming authoritarianism: "product managers", we are told, "need to work, eat, and live with their engineers". Live with them as well? Really? The authors are contemptuous of the idea of "worklife balance", instead citing approvingly those of their employees who are mothers and who obediently turn email and messaging back on at 9pm when they are at home.

More deeply problematic are some of the book's ideological inconsistencies. The authors do not notice the possible tension, for example, between their cheerleading vision of the tech industry "disrupting" higher education through what are called MOOCs (massively open online courses), on the one hand, and their admiring description of how Google's founders preferred to organise their business not on normal corporate lines but more like academia (as at their alma mater, Stanford). It is precisely this academic culture that is under attack from the "disruptive" promise (or threat) of online universities.


The alert reader will also perceive Google's history being massaged if not airbrushed. Schmidt and Rosenberg claim that the business plan was always going to be selling ads: "The Google founders knew that they would make money from advertising. Initially they didn't know exactly how." Except that, in their famous 1996 paper introducing the principles behind Google, "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine" (mentioned nowhere in this book), the founders wrote: "[We] expect that advertising-funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers . . . we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm." Meanwhile, the question of whether the development of Google's Android phone operating system was heavily influenced by the unveiling of the first iPhone - previous demos of Android had shown it running on old-style phones with number keys - is blandly dodged. (The authors claim that it is a rule at Google not to "follow the competition".) What exactly happened between 2012, when Google bought the handset-maker Motorola, and 2014, when it sold it for much less to Lenovo, is never disclosed beyond some vague hints at problems with Motorola's "culture". Nor is there any explanation of why certain Google products - for instance, what they acknowledge was the "popular" RSS service Google Reader - get "retired", in the corporate euphemism, or (to the rest of us) shut down.

Google is still proud, at least, of its ruling principle, "Don't be evil", which seems to have inspired other negative slogans in powerful places: Facebook's is "Don't be lame", while "Don't do stupid stuff" allegedly informs Barack Obama's foreign policy. The problem, you might think, is that "Don't be evil" implies that anything that is not outright evil is probably OK. Rhetorically, it seems that Google has at least inspired everyone to set a very low bar. My own rule for personal moral improvement is "Don't be a serial killer".

This principle will no doubt help make me a saint, just as merely not being evil will save our species. "With enough data and the ability to crunch it," Schmidt and Rosenberg write hopefully, "virtually any challenge facing humanity today can be solved." I look forward to their demonstration that big stacks of computers can resolve conflicts in Syria or Gaza. More appealingly realistic, in the meantime, might be Google's laissez-faire attitude to smaller problems. Schmidt was once asked what Google's dress code was. He replied: "You must wear something." 268pp, John Murray, pounds 25 To order How Google Works for pounds 18.49, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846.

Captions: A Google doodle celebrating the life of Charlotte Bronte (c) 2014 Guardian Newspapers Limited.

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