Book Review – The Google Story

Recently, I had finished reading The Google Story by David A. Wise. This is not a geek manual. There is enough technical information to keep the story moving without losing the reader in code waffle. Google was founded in 1998 and within a span of 17 years; it has become a world leader in internet. Founders Sergey and Larry started Google when they were Ph.D. students at Stanford University in computer science. They both had a crazy idea to download entire information available on the Internet.

There is a lot in the book about the culture of Google, which is compared to a university campus more often than a corporation. Most people works in teams of three to five maximum, and engineers are given 20% time, one day a week in which to work on stuff that’s interesting to them, regardless of its commercial viability. One of the colleagues even writes an equation to explain the whole phenomenon: “youth + freedom + transparency + new model + the general public’s benefit + belief in trust = The Miracle of Google”. The Google story seems to be the mission to prove that equation from first principles.

It is also a business story. For the business reader, it’s fascinating to learn how venture capital firms, still reeling from the post dot com collapse, approached the infant Google with great suspicion, but found the founders and their ideas irresistible. One lesson from the book – no matter how brilliant your science and engineering credentials, you need a business person to talk to the Wall Street and lead your company into the IPO.

It also answers a question that most of our daily users have asked to some point: how does Google makes any money? Vise sees Google as just like any other media corporation in that regard: Advertising. Again the Google Adwords model is described simply. It is a great story. It is a series of chapters that read like articles. There is a whole chapter on Google Chef, Issues in China, and competitive wars with Microsoft. The Google story is the living example of dedication and continued struggle of men who succeeded in achieving their magnificent goals.

David and Goliath: Malcolm Gladwell

Recently, I finished reading David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants. It is a non-fiction book written by Malcolm Gladwell. The book is focused on the probability of improbable events occurring in situations where one outcome is greatly favored over the other. The book contains many different historical stories of these underdogs who wind up beating the odds, the most famous being the story of David and Goliath.

David was the shepherd in Israel, who also serves Israel army for food. Goliath was the giant soldier in Palestine army. The story is 800 years old. Once both the armies attacked each other and nobody was ready to fight from Israel when Goliath came forward to fight. Goliath said, if any of the person defeats me then my army would surrender in front of you. Nobody came forward to fight and then David came forward, asked his king to fight against giant Goliath. Everybody laughed and underestimated David. Then David came in front of Goliath to fight and hit him with a slinger and killed him.

There had been many examples of stories like David and Goliath in the past. When a underestimated man defeated a person powerful then him, he is called as Underdog. The same story happened in 1980, which is termed as ‘Miracle on Ice’. This was the story of United States Ice Hockey National team made up of amateur and collegiate players, who defeated the Soviet Union National team, which had won six gold medals in last seven Olympics. US Ice Hockey team was named as ‘Underdogs’.

In this book, there are stories about the civil rights movements, the religious conflicts in Ireland, and the others. The moral of some of these stories can be dark. This is one unusual lesson about change the book teaches. Most success stories are full of compromises, exchanges, chicanery, and actions. We might find hard to accept in a purist moral framework or as an enforcer of polite society. This is one of the best books, which tells about the art of battling giants and tells about the people who had significant skills fired in the kiln of adversity, who are intolerant of the status quo. We might not like them, they may do things we might think are inadvisable, but they are our giant-killers. One must read this book.