Ken Auletta: Googled: The End of the World as We Know It

While digital companies burgeoned, between 2000 and 2007 traditional media companies lost 167,600 jobs, or one out of every 6. Newspapers, which traditionally claimed nearly a quarter of the just under two hundred billion dollars spent on advertising in the United States, by 2007 were watching their share of ads plunge below 20 percent, and this number was projected to soon fall to 15 percent or lower. These shifts do not lead to the conclusion embraced by many in Silicon Valley that the digital age is the most liberating and meaningful period of technological change the world has yet experienced. Even if one were to discount fire, the wheel, Guten berg’s printing press, or the combustion engine, what about Mr. Edison? Without electricity, there would be no Internet, no computers, no wireless devices, no subways, not to mention no lightbulbs, no air-conditioning, no telephone, radio, or television. But what does set this era apart from others is velocity. It took telephones seventy-one years to penetrate 50 percent of American homes, electricity fifty-two years, and TV three decades. The Internet reached more than 50 percent of Americans in a mere decade; DVD penetration was faster, taking just seven years. Facebook built up a community of two hundred million users in just five years. Because the digital realm is made up of bits, it does not run out of supplies or have space constraints.

Events were moving so rapidly that even the smartest people were guessing, and often guessing wrong. In the nineties, Rupert Murdoch, among others, was convinced his News Corporation could grow by acquiring more local TV stations; Bill Gates of Microsoft asserted that the Internet would kill television networks, which it didn’t; Time Warner mistakenly bet that television, not the Internet, would be the preferred interactive medium; telephone companies rushed to acquire cable companies, only later to sell them; investors clamored to bet on companies that later faded, such as Excite, Netscape, Wang Laboratories, Commodore, Lycos. Israeli entrepreneur Yossi Vardi, whose company was behind the invention of instant messaging, compiled a chart of thirty-four technology stocks that were ranked as premier growth stocks in 1980. By 1999, only one, Intel, was a consistent growth company, while twenty-three had drowned and the others were treading water.

Meanwhile, as traditional media was slicing employees, Google in early 2008 was receiving 1 million job applications per year, adding 150 employees per week, and employing nearly 20,000. After the company went public in 2004, its ledger sheet astonished the media. Its revenues, which were $3.2 billion in 2004, zoomed to $16.6 billion in 2007; in that same span, its net profits climbed from $399 million to $4.2 billion. Defying a worldwide recession, its 2008 profits were $4.2 billion and its revenues rose to $21.8 billion (97 percent of it from advertising).

Google had become a juggernaut; it now produced two-thirds of all Internet searches in the United States and nearly 70 percent worldwide. Its index contained one trillion Web pages in 2008, and according to Brin, every four hours Google indexed the equivalent of the entire Library of Congress. In early 2009, users were clicking on and off billions of pages per day and receiving tens of billions of daily advertising impressions. Google’s wingspan was also getting wider. In 2006, it acquired YouTube, the largest user-generated video Web site, with an estimated twenty-five million unique daily visitors in November of that year. In 2007, it acquired DoubleClick, the foremost digital marketing company; that year, DoubleClick posted seventeen billion display ads daily. Google now hogged 40 percent of both the twenty-three billion dollars spent to advertise online in the United States, and the fifty-four billion dollars worldwide online advertising. Google’s ad revenues in 2008 matched the combined advertising revenues of the five broadcast networks (CBS, NBC, ABC, Fox, and the CW). By 2011, Web advertising in the United States was expected to climb to sixty billion dollars, or 13 percent of all ad dollars. This meant more dollars siphoned from traditional media, with the largest slice probably going to Google. And Google had started initiatives to sell advertising for television, radio, and newspapers, which could boost its market share. Google also introduced other services: Gmail, Google News, Google Earth, Google Maps, Google Video, Picasa for sharing digital photographs, Google Books to search every book ever published, Orkut, a social network site, or additional “cloud computing” applications such as Desktop or Docs.

By 2008, Mel Karmazin was no longer alone in questioning Google’s intentions. Nor were those intentions obscure. In the disclosure documents it filed with the SEC in 2008, Google declared, “We began as a technology company, and have evolved into a software, technology, internet, advertising and media company all rolled into one.” When Google adds mobile phones and a full menu of software applications to its cloud computing, and if it figures out a way to monetize YouTube, Eric Schmidt told me, he thinks it is conceivable that Google can become the first media company to generate one hundred billion dollars in revenues. It irritated media executives to hear Schmidt say, “We are in the advertising business,” yet hear Google employees constantly say they were on a quest to bring information to the masses, as if they toiled for a nonprofit that awarded no bonuses.

Marc Andreessen, thirty-eight, who transformed the Internet into a mass medium by helping invent what became the Netscape browser when he was a student and who is today a successful Internet entrepreneur seeking to build his third billion-dollar-plus company, is suspicious of Google’s intentions: “Their game plan is to do everything. Google is Andy Kaufman. The whole thing with Andy Kaufman is you could never tell when he was joking. Google comes out with a straight face and said, ‘We’re just going to be a search engine. We’re not going to be doing any of this other stuff”-competing with advertising agencies, with telephone companies by getting into the cell phone business, with Hollywood, with publishers, with newspapers. “But I am quite sure they’re joking.”

THERE IS A DISCONNECT between the way Google is often perceived and the way it perceives itself. “I sometimes feel like I live on another planet and speak a different language from traditional media companies,” Eric Schmidt said. And in a sense, Google does live on a separate planet. When it moved to its first Mountain View campus in August 1999, the move reflected the determination of its two young founders to keep employees focused inward. The current Googleplex in Mountain View is a collection of two-and three-story buildings with outdoor tables and park benches shaded by trees, a vegetable garden, and walkways pulsing with people and bicycles. Employees enjoy free meals and luxurious snacks (at a cost to Google of about seventy million dollars per year), and are offered bicycles to travel between buildings containing massage rooms and gyms staffed with trainers. Employees eat at large cafeteria tables, take breaks in lounges with pool tables and espresso machines. No need to leave campus for a car wash or oil change; they’re available on Thursdays. Also available are barbers, dry cleaners, day care, dog care, dentists, and five physicians to dispense free physicals and medical care. Comfortable, Wi-Fi-equipped, biodiesel commuter buses transport employees to and from campus from as far away as San Francisco, and they run from early morning to late at night. No need to buy laptop computers; employees choose their own for free. Maternity leave consists of five months off at full salary, and new dads can take seven weeks off at full pay.

Most employees are alloted a day a week, or 20 percent of their time, to work on projects they feel passionate about. This has produced more than a few of Google’s technological breakthroughs. Just as important, it conveys a sense of freedom. “It’s a way of assuring people that they are scientists and artists,” said Indian-born engineer Krishna Bharat, who used his 20 percent time to invent Google News. It’s also a way to encourage engineers to push the envelope, to assume that their mission is to disrupt traditional ways of doing things.