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

The most immediate concerns of Google’s Washington office were the privacy issues raised by the acquisition of DoubleClick. By the end of 2007, Google was battling the image that it was the Microsoft of 2000. “No question that people here regularly discuss Microsoft’s experience and use that as a cautionary tale,” said Elliot Schrage, the vice president of global communications and public affairs. On the subject of Microsoft, Brin said, “Microsoft is a bit of an unusual company. They don’t seem to like any of us being successful in the technology space.”

So Google sought to demonstrate that it was reaching out to media companies as well as to Washington. To preserve copyrights, YouTube announced that it was testing new antipiracy software to block unauthorized content from being uploaded and viewed. In an ecumenical spirit, the word partnership was constantly invoked by Google executives. Repeatedly, they celebrated its “more than 100,000 partners,” the more than three billion dollars it then distributed annually to Web sites and mostly small business partners in its AdSense program. As 2007 progressed, said General Electric’s Beth Comstock, relations with Google thawed and by summer, G.E.’s NBC negotiated for Google to sell some of the network’s remnant ads. “In the end, I was less concerned that Google was out to replace our entire sales force,” she said.

Google, however, was still clear-eyed about the inevitable gap between its engineers and traditional media. Google’s engineering prowess would, inevitably, make the consumption of media and the selling of advertising more efficient, Larry Page told me one afternoon as we sat in the small, bare-walled conference room steps from his office. So was it inevitable, I asked, that “Google would sometimes bump into traditional media?”

Without hesitation, he corrected me. “I would say, always,” he said in his deep baritone, emitting a subdued chuckle. His was not a boast; rather, it was a candid recognition of reality. He believes Google’s engineers can eradicate most inefficiencies if given the time and resources.

Page had reasons to feel confident. Google had a great year in 2007. Measured by growth, it was Google’s best year, with revenues soaring 60 percent to $16.6 billion, with international revenues contributing nearly half the total, and with profits climbing to $4.2 billion. Google ended the year with 16,805 full-time employees, offices in twenty countries, and the search engine available in 117 languages. And the year had been a personally happy one for Page and Brin. Page married Lucy Southworth, a former model who earned her Ph.D. in bioinformatics in January 2009 from Stanford; they married seven months after Brin wed Anne Wojcicki.

But Sheryl Sandberg was worried. She had held a ranking job in the Clinton administration before, joining Google in 2001, where she supervised all online sales for AdWords and AdSense, and was regularly hailed by Fortune magazine as one of the fifty most powerful female executives in America. Sandberg came to believe Google’s vice was the flip side of its virtue. “We’re an engineering company in that products come first,” she said. “A lot of the reason we’re winning is because our engineering is better.” Reminded that she once was quoted as saying Google made a mistake in not speaking to publishers and answering their questions before announcing plans to digitize all books, she added, “Sometimes we make mistakes here because we move too quickly”

Eric Schmidt would, inadvertently, prove her point. In August 2007, he piloted his Gulfstream G550 to Aspen, Colorado, to give the keynote speech at a dinner held by the free-market oriented Progress and Freedom Foundation. In the speech, he described four “basic principles,” as he referred to them, that he believes are vital for media and tech companies to embrace: freedom of speech, universal broadband access, net neutrality, and transparency. Missing from his prepared remarks were thoughts about privacy and copyright-and how far Google might push the permissible boundaries. (When, for instance, does anticipating a user’s wants become an intrusion? When does fair use become copyright infringement?)

A few weeks later, seated in his tiny conference room on the Mountain View campus, I discussed that speech with Schmidt. Why, I asked, didn’t he mention privacy in his Aspen talk?

There was a long pause before he said, “No particular reason. It’s sort of a given. If we violate the privacy of our users, they’ll leave us.”

And why no mention of copyright?

“Maybe it was the altitude! I was just chatting away.” Besides, he said, copyright “was not an absolute right” and had to be balanced by fair use.

Isn’t it true that Google wants to push the envelope on privacy and copyright?

“That’s probably correct,” Schmidt conceded. “If there’s a legal case, we’re going to favor the legal one that favors users.”

“Google, if it were a person, has all the flaws and all of the virtues of a classic Silicon Valley geek,” said Columbia ’s Tim Wu, who between jobs teaching law worked for a spell in the Valley. “In some ways, they are very principled.” He cited Google’s 20 percent time, saying that few “money-crazed companies would allow” such a thing. “But they have this total deaf ear to certain types of issues. One of them is privacy.” Why? Because, he said, “They just love that data because they can do neat things with it.”

(2007-2008)

For all its democratic ethos, its belief in “the wisdom of crowds,” at Google the engineer is king, held above the crowd. The vaunted 20 percent time that is parceled out selectively by management to nonengineers is given universally to the half of Google employees who are technically trained. Salaries for engineers are relatively modest-a beginning engineer starts at around $100,000 (versus about $50,000 for nonengineers), and rises to about $300,000, including a bonus-but stock rewards are extravagant. Google rewarded its employees with $868.6 million in stock in 2007, a one-year increase of more than 90 percent.

The importance the company attaches to engineers is spotlighted by the time Google’s founders and CEO Schmidt devote to meetings with them. Their Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoons are crammed with Google Product Strategy (GPS) reviews. Teams made up mostly of engineers meet in a long, dimly lit, low-ceilinged conference room named Mar rakesh, on the second floor of Building 43, next to the office that Page and Brin share. Industrial gray carpet covers the floor and melts into the gray walls. A massive, pale oak custom-made rectangular table stretches almost the full length of the room; at one end are billowy red-velvet couches, and at the other, large, flat LCD screens. Whiteboards line the walls. There are two projectors, so time is not wasted unloading and reloading projectors during multiple presentations, and all cables and wires are color coded to minimize time locating the right connections for laptops and other electronic devices.

Meetings last from fifteen minutes to two hours, and are scheduled one after another, like airport takeoffs and landings. “If you want to talk to Larry or Sergey, you can at one of these meetings,” said Vice President Megan Smith. “If you work at another company, can you get to the CEO within seven days? Probably not.” Often at these meetings, said Tim Armstrong, “Larry is going to take one side of the argument and Sergey is going to take the exact opposite side, and what you’re going to see is that everyone is going to argue in the middle and at some point it is going to be clear what the answer is.” This is a process that allows Page and Brin to learn, he said, “who comes to the meeting prepared” and who has the passion and guts to challenge them.