If, in a twist of irony, you put the word Google into the Amazon book search, you now get more than 3,000 titles. One would think everything that could be written about Google already has been. Not deterred, Ken Auletta, who has written the Annals of Communication for The New Yorker for the last 18 years, has decided there are still a few more things to say. Surprisingly, he does manage to find a few in his recent book Googled: The End of the World as We Know It.
Part One gets things off to a good start, where the author opens with a description of a meeting between Mel Karmazin, Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Karmazin – the quintessential New York Madman – is to have said about Google’s impact on traditional advertising; “You’re f… with the magic.” In a less civil world, this would have actually been the subtitle of Auletta’s book. At the very least, it is its main thesis. “Half of advertising is wasted, you just don’t know which half” has been the foundation of advertising as long as there has been advertising. It’s as funny as it is true, but Karmazin believes Google has cracked the code. As a result is the world really has changed, and there is simply no putting the genie back in the bottle*.
Part Two is the least interesting part of the book, with Google’s start really well documented in several earlier books; The Search by John Battelle is a pretty good place to start, and does a better job of putting Google in the context of all the other search engines which also go their start around the same time. Battelle’s book was one of the earlier works to assert Google’s success can be attributed, to some degree, to luck. Or rather, the lucklessness of their competitors. What Auletta manages to add to the story is to find a quote attributed to Larry Page where he says AdSense “was probably more luck than a plan.” Also, the author highlights the missing ingredient provided by the enigmatic ‘Coach Campbell’; that is, Bill Campbell, Chairman of Intuit, Google board member and Silicon Valley confidante-to-the-technology-stars. He had the ability to weld together the traditional approach of Schmidt, and the revolutionary approach of Brin and Page.
Part Three is a dense description of the inevitable clashes arising from Google’s success; with government, so-called old media companies, book publishers and anybody else caught in the tsunami radiating out from the earthquake Google has created. It laboriously enumerates the corporate machinations, lawsuits and negotiations as the wealth inevitably gets redistributed. Two surprises are highlighted; Eric Schmidt’s much more significant contribution to Google’s success than had previously been asserted, and secondly, when Google gets it wrong, it may well be attributed to their leadership’s naivety, as opposed to outright malice. The section is highly detailed and well written, but the nature of the subject material still makes it hard to follow.
The final part of the book is where Auletta’s broad understanding and insight of the media industry really combine to make for some interesting reading. It’s where he finally explains the concept of being Googled by Google; turns out it’s a collective term that describes the net effect of Google focusing its gaze on a particular market space, and what happens to the current occupants of the space when they do.
There is, of course, an angle to Auletta’s book. To some degree, Auletta has been old media, at least during his tenure at The New Yorker. So when he says ‘The End of the World as We Know It’, it may more accurately describes ‘The End of the World as I Know It’. What Auletta, with his great journalistic powers at his disposal, should now investigate whether online advertising – post Google – actually works. If I am in any way representative, my pathological avoidance of the ‘sponsored link’ makes me think it might not. As always, I would highly recommend the Charlie Rose interview of Auletta talking about Googled. The book is well worth reading, and Auletta a person to whom its well worth worth listening.
*Of note is that Karmazin is now CEO of Sirius XM, the very existence of which is predicated on a business model based on an alternative to advertising. To fully appreciate Karmazin’s characterization in the book, it’s worth watching his interview with Charlie Rose.
