In Douglas Coupland Microserfs1995 novel, the twentysomethings who work at Microsoft so cossetted by perks and freebies that they hardly have lives outside the Office "campus". Read this book image of the early days of Google, we are tempted to assume that the founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, read over Microserfs very carefully indeed: "Google encased in a cocoon of essential services – onsite haircuts, on-site car washes, on-site dentist and doctor, free massages, free snacks, free lunch, free dinner, gaming groups, movie nights, wine and beer clubs" and so on. If you worked at Google, Google your life.
Douglas Edwards was "Google's word guy" between 1999 and 2005, responsible for the official text and branding. A former journalist with a literature degree, he portrays himself as a somewhat bemused outsider, indulges in a lot of retrospective office policy score points and insist with curious pride at his total lack of technical chops: apparently he never bothered to learn even basic HTML while at Google, nor did he take a few seconds to look up the definition of a "Java Virtual Machine" to write this book. He, however, has a beautiful line of wry tech metaphor, speaks at one point in a moment when "kids went offline on the backseat of Taurus", or describing a colleague: "her mind worked so quickly that her buffer overflows, fills all available space with a flurry of conversational words."
On his own account, however, had Edwards value just as a non-programmer, furnishing a humanistic corrective to the narrow software engineer's idea of "smart". To geeks mantra that data is not located, reacts Edwards sensible: "I would discover, however, that the data is located. Sometimes the method to collect it malfunctioned, sometimes it is misunderstood, and sometimes it will only provide part of the answer. " Even Google's famous algorithms could not do everything: firm hired eventually thousands of people to do it after the late was nonetheless admitted that advertising copy had to be screened by the people.
But then Google's success has always been built on iterated fiasco. Its first social network, Orkut, was launched before Facebook but judged by what one employee quoted here calls "tech snobbery": it was starved of the resources it needed to scale up. Later Buzz and wave came and went unlamented (and, in the case of the latter, uncomprehended of almost all). Now geekocracy dribble invites to Google +, giant's latest attempt to keep up with Twitter and Facebook.
Early on, as its Edwards warns history stops in 2005, "this book does not go deeply into Google's current imbroglios over censorship, regulation and monopoly." But we get some relevant history. 11 September 2001 were employees subject to retrieve all text and HTML by news sites to view it on Google. "Nobody asked whether it was within our legal rights to appropriate others ' content, ' Edwards comments laconically. He also describes a clever Move in the early stages of Google's book-digitization master plan: in the first instance they scanned only product catalogues, knowing that no company would complain about free promotion. Page and Brins stance on user privacy (retention and data-mining of search history, etc), meanwhile, appears a little better than notoriously pejorative of Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg. "I found some converts," Edwards writes, "beer for my vision of users decisions fully informed about the data they shared with us."
Google, it seems, was run simply as Larry and Sergey's len: "the only rules that applied were those they agreed." Lords to their vassals, of course, and the founders are portrayed as strange enough avaricious in their "human resources". Analyzing a decision to hire a person instead of using him as a consultant, Edwards writes: "Larry and Sergey did not like to hire intelligence, when they could buy the. There are only so many really smart people in the world. Why not collect them all? "
What, then, self-congratulatorily super intelligent masters of Google do with all these people's Pokémon? They are found, new ways to sell advertising. When they were still at Stanford, Brin and page had argued that a search engine that ran the ads had an obvious conflict of interest. So the ads first were considered "evil", until they could be stresses blessed by labelling them "useful" instead (because the "targeted" to the user's "interests"), and submit them separately from "organic" search results. Still, people today find their Google results is awash with zillions of useless splogs (spam blogs set up to catch the popular keywords) may doubt that the company has sufficient motivation to clean up its splog-listings: farmers, jo makes money for Google, and even by running its ads.
Google's wholesale embrace of advertising may have had another devastating if more subtle, effect. "Ross had a PhD. in the aerospace robotics ", Edwards writes of one employee," and the concepts of his own on how the ad system should develop. " One cannot help wondering about the loss to the world of flying robots, which resulted from this change of field. Another Googler, Edwards reports, resulted in "an effort to build one of the largest machine-learning systems in the world – just to improve ad targeting." Read the story of this constant brain drain from other disciplines (Google's early networking hardware guy was a former brain surgeon), a recall, what the former Facebook engineer, Jeff Hammerbacher, told BusinessWeek earlier this year: "the best minds of my generation thinks about how to make people click on ads. That sucks. "
It is, of course, that online advertising is now considered the best hope of survival for most of the "old media", Google's brilliant minds have worked so hard to render obsolete.
Unspeak: Words, are the arms of Steven Poole published by Abacus.
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