I'm feeling lucky
Comparing Google to an ordinary business is like comparing a rocket to an Edsel. Edwards, Employee Number 59, offers the first inside view of Google, giving readers a chance to fully experience the bizarre mix of camaraderie and competition at this phenomenal company. Edwards, Google's first director of marketing and brand management, describes it as it happened. We see the first, pioneering steps of Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the company's young, idiosyncratic partners; the evolution of the company's famously nonhierarchical structure (where every employee finds a problem to tackle or a feature to create and works independently); the development of brand identity; the races to develop and implement each new feature; and the many ideas that never came to pass.
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- One of my favorite genres!
Any book by Steven Levy is great, he is the master! He wrote multiple books about Apple, and also about Google, Facebook,…
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I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 by Douglas Edwards
- You're right, I probably could have done a better job citing sources on these claims. You can read about Larry Page and Sergey Brin's early anti-ads stance in any number of books about Google, or in their own published paper that first introduced the idea for Google: http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html
I summarized a lot of the literature in this article a while back about how Google landed on its business model: http://www.slate.com/articles/business/when_big_businesses_w...
See in particular John Battelle's "The Search" (2005), Steven Levy's "In the Plex" (2011), and Doug Edwards' "I'm Feeling Lucky" (2011).
As for Facebook, there's probably less public documentation but I have been following/covering it from very early on and personally know a few of its earliest employees. Ads have never been Zuck's focus.
Again, as I say in this piece, the fact that these companies didn't set out to become advertising/surveillance juggernauts doesn't excuse anything. They absolutely are. But I raised this point about their mission and origins to help explain why it seems obvious to those companies' leaders that customers' data is not their primary product.
- The Lean Startup - Eric Ries
Essays (any) - Paul Graham
I personally enjoyed "I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59" by Douglas Edwards as well.
- I think it'd be illogical for Google not to in some ways compete with alternatives, like Blekko in this case. Google's core business is search, and in the early days, it was this very naive behavior that allowed Google to sneak right under places like Inktomi. Just because a search engine starts small doesn't mean it can't gain traction or market, and if it has compelling enough features, it'll happen in a heartbeat.
I suggest reading "I'm Feeling Lucky" by Douglass Edwards - the early chapters describe a lot of Google's anxiety of being killed by other search engines for one reason or another. It helps to explain why they'd be quick to adopt new strategies to keep results fresh.
- "A. At the beginning, Google had a very small executive team, and there was a growing conflict within. Some people said, we’re secretly taking people’s data, if folks find out about this, they’re going to be furious; we have to tell them. But the other side said, if we tell people what we’re doing, they will never forgive us. In I’m Feeling Lucky, Douglas Edwards, the first brand manager at Google, writes about a meeting where this argument was going on between the two factions. And Larry Page, the founder, was sitting there very quiet, listening. When they were done arguing, he just said: “We can never tell them.” He understood that they were stealing. And they were terrified of one thing then, and it’s the same thing they’re terrified of now: the law. That it would come into their sphere and say: this is illegal, this is theft, you can’t do this."
- "I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59" By Douglas Edwards Google Books: https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0547416997
