In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works and Shapes Our Lives
Steven Levy
June 2, 2011
4:30 p.m.-6:00 p.m.
Santa Monica
For almost three years, Steven Levy attended high-level meetings of Google executives, spent time with engineering teams as they developed projects, and ate in the free cafes on the Googleplex, a mathematical term for an inconceivably large number that is also the nickname of Google's campus.
The result of this immersion is Levy's latest book, "In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works and Shapes Our Lives," detailing the success - and the missteps - of arguably the most important and forward-looking company in the world.
At this Milken Institute Forum, Levy gave his take on the latest twists and turns in Google's story, including:
The cat-and-mouse games between the Chinese government and Google before it withdrew from the country, the tension between Google's executives in Mountain View and its employees in Beijing, and the fallout after Chinese hackers penetrated Google's digital vaults and exposed Chinese dissidents using Gmail.
The intense debate over Google's effort to digitize the world's books and a judge's decision in March to reject Google's allegedly one-sided copyright settlement with authors and publishers. The company's struggles with difficult issues like keeping user information, tracking users on the Internet, and the gathering of Wi-Fi information via the company's Street View collection process.
The unconventional style of Larry Page, who just became Google's CEO for a second time, as well as his colorful co-founder, Sergey Brin.
It's a story that Levy is infinitely qualified to tell. Now a senior writer at Wired magazine, Levy has covered technology since 1981 for such publications as Rolling Stone, The New Yorker and The New York Times. He was a senior editor and chief technology writer at Newsweek and is the author of several books, among them "The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture and Coolness," "Hackers" and "Insanely Great."
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