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GQ on Google's Road to Riches
prostoalex writes "John Heilemann writes the untold story of Google IPO in GQ magazine (out of all tech publications out there). It's a story about Google founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Google CEO Eric Scmidt and Silicon Valley venture capitalists that guided Google in the startup phase to take it public later. The article answers many questions that readers perhaps had about Google. Why go IPO when your earnings are just fine? How much power do Sergey and Larry have inside the company? What's the reason for so much secrecy? One interesting episode describes an engineer squatting CEO's office seeking solutide from the noise surrounding him in the cube area."
why the salaries of the amazing engineers at Google aren't too high, even after the IPO.
Make your computer faster: rm -rf
This article is nothing but a fluff piece. No new information at all, except perhaps the bit about the poached eggs at the Nasdaq launch.
And to think the entire empire was based on one simple fact: if you make the ads appear to be contextual and related to the rest of a page, a large majority of users (over 80%) will not recognize they're even looking at ads, and thus will be more likely to click.
That's the fundamental genius of Google. They've fooled most of their users. Btw if you don't believe the part about most users being unable to recognize text ads, here's the story about it from the BBC:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4201343.stm
I think in a network filled with porn, spam and viruses, anything that's streamlined and that people like on the Internet is revolutionary.
Exactly. You need that kind of money IMO to compete with the recent MSN Search ads and (still their greatest threat I'm sure) Yahoo. GOOG's still my crutch search engine but I think they'll make commercials and open up GMail more (they have: 50 invites/user now), so that their mini-ads get more attention (and give Google more dough).
Any magazine with Lindsay on the cover is good enough for me. Yowza, to quote Greg Roelofs.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
I googled "security", a very highly-valued keyword, on both IE and Mozilla. There is a very clear blue line between the ads and the results.
In fact, this is simply good design. The line does not over-awe the rest of the page, keeping Google's design plain, simple and highly efficient. As for the colors, webmasters are free to use CSS, to make it more apparent. A site I frequent puts Google ads in its own panel. If webmasters cannot follow clean UI designs, how is that Google's fault?
In any case, the grand-grand-parent insinuated that Google fools users, when it is in fact the users who fool themselves. Even in the BBC article, it just mentions that users can't tell the difference, but does not fault either side.
The myth of "Google Boys of Company G" continues. The GQ article manages to talk to everybody but the boys, which tells you how Page and Brin know the art of "Robert Redford PR Strategy" -- clam up and keep everyone guessing. My take is that Google's success, so far, has one fundamental basis -- the products it offers are free and, by and large, not sources of headaches, as opposed to the products of often-compared Microsoft which cost consumers money and much grief (horrible security, to name one). Google and Microsoft get roasted frequently in this space, but one notices that only the latter receives genuine wrath -- many Slashdotters are so mad at Microsoft that they simply switch to Linux or Firefox, but I bet only a few would ditch Google altogether. Eric Schmidt, the "playground supervisor" of Google, shines in this piece. I got a kick out of reading that Schmidt stopped the boys from going into low-cost space launchings and banning telephones in a new building. On the other hand, what's wrong with "Google Spaceship"?
Sun and Fun
It's an excellent article, except that it always calls the Google founders "boys" - actually they are probably the mosty clever and smart founders since long.
It's interesting to read that even those smart founders had to accept an external CEO - pushed in by anxious venture capitalists. Nevertheless, it's good to see that they managed to stay in control; what is expressed as "pet CEO" in the article.
Personally, I think that firms that are lead by a small group are mostly always better managed than those who have an UberCEO. Wish that Google stays that way.
And, most of all, I wish that venture capitalists will accept that founders need to stay in control - not necessarily in the daily operations (CEO), but at least in the kind of decision group such as at Google. Unfortunately, I am not too confident about this.