Google then and now

The National Interest is running my review of Douglas Edwards's new memoir, I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59. Here's how the review begins: In December 2001, an upstart Silicon Valley company named Google posted its corporate philosophy, in the form of a list of "Ten Things We've Found to be True," on its website. At once charmingly idealistic and off-puttingly smug, the list set the tone for Google's future public pronouncements. "You can be serious without a suit," read one of the tenets. "You can make money without doing evil," read another. But it was the most innocuous sounding of the ten principles—"It's best to do one thing really, really well"—that would prove to be most fateful for the company. No sooner had it pledged to remain a specialist than it began to break its promise by branching into new markets, with far-reaching consequences not only for its own business but also for the Internet as a whole. Google issued its philosophy at a decisive moment in its history. Although it had incorporated just three years earlier, in late 1998, its eponymous search engine was already widely viewed as the best tool available for navigating the...