In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives

by Steven Levy

phone display had four bars. There are significant swaths of the United States of America where one can barely pull in a signal—or gets no bars at all. But here in rural India, the signal was strong.

Google, it turns out, was on the verge of a multimillion-dollar mobile effort to make smart phones into information prostheses, adjuncts to the human brain that would allow people to get information to a vast swath of all the world’s knowledge instantly.

Another Tokyo high point was the 5 A.M. trip to the Tsukiji fish market. It wasn’t the fresh sushi that fascinated the APMs but the mechanics of the fish auction, in some ways similar to the way Google works its AdWords program.

One of them asked, “We’ve heard the road map for products, what’s the road map for revenues?” She almost bit his head off. “That’s not the way to think,” she said. “We are focused on our users. If we make them happy, we will have revenues.”

“This is the gene that Larry and Sergey look for,” she told me. “Even if they leave, it’s still good for us. They’re going to take the Google DNA with them.”

“I think I was the first kid in my elementary school to turn in a word-processed document.”

same for myself. I was the first at my university to take a laptop to class & compose notes.

could unnerve people by simply not talking. But when he did speak, more often than not he would come out with ideas that bordered on the fantastic.

“Even if you fail at your ambitious thing, it’s very hard to fail completely,” he says. “That’s the thing that people don’t get.” Page always thought about that. When people proposed a short-term solution, Page’s instinct was to think long term.