The Geekdom of Google

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But the company's professed virtue can turn too easily to hubris, Auletta notes. Time after time, Google's executives have been surprised by opposition to their actions. The most conspicuous miscue came last year when Google proposed a search ad deal with Yahoo to keep the latter out of Microsoft's (MSFT) clutches. Google seemed shockingly blind to the likelihood that many outsiders—including the Justice Dept., which threatened an antitrust lawsuit before Google backed down—could question the dominant industry leader's motives.

Readers might feel they've already heard much of what's here, and Auletta sheds little new light on Google's impact. The book also occasionally overplays the company's enthusiasm for strictly data-driven decisions. Google's engineers, Auletta writes, "naively believe that most mysteries, including the mysteries of human behavior, are unlocked with data." Yet so far, that belief seems more savvy than naive, and in any case it's not nearly as absolute as Auletta implies; Google uses thousands of human "raters" to help perfect its search results, for instance.

At the same time, Auletta takes Old Media to task for using Google as a "convenient piñata" for their frustrations about the power the Net gives people over their media consumption. Media companies would be better off embracing change, he contends. "If Google is destroying or weakening old business models, it is because the Internet inevitably destroys old ways of doing things," he writes. "It is a wave-generating company that other media companies ride, crash into, or are submerged by." What no one, including Auletta, can yet answer is how long Google can stay atop the waves it is creating.

Hof is BusinessWeek's Silicon Valley bureau chief.

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