Planet Google: How One Company's All-Encompassing Vision Is Transforming Our Lives

by RandallE.Stross (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  2008

  $3.47

  After Google had one of the most successful IPOs in history, in August, 2004, raising a staggering amount of cash, the company set forth on an incredibly audacious new strategy for its future, a vision so bold, large-scale and in many ways so troubling that the company has worked very hard to keep it totally under wraps. Randy Stross has achieved unprecedented access to the Google headquarters and top management, including notoriously close-to-the-vest CEO Eric Schmidt, and to a wide range of sources who have worked with Google or monitored its activities, and he will reveal in this book for the first time the astonishing scale and scope of what Google is setting out to accomplish, and also explore the profound implications for not only the business world, but for our culture at large.

• Used

  Paperback
  2008

  $120.29

  Google has a dream: to manage the entire world's information. They want access to every single bit of it they can - from news, to financial and historical data; from the content of books, films and TV, to a complete record of the Earth's surface; and most controversially, the statistics of our personal lives - from what we have been reading, to who we have been talking to, to what we have been buying and from where. If information is power then Google are fast becoming one of the world's most commanding forces. Google is almost evangelical in its belief that by realizing its vision, it will be fulfilling the promise of computing as envisioned by its founding developers. Others, however, are increasingly alarmed by the potential invasion of privacy that Google's vision might both entail and enable. With unprecedented access to the key players at Google HQ, Planet Google is a revelatory - and often alarming - behind-the-scenes investigation into Google's plans, and the implications of its mission for our future.