I had a chance at a recent Wired event to chat with Steven Levy about In The Plex which I enjoyed greatly. It is a fun, fascinating read about how a great innovation in search and a second innovation — monetizing it — led to creation, development, and dominance of Google.

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

Levy, who had done a few way early and quite complementary articles on Google (before anyone knew who they were) was granted “unprecedented access to the company” and it shows in his quite revelatory book about how how Google became the company it is today.

The key to Google’s success in all of their businesses, according to Levy, is the engineering mind-set and adoption of such Internet values as speed, openness, experimentation, and risk taking.

I was tempted to accuse Levy of fawning over the company, but he is pretty brutal on how Google stumbled so badly in China as well as in social networking,

He writes with a deep understanding of engineering and software — which works terrifically well in this book. That technology savvy is what was noticeably missing from Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs.

If you are curious as to how things operate in the Googleplex, this books gives you the details.

Source: The Big Picture