Transcript

Discussing the Book, "In the Plex"

July 13, 2011

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You’re listening to an archived version of the PDF Summer Book Club Call featuring special guest Steven Levy, author of ‘In the Plex, How Google Thinks, Works and Shapes our Lives.

The call was recorded on July 13th and is presented here in its entirety. For more information on Personal Democracy Forum and our call series, visit PersonalDemocracy.com or follow us on Twitter at PDFT. Thanks and enjoy the call.

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MICAH SIFRY: Hi everybody. This is Micah Sifry from Personal Democracy Forum joining you for yet another gathering of the PDF network for our bi-weekly conference calls with movers and shakers, thinkers, doers in the political technology space.

As always, we’re thankful at Personal Democracy Forum to AT&T for sponsoring these calls, making them possible.

And this week we’re continuing in our series of summer book chats. We decided to celebrate the season where we try to catch up on our reading by bringing a couple of authors on who are part of our community writing things about things that are of great interest to our community. Last time we had Eli Pariser whose new book The Filter Bubble is getting a lot of good attention.

And this week we’re really, really lucky to be joined by Steven Levy who is probably one of the handful of veteran journalists who have covered the entire rise of modern technology space. You probably know him for his classic book Hackers, Heroes of the Computer Revolution. He’s written a number of books about Apple, including Insanely Great and The Personal Fixing and today we’re going to spend an hour with Steve talking about his new book, In the Plex: How Google Things, Works and Shapes our Lives.

And as with our other calls, I’m going to ask people who are listening to please mute your phones, that’s simply hit *6 or whatever mute button you may have available to you. But unlike with our other calls where we normally sort of – I banter with the author for the first half hour then we open things up, I’m going to keep things a little bit looser. So, we’ll see how that goes. This means that if you feel a pressing need to jump in with a question or a comment, unmute your phone and politely say, ‘excuse me, there’s something I want to raise or ask,’ and we’ll see how that goes.

If it gets to (inaudible) then I’ll switch to the system where I moderate and sort of seek your questions in the queue up on the dashboard that I’m using here. But for now we’ll go like this.

So, Steve I have to tell you first of all, I have completely enjoyed reading your book. I suspect because I have yet – I can’t think of any other book that has gotten so far inside the story of Google, the culture of Google and not only do you provide in-depth portraits of the founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, but many of the other key engineers, innovators and some of their key policy people. They all make substantial appearances in the book, not just cameos. And so for anybody who really wants to bone up if you will on this amazing company, there’s probably no better book to do so.

The first thing I wanted to ask you is how long did it take you do this? What was actually the process for you? What kind of access did you have? Were there any restrictions on your ability to report the book? Just tell us what it was like for starters.

STEVEN LEVY: Sure, yeah, and thanks for having me to this event. And thanks for all of you who are on the call here. It’s really gratifying to hear your comments about the book because that’s exactly what I set out and intended to do, which was to take this deep eye into Google and get this access.

The idea for how to do this emerged from me in the summer of 2007 when I took a trip with some young Google managers. They go (inaudible) trek you to Google, takes these people who are supposed to be future leaders of Google on an international trip every year and I accompanied them; literally, we went around the world. We went from San Francisco to Tokyo to Beijing to Bangalore to Tel Aviv and back to the U. S.

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And for 16 days I spent 24/7 with these people and realized well, there’s something going on at Google even though I’ve been covering it for about a year with Newsweek, I hadn’t seen this before. It’s a dimension of the company – the internet is just woven into the consciousness of the people and the operations and I thought maybe I should try to pursue a whole book taken from the inside where I could go back and explain sort of from an inside/out view how they did their products and how they think and what the culture’s like.

And I pitched this to them and amazingly Larry and Sergey signed off on it. And the deal was, they didn’t give me a badge. They told me actually if they had a badge, they would give me one if I gave them approval over what I wrote and I didn’t want to get into that.

So, I was independent to write what I wanted and I could talk to anyone I wanted. They set up an interview. Very few people turned down – I can probably count the fingers on the one hand of people who didn’t want to talk to me and probably most of those eventually talked to me. I started a number of meetings, I got to what’s the progress of a number of products that were under development at the time there. And the one thing I agreed to was I wouldn’t write about a product before it was out. So, my book would not be an announcement of a product sooner than Google wanted. And in one case, all I can say now is Google Plus – I couldn’t write about. All the stuff that happened with Google Plus in the book – I sort of tweaked out and did the origins of what was called Emerald City but that’s the reason in part you saw 6,000 word drop the day it happened on Wire.com.

And of course I went through a normal fact checking process there but Google didn’t get to see the book in advance so – though now it’s out there. I’ve got really great response from Google. I was just there two days ago and people came up to me and told me that, yeah, you got it, which is just terrific.

MICAH SIFRY: That’s great. Now it really should stand as a model of this kind of journalism regardless of whatever else one might ask about the book itself. So, it took you about four years to do in all, is that right?

STEVEN LEVY: About three years. I started I think in June 2008 is when I started the serious research and I had a manuscript of serious research and I had a manuscript about last August which I kept tweaking and so they ripped out of my hands.

MICAH SIFRY: Okay. Well it’s tempting to ask are there other projects coming that you know about that aren’t in the book because they haven’t been launched yet?

STEVEN LEVY: I – none that I was following and attending meetings on and things like that. I did hear about some stuff which I can’t talk about under those regulations.

But it was interesting because toward the end I knew so much about Google when I would do an interview, within a few minutes people realized, oh, he knows about this, so I know there’s no problem to talk about that. And that will be something that Google hadn’t really officially decided to let me in there.

So, I found out a lot of stuff just because people knew that, ‘oh, yeah, he’s the guy …’ that people can talk to about what’s going on that we haven’t told other people.

MICAH SIFRY: Yeah, it’s sort of a unique position to be in to be this knowledgeable about a place like that.

One of the questions that really struck me as I read through the book is what I think is an on-going tension that you see and probably with lots of companies, but in particular a place like Google where the founders are still not just alive but active in the case of Larry Page, taking now a leadership role and that there does seem to be an interesting tension here between – you Google (call falls out) corporation that you know, now that it’s public it exists to maximize shareholder value and on the other hand in many ways it feels like this iconoclastic science project that has these two quirky genius founders who kind of pull it and push it in different directions.

And I’m curious if you could summarize where do you come down on this? I mean how much of it is should we really think of Google as it’s just another business? It exists to basically gather up our eyeballs and sell them to advertisers versus this other quirky thing?

STEVEN LEVY: So, they actually were explicit about this themselves when they went public in 2004, they – and Larry was the main author of the letter to shareholders that they published in (inaudible) – and he said, ‘hey, we’re not a conventional company.’ Those were his exact words. And he said that sometimes for the good of humanity, we will take less profits and a given area than we would otherwise. We’re not always go where the money and the shareholders you have to understand that.

And so the normal relationship between shareholders and the company is that the company is supposed to just maximize your return and in Google’s case they said, ‘if that’s what you want from us, don’t invest in us.’ So, they were explicit about that.

Now, as the company goes on it gets to be interesting. They very famously have this motto, ‘Don’t be evil.’ And right now you would think they would be regretting it because everything they do which has any kind of whiff of something, which isn’t totally idealistic, people will bludgeon with it. Oh, yeah, what happened to ‘Don’t be Evil?’ And certainly the communications people are unhappy those words were ever uttered.

But the leaders of the company still don’t shrug away from that. They still think of it as a valid way of a filter internally and externally to judge what they do.

Now an interesting thing happened as the company gets bigger, it gets involved in different things, they’re sort of the Lord of the Rings effect there. They’ve been wearing the ring and they think, well, we’re good guys, we want to do this so this must be good whatever this and that must be.

So, you know righteousness sort of gets a little mixed up with self interest as these thing proceed and I tried to tease that out in the book.

MICAH SIFRY: And would you care to off your thoughts on which direction it seems to be headed with Page taking over from (inaudible) Schmidt?

I mean, I should back up a step and say I was also really struck that the three key leaders, Brin, Page and Schmidt – that you actually – and correct me if you think this impression is wrong – but that you actually gave the most multi-faceted portrait of Brin. Not only do we get their obviously science and math backgrounds and interest – and the Montessori schooling of both of them is obviously a key insight into understanding their personalities and how they pursue things.

But Brin we also get this sense of a guy who because of his parents’ experience in the Soviet Union and his own experience coming here as a young child, as a refugee, has a sensitivity that’s different and at least explored in some detail in the book , whereas with Page and with Schmidt, I didn’t get that same sense of the different sides of where they’re coming from. It’s just hard to get at that.

STEVEN LEVY: Well I think you might have missed something, but Larry doesn’t – his story – his personal narrative, there’s a little bit about this and he’s a child of divorce who does have a – I don’t want to necessarily say paranoid but overly cautious side and he’s more secretive. His passions are really the passions that drive Google.

One of my favorite passages in the book is one where he talks about Larry’s relationship with Steve, speed of products and I say he’s in that throw of latency that’s almost like Lady MacBeth washing her hands of free of guilt. Larry wants to wash Google free of latency and make everything go faster, faster, faster. He thinks it’s popularity and pleasing users there.

But with Sergey as a narrative writer it was just amazing to document how directly that affected his and really Google’s responses and rationalizations and ultimately change of direction when it came to China move that they originally made and rationalized as a righteous move over all even though they had to do something abhorrent which was the sense of search results. And then they changed direction after they were hacked but the hacking was as everyone said, it was a final straw in what was a year’s long frustrating experience.

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MICAH SIFRY: Yeah, very much. To what degree do you think that – and this is now really more a question asking you to compare Google to other companies in the text base. But how different would you say their internal culture is from other companies from what you’re able to see. And what I mean by that is in terms of how much information is really shared across the organization, how flat and open are they. And also to what degree is authority – the distance between the top and the bottom of the company, people’s willingness to ask challenging questions.

You definitely show in the book that there’s a good deal of that. That people can access each other’s information, tracking how people are doing and so on internally at a fairly robust level. And that people do stand up at Friday All Staff Meetings and ask direct questions of the founders that sometimes can be quite probing.

Do you think this is typical? Is this really unusual? Where does it go?

STEVEN LEVY: I think it’s unusual. I think it’s very rare that companies share that much internally. I compare Google to a lobster that has a hard crust on the outside and it’s hard for outsiders to get information because a lot of things – what other companies would readily share, Google doesn’t.

When Larry came in he did a big reorganization and the Los Angeles Times broke a story about it that they had internal sources. And Google – it took weeks before they even acknowledged and affirmed that. They didn’t deny it. And I still don’t think they made a formal announcement when the head of Google (dot) org organization, their organization. They moved one person out and put another person in and to this day I don’t think they made an acknowledgement about that. That was a couple months ago.

But internally, as you say, they’re very open. You could basically see what everyone’s internal goals are and get information about them and they like to see themselves, this is how they model themselves, as a very flat company, that people report to the fewest number of people. And that also decisions are made not by politics or personalities, but by data. So, boss can be trumped by the data.

They’re not big on direct orders, they’re big on consensus. And one big difference in the recent Google Plus Project is that it was more of a top / down enterprise than previous Google projects were. You know, maybe (inaudible) of that later, but they felt that this particular initiative, the (inaudible) in which they had to do it was so sweeping and urgent that they had to revert to a more traditional line of commands.

MICAH SIFRY: Right, right. Well the sense that I really wanted to get from you in this conversation and I think it’s of particular interest for the PDF audience is Google’s role in the larger world. The impact that it has is obviously huge, disruptive in many cases, empower and quite important, regardless of what you think of it.

And one of the key elements that comes up quite clearly in The Plex is your – the degree to which Google has made moves that are both in the company’s interest, which is in support of an open internet.

And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how they think about that and then – so we can get some sense as to what degree this is sort of deeply ingrained in their DNA, you know? When Google made its – this proposed agreement with Verizon on how to deal with net neutrality, which was sort of a compromise, there were people who were quite upset about that seeing it as the company backtracking on a core commitment.

So, talk about Google and its approach to defending the open internet.

STEVEN LEVY: Well both for ideological reasons and really self interest I think, Google as you say is a huge supporter of the open internet. By and large the way Google’s business model works is the more people use the internet, the better off Google is because they want people to use the internet –

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-- and specifically the web, you know, they’re just going to be using the internet more. And when they search, Google’s going to have a chance to deliver more ads to them and it’s going to be better for Google and Google’s other products based on the ubiquity of the internet in people’s lives.

So, anything to express that is good for Google. But they’re also ideologically supportive of that, they like the concepts behind it and it’s a feel good thing all around.

And as for net neutrality, that really upset people a lot, for good reason, I felt because Google had gotten ahead of an extremely vocal component of net neutrality and they argued and said – their strongest argument was said, ‘listen, we’re a big company, if people – if these carriers start charging for access, we can afford it. We can afford to make Google or YouTube high speed, but we’re worried about the next Google. It shows how altruistic we are, we’re concerned about innovation after us and to just to help the internet there.

And then certainly they hired one of the big – the father of the internet – is the internet evangelist for Google and one of the big things they did was proselytize neutrality. So, when this compromise came along and what Google will says is, ‘well it’s not a plan we did, it didn’t set a course for us, we were just suggesting a set of principles to advance net neutrality …’ and even though the FCC wasn’t too happen that I came during a period of negotiations which was last summer, it turned out the track for tangibility some of the stuff that the FCC actually went through last time.

But it was disappointing to people to basically jettison the mobile net in terms of the net neutrality rules that they were going to stand up for that. And it made people wonder, ‘gee, what’s going on because Google and Verizon have a relationship to support and not so much for the net at large or the world at large but because Verizon is a key partner in Google putting its Android operating system out into the world.

So, people I think rightfully wondered, ‘hey, is this an outgrowth of that? Is that why it’s closing up?’ And Google’s answer was that well, just (inaudible) Chairman of the FCC’s answer later was a few months later was, ‘well, we’re nailing down net neutrality on the landed internet and we’ll deal with mobile later.’ So, take your pick.

MICAH SIFRY: Yeah, so I think that you put your finger on what the exact question is is right now if it’s in Google’s interest to support the open internet because they view the internet as a place where their business continues to grow, great. But the mobile space is not like the open internet especially in the United States.

So, an alliance with a company, whatever company, all of the wireless providers are evil in their own ways or shall I say – evil is such a value-laden word; they’re all special in their own way, but they certainly don’t go around worrying about the open internet the way that Google has.

That brings up a related question which I think goes to Google’s power and how they wield it around actual search results. A number of people have asked given that we see the world through Google now, right? This is an argument that , for example, sees a (inaudible) Nathan makes in his book, the Google-ization of everyting,’ which we may do a book talk with later on this year.

You know, when 70% of searches in the United States are done through Google Search and if you go to Europe there are countries of upwards – way over 90% which means that Google is the lens through which information gets to people. And if Google for whatever reason changes its search algorithm or makes a deliberate change based on specific laws in a country, right? I mean it isn’t like every search result is the same and in countries where certain results aren’t allowed, Google will alter those results.

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But they’re completely non-transparent about how those results – how they come up with them?

STEVEN LEVY: When they censorship, they are a little transparent but they’re less transparent when they just make a change to their algorithms in some categories if things go up and some go down.

MICAH SIFRY: Right. And they’re argument is to be transparent will actually allow more gaming, but on the other hand the process of reviewing these decisions itself is also closed.

I mean I think of this as the analogous problem to what a company like Facebook has where if Facebook shuts down your profile, which often happens for machine-generated reason, a person – you can get involved in doing, your recourse is very weak. There isn’t a system of habeas corpus.

And where I’m going with this is whether you think in your talking with all the different people you talked to in the writing of this book, how much does Google understand its role in creating this new network public sphere that we spend so much of our time now participating in, having the conversation in? You know, there’s immense power in that and how do they think about their responsibility and where exactly – who owns those problems of the company?

STEVEN LEVY: Well that’s a great question. The answer, to break it up because the power of being the world’s search company affects us in so many different ways that you almost have to break it up.

First there’s this search neutrality is the term, which has been tagged to those issues that you were talking about of whether – really there should be oversight over Google Search engine. People talk about it like it’s a utility, just like you plug something into the electrical outlet and that you plug your query into the search outlet and get an answer, and just like a utility, Google should be regulated.

I actually do see Google’s point on a lot of problems on this as whether Google’s engineers pointed out to me saying that we were utterly neutral in search results, we just give you back an alphabetical list of all the websites when you search for something because we’re making an editorial choice.

And indeed, a judge in Texas I believe, a Federal judge, ruled that search results are protected opinions, just like a movie review, right? So, it would be like saying The New York Times used to have a lot of power in theater reviews. Really, live or die power there. So, should they have been regulated? Should the theater viewers of then been made to go through a process and got oversight to make sure that they were doing it fairly? Or (inaudible) The New York Times police it there.

So, that’s sort of an extreme example but I think unless – a (inaudible) question would be whether Google has the right to elevate its own products in the page that gives you the search results, right? So, Google maps – has an answer to something you’re doing, you know? Should Google be able to give you that in favor or Yahoo’s absolution or Microsoft’s?

So, that’s an open question and one which is less clear. Google will say, ‘hey, we have to give the best results we can and you have to trust us to do it,’ and the oversight on that is people can go somewhere else. They can go to Bing, right? Or they can go to one of these (inaudible).

And so – and a couple years ago, Google was down for some reason, it was a very rare outage. And in that six or four hours they were down, a huge number of people started searching Yahoo and Yahoo’s search went up. And Google points to that triumphantly. As a matter of fact, I wouldn’t be totally surprised if Google – if it was an experiment that Google just funded off one day just to prove a point because it worked out so well for them that they could point to this saying, ‘see, our competitors are only one click away. We’re not a lock in there.’

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Just in taking responsibility, I always thought that Google should take more responsibility for the internet being an instrument to expose personal information. Now Google didn’t make that happen, Google didn’t put public documents online, Google didn’t – it wasn’t responsible. The (inaudible) of Google might have hastened it, but to get all this information on line, some of it uncomfortable information about people, they don’t ordinarily come up in an embarrassing way, it just doesn’t feel right.

So, if someone Googles your name, those first 10 results are kind of a resume for you and you wouldn’t put like a DUI on your resume, but Google does. And I think it’s something Google needs to grapple with that issue and figure how are we going to do this and they’re actually getting a little more social, maybe they’re thinking a little more in that direction.

But I think historically they haven’t done enough to take ownership of that problem.

MICAH SIFRY: And that gets back to my question, I remember in earlier years a guy like Andrew McLaughlin who played a very important role in helping them analyze and work on hard policy questions related to how Google would operate in other countries around the world and how you would adapt to different local laws, including obviously the whole complicated question with China.

Andrew left Google and went to work for the Obama Administration for a number of years and now is running (inaudible).

I didn’t get the sense reading the book that this issue of worrying about the moral – these hard problems – I mean it seemed as though the final arbiter is Sergey. Eli Pariser actually describes going – happening to be at a conference where he met Sergey and got to talk to him about this issue that he raises in his book that search results are personalized now, so if you and I conduct the same search, we won’t get the same results anymore because Google is trying to get the best results for me with the affect that we’re all going to be put into our own little filter bubbles.

And this was – he raised it and kind of got a shrug that this was not seen as an important concern. So, where is the appeals court? Do they care about public opinion? Where would you say?

STEVEN LEVY: Well, they care about public opinion. They say the appeals court is your choice of where you search. And in this case – and I think that even though most – like normal humans are MIT graduates would think of this and say, ‘well, if you want to get (inaudible) problem, just sign out and do your search, right.’

And then one search engineer said, ‘oh, look, there’s just this little piece of code in the URL that had all these – it looked like the Bizarro world, Mr. and Mrs (inaudible) crazy code. If you just take this little chunk out of the URL then you get the search results that (inaudible).

And actually in talking about Eli’s issue with them, they think that (inaudible) results are not that personalized. That some results are changed, but overall it’s not that dramatically different.

I think the more important point is what I mentioned earlier about Google unearthing those things and they (inaudible) of that and they thought the way to do it is that’s – we endorse the open web. We endorse what the web says is information that’s about you is relevant.

And when people complain – I talked to the person whose job it was in the early days of Google when people had no understanding at all why these things were coming up about them, they would complain and they’d say, ‘my boyfriend’s abusive and I have a court order against him knows where I live now, and I do I get this out of there?’ And they have these rules saying that (inaudible) judged in a libel case against you, if there’s a court order then you can do something official, but you can’t do it just because you don’t like it or you are uncomfortable with it.

And that’s just the way it is and this poor woman would have to explain to people, sometimes she was in tears doing it. They’re saying, ‘we’re sorry, we can’t block that. This is what we’ve judged to be the best for society, this degree of openness.’

So, they give it a thought and basically in terms of things like this, Google thinks it out and they think on a very high loft plain, but they don’t really connect with some of the emotional, gut issues that people have with this when it just doesn’t feel right.

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MICAH SIFRY: Right. So, what you’re describing is the engineer mindset and so what they aren’t registering is that somebody who can’t afford to go get a court order that tries to segregate that information in some way is at a disadvantage and that that would be typically people who can’t afford lawyers or are weaker for other reasons in society.

So, in some odd way their devotion toward transparency by default is a little heartless and –

STEVEN LEVY: Well evidently – they would argue that this is the fairest way that we’re treating equally there. And I think actually –

MICAH SIFRY: Yeah, but it’s a value judgment they’re making, too.

STEVEN LEVY: Yeah, ideally it requires a more nuanced sort of approach to this problem in particular and they to date haven’t tackled it. But they did this thing which helps you – I track your online reputation, but I don’t think you should have – the ultimately thing is if you’re unhappy with it, you’ve got to either figure it out yourself how to do it or hire one of these places – there’s a little cottage industry that’s like a –

MICAH SIFRY: I have to say I was –

STEVEN LEVY: -- to help you clean it.

MICAH SIFRY: Yeah, and I was both shocked and impressed when I actually kind of went in and looked at my complete Google profile and I was like, oh my God, I’d forgotten that I – four years ago created that blogger account or whatever, but there it is.’

And so in some way I felt very well served but you know I’ve also encountered situations where somebody may not realize that they uploaded some pictures to their Picasso account, which is a Google product now, and Google makes it incredibly easy to go find them and you may not realize that there’s pictures of you on your honeymoon that you thought you were just sharing with a few friends. There can be a lot of unintended consequences.

STEVEN LEVY: Right and Google tries. You know, you can keep your pictures private on Picasso and now that Google’s doing the Google Plus thing, you know, they’re way down in the weeds trying to figure out how to keep your sharing limited to just those people you want to share things with.

That’s explicitly – I think that’s a big differentiating aspect of this product compared to Facebook.

MICAH SIFRY: Right, right. Last thing that I want to get in to is just the relationship between Google and Washington, but I do want to make sure that if there’s anybody listening right now, we’ve got about 20 minutes left, and I’ve completely monopolized you and we certainly opened up lots of interesting lines of conversation.

Before we talk about Washington and Google, just want to see if there’s anybody who’s listening who wants to sort of de-cloak and make a comment or a question. Just identify yourself and try and keep your remarks brief. I’m going to pause here and see if anyone wants to jump in.

PARTICPANT 1: This is Michael Nelson down at Georgetown in Washington. I don’t want to talk about Washington, I want to talk a bit more about transparency and the lobster analogy.

Since there is all this growing distrust about Google and fear that they are favoring their own services in the search, I’m wondering if you think that Google has some ways they are going to address that. Are they going to become more transparent? Are they going to somehow show more of how their system works so that people can trust it more? Or is there some other way that they’re going to increase trust in the fairness of their system?

You know you’re in trouble when Economist magazine runs a cover story that says, ‘who can trust Google?’

STEVEN LEVY: Right. And that is – that’s a great question. Eric Schmidt says time and again that that’s the other thing which keeps them honest; if people don’t trust us, we’re out of business – that’s what he says. And all I thought was, ‘well I remember when you couldn’t – you had to worry buying a bottle of Tylenol that would kill you, yet Tylenol is still popular.’ So, I don’t think even if one horrible privacy event, even worse than the buzz thing, would take Google out of business.

But his point is well taken; they need to retain people’s trust. I think they have over the last couple of years done some things to be more transparent – they let me in for one thing, which was – some people were surprised at that. And I came back and to be honest, I don’t think they’re able, that they’re humans and you know, they’re not perfect and there’s things to criticize but overall, I have to say, I’ll be explicit, I’m fairly positive. I like a company that tries to be idealistic and maybe –

0:40:19

-- doesn’t live up to everything rather than a company that just like outright we’re going to deliver money to shareholders, we don’t give a damn about the society or whatever, which is the sort of default.

But they’ve also been a little more open in that their traditional black boxes, they’ve – like if you go into YouTube you can actually get some pretty good videos about how search works and how the ads work and their ad system is a little more complicated, counter intuitive in some ways like I try to explain in my book. But they have these videos to try and de-mystify it for some people.

On the other hand, Larry’s ascension means in some aspects I think – I’m actually surprised to the degree that he doesn’t share. The analysts went bonkers on the first earning’s call after Larry was there (inaudible) Larry show up and Larry not show up, and he showed up but he was there for like two minutes and said a couple of bromides and left. I think he would have been better off just not being there at all. People got angry and said, ‘well can’t you explain what your goals are now that you’re the CEO and take some of these questions?’

So, I think on one hand, Larry’s not going to change his stripes and become a very public person was the message there. So, I think that look, they’re smart people and there’s pressure to be more transparent in certain areas, they’ll share more. But –

PARTICIPANT 1: (Inaudible) don’t tend to be transparent and open. The old joke is how do you know you’re talking to a extroverted engineer? He looks at your shoes. So –

STEVEN LEVY: Okay, so I actually have to say I think that stuff’s taken too far. I’ve been writing about engineers for a long time and I find that sometimes – you know, more often than not when you get them talking, they’re not going to give away the family jewels, but they’ll talk plenty and I’ve had a lot of conversations about Google on a technical level, they wanted me to understand so I could explain it to the world there.

I think engineers generally get a bad rap. I think – it says something about engineers that it took a couple of engineers to go and set down a gauntlet for saying we’re going to be an idealistic company, these (inaudible) engineers didn’t do. And when you compare Google to a media company and say well, they’re these golden engineers – have you ever see the people who run media companies? Do you see what’s going on in News Corp? I mean these aren’t engineers at News Corp. They’re not the warmest and fuzziest people.

PARTICIPANT 1: Well I’m a (inaudible) (overlapping remarks) engineer, but part of the problem is that engineers tend to tell it like it is and that can get them in trouble --

MICAH SIFRY: Right, they do that. There’s someone else who wanted to raise a question?

PARTICIPANT 2: Yeah, just really quickly. I’d like to change entirely. If this isn’t PDF just --

MICAH SIFRY: Tell us who you are, if you don’t mind.

PARTICIPANT 2: Esther (inaudible), I’m sorry. Just given the insight into the decision to create Google Health and then to sort of abandon it for years before they finally closed it --

STEVEN LEVY: Google Health you’re asking?

PARTICIPANT 2: Yes.

STEVEN LEVY: Yeah, okay. That -- it’s interesting because I did some work in that and it just sort of zig zagged all the time I remember when I went on that trip in 2007, they were in the process of removing the person who was in charge and Marissa Mayer was in charge of it for a while. I think -- it was a combination of -- there was -- really to be honest, from my perception, there was a lack of a firm mission from the get go and then the obstacles were just too big in terms of building out something to do health care records without a real way that would scale to get the people who actually have health records -- the individual physicians and things like that -- to go and sign on there.

And they -- around the same time, Microsoft Health Poll was going. I remember I did a call to the two approaches there and neither of those companies I think had a great experience in moving this. It really is such a big problem that I think a bottom up approach doesn’t seem to work on that. So, finally it looks like they gave up the ghost.

MICAH SIFRY: Esther, do you want to follow up? I have a follow up.

PARTICIPANT 2: No.

0:45:09

MICAH SIFRY: Yeah, just on that same subject, do you think maybe at the same time they were also being sort of hitting this incredibly complicated situation with the whole Google Books project which started again for idealistic reasons but ran into problems that they didn’t anticipate. And while it’s true they will tackle projects that don’t necessarily have a -- that serve some larger benefit to humanity as you put it -- they may not have the bandwidth to do many of those all at once?

STEVEN LEVY: Well I think in this case -- Google’s never been shy about taking on these multiple challenges there. You know, like I say in my book, they’re fearless about that, okay? Oh, we want to be a phone company, we’ll be a phone company. We want to be a video company, we’ll be a video company.

MICAH SIFRY: I’m still waiting for them to wire a whole city with high speed broadband.

STEVEN LEVY: Well yeah, they’ll go ahead and do that and you know, the first time they did all this spectrum, it was this stocky horse though I think Larry actually wanted to keep going. I think -- I really believe next time there is a giant spectrum auction, Google will be a serious bidder. That’s just my personal belief.

But in the book thing, that’s a great example. I give a lot of detail about the book thing and in my book because they saw it as an idealistic thing that everyone would embrace. But they lost sight of the purism of it when they did the settlement and in a way they couldn’t resist making it a bigger scheme where they actually sell books and neither sold vendor of orphan books and wound up turning people who were their natural allies.

I relish a little of the irony that even the science fiction writers were against Google and you know those science fiction fans in the Googleplex and that had to be a big blow when you get the science fiction writers opposing Google. You know something is really wrong.

MICAH SIFRY: Okay, I really want to use the last time we have here to talk about the relationship between Google and Washington.

Sort of in the last part of the book it comes up both in terms of this sort of -- the geek in the White House and the close relationships between a couple of key people like Eric Schmidt with the Obama Administration.

But it also comes up because like many start ups that do well inevitably they become subject to all sorts of other competing interests that have sway in Washington and inevitably these companies feel like they have to invest in and deal with Washington DC, too.

And I don’t want to re-hash everything that you describe in the book but the question I was sort of going to ask is in the collision between Google and Washington, which one is transforming the other one to be more like it?

STEVEN LEVY: Well, actually that’s a big issue because the reason why Google was excited about Obama -- and the reason why Obama -- and he write about this in his second book -- is excited about Google is that they are kindred spirits in a sense. They both approach problem solving in a very similar data-driven way.

And Google -- when Obama spoke of Google when he was running for President, it was this mind meld and he would solve this health care problem and it would be by data. People would understand that data would sway people to their side there.

And I sort of make the analogy -- not too many people picked up on this -- that a similar thing has happened with Google as it tries to get into issues like the book deal, you know the book scanning deal fell through. It’s one of the same kind of problems -- some of the same kind of reasons that the Obama Administration has run into problems getting its initiatives through there. That basically logic and a compelling argument isn’t enough. Sometimes just -- it doesn’t track with regulatory regimen and sometimes people who are ill-intentioned to you will successfully sabotage it.

You know, I covered Microsoft during its antitrust days and I witnessed firsthand, I had a lot of interviews with Bill Gates who was just who was just over the coals about this. I used to think this is something he wouldn’t wish on his worst enemy. But as it turns out, this is exactly what happened. He wished exactly that on his worst enemy and Microsoft has been a key factor in helping the government now open a formal investigation into Google as an antitrust violator.

0:50:01

And Google’s competitors, AT&T and Microsoft, are pretty actively pushing this investigation and politicking against Google at every turn there. And for Google who thinks that people should just make decisions on what the data tells them is the best solution has been a real education. And in some cases, a classic education.

Google’s (inaudible), the classic path of saying our relationship with Washington should be leave us alone. Then they get a couple lobbyists in there and people say that’s not enough, you have to learn. And then belatedly they beef up the lobbying organization and soon they’re part of the establishment. And to some degree that’s what happened with Google.

MICAH SIFRY: You know, I had conversations with people inside Google and made the argument that actually it never made sense to me why a company that plays such an integral role in the internet as a platform never uses its platform power to affect change in Washington except on the real margins.

And the only time I can think that any of these giant platform companies have done this, I think there was one moment where maybe eBay sent a message to all the eBay sellers basically saying here’s some bad legislation that we’re upset about. And here’s how to contact your representatives to tell them what you think.

STEVEN LEVY: Classic astro turf kind of move?

MICAH SIFRY: Well it’s not astro turf if it requires people to take an affirmative step and send a message and if they agree with that message it’s no different than every other interest group that rallies its users or the people who are (inaudible) to its cause.

And yet Google, which has this tremendous platform power, you know -- or I think if Craigslist for example is another example of this. Craig putting a link on the home page of Craigslist to help channel contributions to Katrina victims is like one of the few times that he’s used his own platform directly to do something other than what the users would otherwise be doing on a daily basis with the site.

Whereas Google is, as you say, following the same path that every other corporation that comes out of Silicon Valley seems to do, which is leave us alone and then they start hiring lobbyists and making campaign contributions.

And it doesn’t seem very Googly, does it?

STEVEN LEVY: Well actually I think Google would get a lot of heat if it started using those huge assets it has in infrastructure and all its users to stick up for initiatives for its interests there. I think it’s to Google credit that they don’t use that. They do use it for things like Haiti organization and things like that and they use it for things -- you know, if their (inaudible) organization to track flu trends and things like that, I think it’s to their credit that they’re not using that stuff to sway legislators.

And I think if they did that they would have people say look at that, now there’s another thing we should be scared of. Google’s got all this power and all these users and they’re using them to buy off Washington or they’re scaring Washington to give them what they want.

MICAH SIFRY: (Inaudible) if they did it that way. But I think I’m giving those examples as a way of just saying I haven’t see them do Washington in a Googly way. I think Washington is doing them.

STEVEN LEVY: Well that’s certainly happening, yeah. And it shocks them. I mean -- the one quote in that chapter that just strikes out from Katie Stanton who is a Googler, went to Washington, she worked the White House, she worked the State Department and then just (inaudible) to Twitter, she said that at one point she couldn’t believe it. She said you’re (inaudible) from Google, it’s almost like admitting you’re a criminal enterprise around here.

MICAH SIFRY: Yeah, no Katie had an eye opening experience. I know Katie, too.

We have a couple minutes left who is there anybody who’s listening who wants to chime in with one last comment or question? We have Steve Levy, the author of In the Plex, we’ve had a great hour with him. Go ahead if you have a question.

PARTICIPANT 3: I have a question. My name is John Rick and it was a fascinating book. I think as Micah said it as the most in-depth investigation of this fascinating company.

I was just curious, what surprised you most about Google?

STEVEN LEVY: Hmm --

MICAH SIFRY: And I see one other person who may chime in -- can we squeeze this last question in? Another person who was waiting, make the question. Okay, go ahead.

0:55:17

PARTICIPANT 4: I’m Mike Kruger and I’m just wondering what you thought the future of Google Plus might be.

MICAH SIFRY: Great, two great questions.

STEVEN LEVY: So, and the surprising thing, you know it surprised me that to the degree to which Google was pretty upfront about saying we tolerate a certain amount of chaos and disorganization and what they do. But how they actually had sort of these quasi bureaucratic systems that they actually did embrace. There’s one thing called OKRs is their internal goals, it’s like a big deal there.

So, they’ve managed to -- in one hand it’s you know, in keeping with their geek side to have people -- they report measurements. But it seems to kind of go against the grain of the anything goes attitude of Google there. So, they’re trying to be a big company and be well run like a big company but on their own terms. I think that’s sort of an Eric legacy there that they built in there.

So, it was interesting to see how important that was, particularly this thing called OKRs which you can read about in the book which is actually huge at Google. You talk to people at Google and you said, what’s your OKR? They’ll know exactly what you’re talking about. And their goal for the next quarter, the next year and it’s measurable, etcetera, etcetera.

As for the future of Google Plus, you know I tracked that thing for a year almost before it came out and I’ll tell you Google was embraced for people to look at it and say well, too little, too late. They think -- it’s not in Google’s DNA to take on the social networking, they should just stick to their knitting there.

And Google was surprised -- was shocked -- to see how well this initiative has been received by pundits and by the general public there. They thought that they would just get it out there, grit their teeth and then just keep improving it and slowly win people over. But what’s happened is it’s just taken off.

You can’t contrast it enough with what happened with Buzz which came out and just like was slammed with the privacy flaw in the first few days and was a totally disaster. And this one is the opposite. People are saying hey, we like this and I like this part of it and people are being tolerant as Google is testing it. They’ve labeled it very specifically as a field test.

So, I think that the people at Google are ecstatic that so far it’s been greeted and welcomes and they see that as a sign that people are a little fed up with Facebook and they’re looking for an alternative.

MICAH SIFRY: Very interesting. And it’s growing it seems like at an astronomical pace. Do you know what sparks are for by the way? Never mind, don’t answer that question.

This has been fascinating and a lot of fun and Steve I envy you. I like to say to people that working at PDF gives us sometimes a front row seat on the 50 yard line where technology and politics are colliding. And I feel like you’ve been in the huddle for a while now and thank you for all your work on this book. It’s really a great read, a great summer read and I really recommend it to our community.

Thank you for the time. Thank you again to AT&T for sponsoring this call.

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