Googled: The End of the World As We Know It

by Ken Auletta

There are companies that create waves and those that ride or are drowned by them.

As only he can, bestselling author Ken Auletta takes readers for a ride on the Google wave, telling the story of how it formed and crashed into traditional media businesses from newspapers to books, to television, to movies, to telephones, to advertising, to Microsoft. With unprecedented access to Google's founders and executives, as well as to those in media who are struggling to keep their heads above water, Auletta reveals how the industry is being disrupted and redefined.

Using Google as a stand-in for the digital revolution, Auletta takes readers inside Google's closed-door meetings and paints portraits of Google's notoriously private founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, as well as those who work with―and against them.

In his narrative, Auletta provides the fullest account ever told of Google's rise, shares the secret sauce of Google's success, and shows why the worlds of new and old media often communicate as if residents of different planets.

Googled by Ken Auletta offers an incisive examination of Google's meteoric rise and its profound impact on the media industry.

Drawing on decades of media coverage expertise, Auletta explores how Google's engineering philosophy—rooted in the belief that established practices can be optimized—has transformed the company into a $20 billion advertising powerhouse.

With YouTube, mobile initiatives, and strategic expansions, Google is positioned to become the world's first $100 billion media company under CEO Eric Schmidt's leadership.

Yet Auletta doesn't shy away from the challenges ahead. Beyond external pressures from media competitors and government regulators, Google faces internal vulnerabilities: organizational bloat, mission drift, and the dangers of unchecked confidence.

Auletta investigates whether Google's dependence on data-driven decision-making and computational frameworks will prove resilient as the company expands, comparing its trajectory to historical market disruptions on Wall Street.