When Google opened for business in China in 2006, Eric E. Schmidt, its chief executive, said, “Google has 5,000 years of patience in China.” But its divorce from the country just four years later was inevitable because operations there were troubled from the start.
Josephine Schiele/Wired
The author Steven Levy
That is the conclusion of Steven Levy, a longtime technology journalist who spent three years reporting inside the company to write “In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works and Shapes Our Lives.” The New York Times obtained a copy of the book, which arrives in stores April 12.
The book, a wide-ranging history of the company from start-up to behemoth, sheds light on the biggest threats Google faces today, from the Chinese government to Facebook and privacy critics.
Though Google left China after accusing government officials of breaking into company computers and activists’ Gmail accounts, a long sequence of problems led to that decision.
There were missteps from the start. When the Google founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, visited China in 2004, they needed coaching on how to behave, Mr. Levy writes. On a visit to India, they had been compared to college backpackers, riding in rickshaws. Al Gore, the former vice president, had to warn them that they were politically naïve and that the Chinese would think they were arrogant if they acted like that in China.
Many Chinese Internet users preferred the search engine Baidu out of patriotism, and the government even redirected traffic from Google to Baidu, according to Mr. Levy. Google never figured out how to manage business customs in China. It fired the head of government relations in China after she gave iPods to Chinese officials, which she charged to her Google expense account.
Google itself made it hard for its workers in China to succeed, Mr. Levy writes. It refused to grant the money to advertise in China, and the founders never visited the country once Google opened an office.
But one problem was bigger than all the rest, according to the book. Though Google prides itself on giving engineers access to its code base to invent new products, it blocked the engineers in China because it said government officials might force them to reveal private information. Experienced engineers, who felt distrusted, could not work on new products and had to spend time on tasks like testing Google searches, something that less-qualified people do at other Google offices.
A year before Google discovered the break-in that spurred it to leave the country, a group of executives, led by Andrew McLaughlin, the former head of public policy, and David C. Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer, began pushing for Google’s departure.
Other battles that Google is fighting today, against Facebook and critics of its privacy policies, also had their roots years ago.
Mr. Schmidt, Google’s outspoken chief who will be replaced by Mr. Page on Monday, has made public gaffes when speaking about privacy. Mr. Levy reveals that he has made gaffes inside the company, too. Mr. Schmidt asked that Google remove from the search engine information about a political donation he had made. Sheryl Sandberg, a Google executive who is now Facebook’s chief operating officer, told him that was unacceptable.
A Google spokeswoman, Karen Wickre, initially declined to comment on the anecdotes from Mr. Levy's book. Later, another spokeswoman, Jill Hazelbaker, said that Mr. Schmidt denied that the incident happened.
The fight against Facebook began in earnest last year, when Urs Hölzle, the company’s first engineering vice president, wrote a memo, which insiders called the Urs-Quake, warning that Google was behind in social networking and needed to recruit people to work on it immediately.
They named the project Emerald Sea and recreated an 1878 painting by that name in front of the elevators where they worked, according to the book. It showed an enormous wave knocking over a ship. That ship could be Google, it warned — the company would either sail on the social networking wave or drown in it.
In an interview, Mr. Levy attributed Google’s social networking failures to its inability to play catch-up with a competitor.
“They’re supernervous about Facebook,” he said. “Google’s not strong in the rear view mirror. Google’s strong when they’re looking out their windshield.”
© 2011nytimes.com
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