The Google Guys (3 page)
Authors: Richard L. Brandt
The situation was exacerbated when the online site Valleywag actually read the onerous nondisclosure agreement that came with Chrome, Google's new browser. It stated that any content that people “submit, post or display” when using Chrome automatically gives Google “perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute” the information.
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It turned out that this was one of Google's standard nondisclosure agreements, which slipped past without Google's management noticing. Google quickly retracted it, replacing the agreement with the explanation “In order to keep things simple for our users, we try to use the same set of legal terms (our Universal Terms of Service) for many of our products. Sometimes, as in the case of Google Chrome, this means that the legal terms for a specific product may include terms that don't apply well to the use of that product.”
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But Google uses a very similar agreement when guest lecturers give talks at the company, a regular occurrence. San Francisco psychiatrist Thomas Lewis felt he was giving away the rights to his research in order to give an invited talk. When he complained, he was told to list beforehand everything he was going to talk about that he had the rights to, and it would be excluded. His lawyer told him to make the list huge, and wouldn't mind if he came as close as possible to including everything in the world. He did so and gave his speech.
Or try Matt Asay, who writes The Open Road blog for CNET. Google has a group of applications that people can download for free, called the Google Pack. These programs are a mix of software from Google and third parties. Before Chrome, Google included the open-source Firefox browser as the default browser in the pack. After Chrome, it still offers Firefox as a choice, but now Chrome is the default choice. That move, Asay says, “has Google looking more like the old Microsoft monopoly it replaces.”
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But, of course, it's Google's entry into China that gets the main criticism. In order to enter that market, by law it has to agree to censor the results of its own search engine. One alternative is to stay out of China completely, as a protest against censorship, which many Google critics insist would be the right thing to do. The other is to run a Chinese-language search engine offshore without censoring it, which would mean that access to the site would be cut off from China by the Chinese government anytime something came up that the officials didn't like. And, in fact, Google does run just such an offshore search engine, in addition to the one based in China. It just doesn't get much traffic.
Google executives have idealistic excuses for entering China, based mainly on the theory that some information serves the Chinese population better than none. That's a fine argument, except that there are several other search engines operating in China to fill the gap (all of which also censor themselves), including China's homegrown Baidu. All Google can claim to do is push the envelope as much as possible to free up information. Nevertheless, the decision to enter China is the one that nags most at the founders' consciencesâespecially Sergey's.
But Larry and Sergey are growing up, maturing with the company they command, learning to compromise and to mellow the mercurial pursuit of their idealism that dominated Google's early days. And they're going to be around for a long time. They've tackled the beast of business, and won.
They've also been lucky, and their rise has seemed almost effortless from the outside. But luck is insufficient fertilizer for growing a business as successful and dynamic as Google. There's brilliant method in the founders' madness. As usual, the angel is in the details.
Chapter 1
Arbiters of Cyberspace
Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.
âMartin Luther King, Jr.
Ptolemy I was a childhood friend of Alexander's. Born in Macedonia, a Greek-speaking region at Greece's northern border, they arrived at the peak of Macedonia's power. The Greeks, however, considered Macedonians to be barbarians, and refused, for example, to allow them to join in the Olympic games. Alexander's father, King Philip II of Macedonia, changed the status quo by conquering the Greek city-states and uniting them under one country. Although a ruthless conqueror, Philip instilled in his son a dedication to Greek culture. As a youth, Alexander studied under Aristotle, who taught him philosophy, science, medicine, rhetoric, and literature. Philip's goal, passed on to Alexander, was to spread the enlightenment of Greek culture to the rest of the world. His friend Ptolemy, who studied with him and was a historian and a poet, was the one who accomplished this by creating his library at Alexandria. Alexander and Ptolemy were conquerors, but they were also idealists, trying to spread Greek learning, literature, art, and science throughout the world.
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arry and Sergey's families came from just beyond the outskirts of the status quo. Before either of them was born, their families crossed that border into academic life. They lacked the wealth, the connections to the business elite, and the capitalist instincts that Bill Gates showed when he was still in high school. But neither did they rise from extreme poverty as did Andy Grove, the CEO of Intel who drove the company to great heights after arriving in the United States as a young, brilliant, and penniless Hungarian refugee with a bulldog determination to thrive.
arry and Sergey's families came from just beyond the outskirts of the status quo. Before either of them was born, their families crossed that border into academic life. They lacked the wealth, the connections to the business elite, and the capitalist instincts that Bill Gates showed when he was still in high school. But neither did they rise from extreme poverty as did Andy Grove, the CEO of Intel who drove the company to great heights after arriving in the United States as a young, brilliant, and penniless Hungarian refugee with a bulldog determination to thrive.
Larry and Sergey came from highly intellectual families that had faced more than their share of battles against powerful institutions. Larry's family waged labor union battles against the American auto industry, while Sergey's family suffered through government oppression and discrimination in the Soviet Union.
The LeftistLarry has more in common with left-wing documentary filmmaker Michael Moore than with Microsoft founder William H. Gates. Larry's family had working-class roots in the General Motors company town of Flint, Michigan, the hometown of Moore portrayed in his film
Roger and Me
.
Roger and Me
.
Larry's grandfather was an autoworker and a politically leftist member of the Teamsters during its antagonistic battles with the youthful auto industry. The union was led by factions with communist influence. Larry's grandfather participated in possibly the greatest labor struggle of the early twentieth century, the Flint Sit-Down Strike of 1937, when the workers took over a major auto factory. Larry still keeps a memento from those days: a hammer that his grandfather carried with him for protection during the acrimonious strike.
But Larry's father, Carl, broke out of that environment and became a leading computer scientist, a talent his sons inherited. Born in 1938, Carl Page survived childhood polio, which left him somewhat fragile throughout his life. He was also the first person in the family to graduate from high school (in 1956). He then went on to the University of Michigan to study engineering. While still an undergraduate in 1959, Carl Page was hired to work in the university's Logic of Computers Group, a pioneering research team headed by legendary computer scientists such as Art Burks and John Holland. He earned two bachelor of science degrees in engineering in 1960, one of them in the specialty field of computer scienceâthe first graduate with a degree in that field at the University of Michigan. In 1965, he earned his Ph.D. in computer science from the same university.
The sixties was the time of Sputnik and the race to the moon, when good computer scientists were in demand from the aerospace industry, but Carl decided to remain in academia. After graduating, he had a short stint teaching at the University of North Carolina, but returned to Michigan (where Larry was born in 1973) and joined the faculty of Michigan State University in 1967. Although MSU did not have the prestige of the University of Michigan, Carl was a talented pioneer in computer artificial intelligence. He was also a visiting scholar at Stanford University in the 1974/75 academic year, and spent a year as a researcher at NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, in 1978.
Most of the Page family is scientifically and academically oriented. Larry's mother, Gloria W. Page, taught computer programming at Michigan State. (His parents were later divorced.) He has an older brother, Carl, Jr., who served as his entrepreneurial role model. After earning a master of science degree at the University of Michigan, Carl, Jr., went on to become cofounder of a dot-com company called eGroups, which was sold to Yahoo in the summer of 2000 for $432 million in stock. Larry's younger sister, Beverly, still lives in Michigan. Sadly, their father, Carl, Sr., died of pneumonia in 1996, just as Larry was starting the research to create Google. The loss affected him deeply.
The TinkererComing from such a computer-literate family, Larry Page naturally developed an early fondness for computers. In 1979, when he was six, his family obtained a very early home computer called the Exidy Sorcerer. His brother wrote an operating system for the machine, not long before a young company called Microsoft began modifying an operating system for the first IBM PC. With the help of a homemade typing program and a dot-matrix printer, Larry used the computer as a word processor to complete an assignment for a school class. It was the first time anyone at the school had ever seen something produced on a word processorâor heard of such a thing.
Larry attended a Montessori school early on, and thrived in its self-paced learning environment. His parents encouraged his curiosity and love of tinkering. When Larry was nine, his brother gave him a set of screwdrivers, and he immediately set to work dismantling every power tool around the house he could get his hands on. The popular account is that his parents were less than thrilled because he couldn't put them back together again.
It's an event that Larry laughs about today. When I ran into him at Google recently, I asked him if the story was true. He looked up and smiled. It wasn't that he couldn't put the tools back together, he said. “I just didn't.”
That's believable, because he has always been more likely to build things than tear them apart. He got his undergraduate degree in engineering at the University of Michigan in 1995, winning many honors, including the university's first Outstanding Student Award. But he's fonder of telling people how he built a working programmable plotter and inkjet printer in a casing he made out of Lego blocks while at the University of Michigan. He also started showing his entrepreneurial interest at Michigan, taking business classes and joining the LeaderShape program, which teaches its members the skills to be leaders in society.
When he entered the Ph.D. program in computer science at Stanford, he arrived with a strong foundation both in computer science and in liberal politics. As with many academic families, Larry's had never lost its leftist roots, and remained politically active. When his father died, the family requested that friends give donations to the Democratic Party rather than buying flowers. That political bias dominates Larry's personalityâand that of Google as well. More than 90 percent of political donations by Google employees today go to the Democratic Party, and employees overwhelmingly supported Barack Obama over John McCain in 2008. CEO Eric Schmidt campaigned for Barack Obama and served as one of his economic advisers. Schmidt, Larry, and three other Google executives donated $25,000 each to fund a $150,000 party at Obama's inauguration.
The RefusenikIf Larry Page carried the hammer of his family's past, Sergey (or Sergei) Brin carried the sickle. He was born in Moscow, also in 1973, when it was still the seat of power of the old Soviet Union.
Both Larry and Sergey are Jewish, but that ethnicity has affected Sergey's family more than it has Larry's. Sergey's father, Mikhail (changed to Michael when he came to the United States) Brin, was a curmudgeonly intellectual and a gifted mathematician. At first he wanted to study physics at Moscow State University and become an astronomer. But he was turned down because the Communist Party banned Jews from the physics department; the government didn't want them to have access to Soviet nuclear secrets. So he decided to study mathematics instead, and took the entrance exams in rooms reserved for Jewish students, appallingly nicknamed the “gas chambers.”
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Mikhail graduated with distinction in 1970. Sergey was born three years later.
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Mikhail graduated with distinction in 1970. Sergey was born three years later.
Considering the Soviet hunger to prove its technological superiority over the United States in the 1970s, a talented mathematician would normally have been recruited into the space program or military research. But this choice was not offered to Mikhail Brin. He wanted to continue his studies at the university, but was turned down, again because of the anti-Semitism prevalent in the USSR.
Without a graduate degree, he settled for a meaningless job at Gosplan, the Russian economic policy planning agency. His Orwellian task was to come up with the right statistics to demonstrate that the standard of living in the Soviet Union was higher than that of the United States. He hated the job, but it was better than being shoved off to some research station in Siberia. His wife, Eugenia, also managed to endure the anti-Semitism and got a degree in mathematics; she later worked in a research lab at the Soviet gas and oil institute.
In his spare time, Mikhail continued his studies in mathematics, and managed to publish papers in respected math journals. He probably would have had an easier time getting a Ph.D. in economics, but he obviously did not have much love of Soviet-style economics and was more interested in an academic career. He convinced two lecturers to be his advisers for a doctorate in mathematics, submitted his thesis to Kharkov National University in the Ukraine, a backwater compared to Moscow, and earned his Ph.D. in 1975. “He pursued his work against great odds,” says Anatoly Katok, a longtime friend and colleague from Moscow. “There was resistance from the establishment. They didn't want Jews and they didn't want outsiders.”
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