Ken Aulettan visits Google's Mountain View office to present his book "Googled: The End of the World As We Know It". This event took place on November 11, 2009, as part of the Authors@Google series

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 Googles 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 Googles closed-door meetings and paints portraits of Googles 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 Googles rise, shares the secret sauce of Googles success, and shows why the worlds of new and old media often communicate as if residents of different planets.

Google engineers start from an assumption that the old ways of doing things can be improved and made more efficient, an approach that has yielded remarkable results— Google will generate about $20 billion in advertising revenues this year, or more than the combined prime-time ad revenues of CBS, NBC, ABC, and FOX. And with its ownership of YouTube and its mobile phone and other initiatives, Google CEO Eric Schmidt tells Auletta his company is poised to become the worlds first $100 billion media company.

Yet there are many obstacles that threaten Googles future, and opposition from media companies and government regulators may be the least of these. Google faces internal threats, from its burgeoning size to losing focus to hubris. In coming years, Googles faith in mathematical formulas and in slide rule logic will be tested, just as it has been on Wall Street. (less info)