In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
by Steven Levy
An interesting moment occurred in Bangalore when Mayer was taking questions from local engineers after presenting an overview of upcoming products. One of them asked, “We’ve heard the road map for products, what’s the road map for revenues?” She almost bit his head off. “That’s not the way to think,” she said. “We are focused on our users. If we make them happy, we will have revenues.” Page indulged in a little vanity in naming the part of the system that rated websites by the incoming links: he called it PageRank. But it was a sly vanity; many people assumed the name referred to web pages, not a surname.
An interesting moment occurred in Bangalore when Mayer was taking questions from local engineers after presenting an overview of upcoming products. One of them asked, “We’ve heard the road map for products, what’s the road map for revenues?” She almost bit his head off. “That’s not the way to think,” she said. “We are focused on our users. If we make them happy, we will have revenues.”
Page indulged in a little vanity in naming the part of the system that rated websites by the incoming links: he called it PageRank. But it was a sly vanity; many people assumed the name referred to web pages, not a surname.
“We don’t monetize the thing we create,” Andy Rubin says. “We monetize the people that use it. The more people that use our products, the more opportunity we have to advertise to them.”
Page once said that anyone hired at Google should be capable of engaging him in a fascinating discussion should he be stuck at an airport with the employee on a business trip.
A product manager at Google didn’t give orders. His (or her) job was to charm the engineers into a certain way of thinking. It was a Mensa form of cat herding.
"An interesting moment occurred in Bangalore when Mayer was taking questions from local engineers after presenting an overview of upcoming products. One of them asked, “We’ve heard the road map for products, what’s the road map for revenues?” She almost bit his head off. “That’s not the way to think,” she said. “We are focused on our users. If we make them happy, we will have revenues.”"
"Page indulged in a little vanity in naming the part of the system that rated websites by the incoming links: he called it PageRank. But it was a sly vanity; many people assumed the name referred to web pages, not a surname."
"“We don’t monetize the thing we create,” Andy Rubin says. “We monetize the people that use it. The more people that use our products, the more opportunity we have to advertise to them.”"
"Page once said that anyone hired at Google should be capable of engaging him in a fascinating discussion should he be stuck at an airport with the employee on a business trip."
"A product manager at Google didn’t give orders. His (or her) job was to charm the engineers into a certain way of thinking. It was a Mensa form of cat herding."
"He believed that the only true failure was not attempting the audacious. “Even if you fail at your ambitious thing, it’s very hard to fail completely,”"
"“We designed Google,” Urs Hölzle says, “to be the kind of place where the kind of people we wanted to work here would work for free.”"
- →“We don’t monetize the thing we create,” Andy Rubin says. “We monetize the people that use it. The more people that use our products, the more opportunity we have to advertise to them.”
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