We at Ars have been big Google fans for quite some time, so I always dig reading details about the company–how it works, who makes it work, and so on. ThisFortune articleoutlines the history of the company and gives some great insight into where it’s at and what makes it go. I especially enjoyed the statistics, and the talk of hundreds of really smart engineers milling about in ultra-high-tech datacenters, solving problems and making cool things. The one thing you might watch out for, though, is the author’s typically journalistic need to turn a rundown on Google the company into a “story.” He sets up this tension between the idealistic but possibly naive founders who represent the pure, high-minded soul of the company and the more market-oriented CEO, a business type brought in to do business things for non-idealistic, non-high-minded, business reasons. This founders vs. CEO tension is, we learn, part of a much deeper tension within the company around the core question of its overall mission: is Google’s grand goal to make wonderful technology that empowers users everywhere, or to make money? Hmmm… You know, that tension may actually be there; I don’t know because I’m not part of that company. But as someone who’s been on both ends of more than one story, I know an “angle” when I see one.
Anyway, I only have two real gripes about Google. The first one is that theirtoolbardoesn’t work on my Mac. On my Windows XP box the Google Toolbar is the fourth most used browser widget in my IE window (behind the back button, the address bar, and the shortcuts bar). It kills me that it’s not there in any of the Mac browsers I use.
