• Jock Given

08 July 2010In Inside Story, Jock Given reviews Ken Auletta’s new book, Googled

THE PEOPLE at Google didn’t leap at Ken Auletta’s plan to write a book about their company. The New Yorker’s communications writer since 1992, Auletta portrayed the decline of the big three American television networks in Three Blind Mice, published in the early 1990s, and the fate of Microsoft in World War 3.0 a decade later.

If the picture is not pretty, Auletta will paint it anyway. Corporations with customers, shareholders and valuable brands don’t relish this kind of scrutiny. But Google eventually said yes. They let Auletta make many visits to their headquarters at Mountain View in Silicon Valley outside San Francisco, where he conducted about 150 interviews with staff, including eleven with CEO, Eric Schmidt. Only one vice-president declined to be interviewed.

The result is an absorbing confrontation. In Auletta’s other work, he is a model of journalistic observation. Who Ken Auletta is and…

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