Geoff Schumacher

I just finished reading Ken Auletta’s “Googled,” about the ubiquitous Internet goliath. It’s a very good book that explains clearly and completely why Google is such a dominant player on the web — and why so many people want to work there. Auletta also does a fine job of outlining the dilemmas faced by the newspaper, magazine, book and television industries as the world becomes more and more comfortable with online reading, viewing and so forth.

There are many lessons to be gleaned from this book for anyone in the print media business who is striving to change the business model to not only incorporate the web but to make it the primary focus of the enterprise. One of the main lessons is that newspaper companies need to hire more and better computer engineers and let them help guide the way. All us old-school word people may have vaguely decent ideas about how to make our websites better and more profitable but we need engineers to be involved to not only implement what we envision but to come up with better and more efficient ways of doing things.

This is primarily why Google has leaped far ahead of the pack. Here is a quote from Eric Schmidt, Google CEO, from the book: “I sometimes feel like I live on another planet and speak a different language from traditional media companies.” Here is a common mantra heard at Google: “Have a healthy disregard for the impossible.”