Five minutes with Ken Auletta
What surprised you most about Google?
I was constantly surprised by the thought: where did two men in their mid-20s get such clarity of thought to say: "We're going to give our engineers 20% of their time to work on any project of their choice." That 20% resulted in a lot of innovations.
What's really going on with China? Might they pull out?
They've always been uneasy with having to sanitise their searches in China, but they compromised. Recently, there's been evidence someone had hacked into Gmail accounts in China. Trust is fundamental to Google's success. If governments can hack into Gmail accounts, that trust is undermined. And it's even more important because Google has staked its future on cloud computing, which is basically storing information in a server. If someone can hack into that server, no one'll use a cloud computer.
Why did Google miss out on social networking?
They did start a social network called Orkut. It's done well in Brazil and India but not in the US. That's a menace to Google because search, while still growing, is slowing. If I'm buying a camera and I post something on Facebook and get 15 answers, that's more valuable than thousands of answers on Google. And Google's terrified; that's one reason they tried to buy Twitter last month.