Bloomberg Game Changers: Google

Movie Title--  Bloomberg Game Changers: Google

Release Year--  2010

Running Time--  48 Minutes

Film Type--  Documentary

Narrator--  Ted Marcoux

The story of the birth of Google and it's creators Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

This story begins with two men; Larry Page born March 1973 in Michigan and Sergey Brin born August 1973 in the Soviet Union; Brin emigrated with his parents to America in 1979.  Both of their parents worked in similar fields with each one having a parent with a computer science degree.  Page received a Bachelors in Science for Computer Engineering from the University of Michigan and Brin received a Bachelors in Science for Computer Engineering from the University of Maryland.  After that they both enrolled in a computer science Ph. D program at Stanford University.

Web browsing in the 1990's was difficult and misleading.  Page and Brin wanted something better for the internet, so they started to keep a record of "Back Links" from websites and realized that they could make a ranking system of these websites to give better results when searching for something online.  After coming up with their ranking system, they needed a name so they decided on Googol, (which is a 1 with 100 0's behind it) but they found that it was already owned, so they then changed the spelling to Google.  As they began to build Google, they would overload Stanford University's network, even crashing it once.

In 1998 they drop out of their Ph. D classes to look for funding for their new company.  They were passed up by different CEOs and companies.  One morning, Andy Bechtolsheim of Sun Microsystems sees them sitting on the porch, gets out of his car and after 10 minutes of presentation, writes a $100,000 check to Google Inc.  Google was not then an official company yet, so they could not cash the check right away.  They went to Ram Shiriram that had approached them before and with his help and the help of 3 more investors they raised $1,000,000 which included $250,000 from Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com.  Google Inc. was incorporated in September 1998.  They gained the attention of venture capitalists Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital and John Doerr of Kliener Perkins who both wanted an exclusive deal but Page and Brin said no; they wanted BOTH to be their venture capitalists.

They issued their first press release in 1999 announcing the $25,000,000 investment.  Later that year they made an arrangement with Netscape to send all of their internet traffic to Google.  By then they were too big for their garage work space and moved into a new headquarters they named the Googleplex.

The Googleplex was set up so that people would want to stay longer at their jobs.  It holds cafes with trained chefs and long tables to eat at so that you were forced to sit next to someone from the company that you did not know so you could share your ideas with each other.  It also houses places for family services, massages, a gym, volleyball courts, and a barber shop, just to name a few.  This helped to start the company mantra "Don't Be Evil".  Page and Brin did not want employees leaving the company to start their own companies, they preferred for them to start something new for Google.  This became a perk called 20% time.  Which was 20% of your time you could spend working on what you think you should do, however it was hard to get a project green lit.  A few of the products that have come out of 20% time is Google News, Google Suggest, Google AdSense, and Google Talk (just to name a few).  NOTE--Since this documentary has aired, Google has done away with 20% time.

Now Google had employees but they still were not making any money.  They wanted their new sleek, plain Google homepage (that Brin designed) to focus on the user experience.  It had to be fast and ads bogged down the speed and they did not think that ads were good for the user and thus Google Adwords was born.  Ads come up on the side of the page when someone types in a search for certain products and the vendors only pay when someone clicks on the ad.

By now the venture capitalists wanted a CEO in place and they introduced Page and Brin to Eric Schmidt in 2001.  They liked him because he wasn't just a professional business man but he also had a background in engineering.  Brin said they hired Schmidt because they needed some "Parental supervision".

In 2002 Google forges a partnership with AOL which provides them with 34 million new customers.

In 2004 Google goes public.  They have an auction for their IPO price.  It closed at just over $100 a share, making the company work over $23 billion and it is now believed that it could have been higher.  Also in 2004 Google included Google Maps, Google News and Google Earth but they were having trouble with their email-Google Mail more commonly known as Gmail.  The problem with Gmail was the ads that appeared were generated from the content in people's emails and that caused the consumer to get nervous.  

In 2006 Google strikes a deal with China for access to their 400,000,000 web users with the condition that they would censor the search results of banned content.  Google reluctantly agrees but then discovers that China has launched a cyber attack on Google.  This is mainly to gain access to the Gmail accounts of Chinese Human Rights Activists.  Google sends all web traffic to an unfiltered, uncensored site in Hong Kong.  In 2010 Google's agreement with China gets renewed after intense negotiations.  

Google has also been working on a video service called Google Video however it takes a long time to upload video content to the web but there was a new site called YouTube that uploaded instantly and the content was ready to view immediately.  By 2006 65,000 videos a day are being uploaded to YouTube.  Google buys YouTube in 2006 for $1.65 billion in stock.

In 2006 Google quietly buys Android, a small company that produced software for mobile phones, for $50,000,000.  

In 2007 they come out with Google Street View which they call an "effort to capture every neighborhood on the planet".  However Google ran into a problem when the cameras they sent out took personal user information from unsecured WiFi locations, making people feel as if their privacy was being compromised.  Google then agrees to destroy all the personal information that was taken.

In 2008 the first Android powered mobile phone comes out.  This angers Steve Jobs who accused Page and Brin of trying to kill the Iphone and slammed them for entering the mobile phone business.  Eric Schmidt, who had been a member of Apple's board of directors for three years, resigns from Apple's board.

Google starts providing products like documents and spreadsheet programs, causing a little friction with Microsoft, so in 2010 Microsoft introduces Bing to compete with Google.

In 2011 CEO Eric Schmidt announces that he is leaving Google and that Larry Page would take over as Google CEO and Brin would focus on new product.  Schmidt tweets "Day to day supervision no longer needed."

I am very sorry that this post is super wordy but I found this program very interesting.  This month I will be 31 years old and as I watched this documentary I started thinking to myself "I can't remember life on the internet before Google".  Personally I don't think that these two men get enough credit for the things that they have done, they have literally changed the world.

I am also sorry that two-thirds of the post is in a timeline format but I felt like it was the only way for me to include the information I wanted to talk about without the post being 2 miles long.  I put a lot of Google facts above but I only did it up until this documentary came out.  If you are interested in learning more about the timeline of Google you can go here: http://www.google.com/about/company/history/ .

So, the next time you tell someone to "Google it" or you look up directions on Google Maps or you watch that cute cat video on YouTube or you check your Gmail account on your Android phone remember these guys, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who made it all possible.