In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives by Steven Levy is the single best account of Google from conception to the present. The book is a coming of age story of a multi-billion dollar company. It starts at the birth of the company and ends with the transition of power from Eric Schmidt to Larry Page, who earlier this year became CEO of the company he co-founded with Sergey Brin.

In The Plex focuses more on “how Google thinks and works” than on “how Google shapes our live.” To that end it is a better book about the business of technology than a book describing the impact of Google on our culture. I was a little surprised by this because The Perfect Thing is the best single description of the cultural impact of a piece of technology that I’ve ever read. However, Levy’s decision to focus on Google’s business impact probably gives the book more shelf-life (Yeah, I’m not apologizing for that pun.) since Google’s impact on our culture is still being played out. Google introduced many of the fundamental ideas about cloud computing to the average person, and society definitely hasn’t fully grasped the implications of “the cloud” in our society. Still, the early history of Google and their process for building and managing a technology company are well-documented in the book, and this will prove valuable for many years to come.

The book consists of seven parts, with a prologue and an epilogue. The first four parts are outstanding, classic Steven Levy work. Google’s unreal, rapid growth; its famous hiring practices; and its lavish employee benefits are all well-cataloged here. Levy does an amazing job conveying tons of information in an extremely short space here. I enjoyed Levy’s choice to organize this material topically as opposed to chronologically. So many things were happening so quickly with Google, that describing them in the order they happened would have utterly overwhelmed the reader.

The last three parts of the book are where he starts to lose me. Levy sort of gives Google a bit of a pass on some rather important mistakes that they’ve made. Part Five covers everything from YouTube and Android to all the random other things that Google does, but it feels slanted towards “successes” rather than mistakes, which are briefly described in the epilogue. Part Six covers Google’s ventures in China, but it also feels a bit pro-Google. What part of “Don’t be Evil” includes actively supporting the Chinese government? Part Seven focuses on the impact Google has had on the government and the various lawsuits that have become major national news (e.g. Book Search). These also seem rather slanted to me. For example, many of the Googlers who went to work for the White House or other branches of the government complained that they weren’t able to work at Google speed while they were there. This implies that Google is somehow impressively fast, when the reality is that a cadre of Molasses manufacturing executives could switch to government work and discover whole new levels of sluggish bureaucracy.

Those last three parts weren’t so much inaccurately puffing up the accomplishments of Google as much as they were simply not quite telling the whole story. Levy minimizes many of the “negatives.” Google’s Buzz snafu was relegated to a couple of pages in the epilogue. Google’s WiFi data collection as a part of their street view project is similarly lacking in coverage. Levy should have investigated these incidents thoroughly. How does a company as important at Google make mistakes like these? A book with the subtitle “how Google thinks, works, and shapes our lives” should provide more detailed answers.

The only pro-Google aspect of the last three parts that was missing or incomplete was the China hacking incident. Although this was covered from the Google perspective, it was a major incident for other technology companies and more importantly for the U.S. Government. The incident forces several questions implied by the information technology revolution like: How should we respond to international hacking incidents? What is the role of the U.S. Government in protecting companies that have been hacked by foreign governments? And what is the legal process for adjudicating international hacking incidents? These are critical questions that were first brought to the national conversation by the Google hacking incident. We don’t have answers to them, but they aren’t even adequately described as important in the book.

Steven Levy is one of my favorite technical authors, and I’ve read many of his books. I just recently finished Insanely Great, and I previously read both Crypto and The Perfect Thing. If I were ranking them, I would probably have to place this book at the end of that list, which is more to say that his other books were fantastic and this one was merely good.