During my flight back from NYC, I managed to read another profile book. This one was not a company profile that I have read before, but covered the changes in Silicon Valley since the phrase Web 2.0 was coined. The book "Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good - The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0" by Sarah Lacy was a really good read as well.

There is no back cover summary of this book, and the inner liner is too long to really want to post here. However, here is the summary:

After the DotCom Bubble burst in 2000, many of the IT companies that had started to be formed with grandiose ideas failed miserably and vanished. There were a select few that continued to prosper amazingly well, and some of them that continued to grow slowly, but the majority of them closed shop. Then, several years later, what people originally thought of as the next bubble began to form. This was not a bubble, though - this was a completely different mindset as to how the IT industry would grow. Instead of companies forcing product out the door with only one thought in mind, the new iteration was dubbed Web 2.0 and got feedback from the users and facilitated communication in order to grow.

According to Wikipedia, "Web 2.0 is a term describing the trend in the use of World Wide Web technology and web design that aims to enhance creativity, information sharning, and, most notably, collaboration among users." The key element here is the collaboration, which enhances the communication from users on the system with one another as well as with the owners of the site. This led to the growth and expansion of many such sites - MySpace, PayPal, LinkedIn, Digg, and the one that blew everyone away - Facebook. Some of these have gone public, some have not; either way, they are examples of how the owners of the sites have grown it for what they want as well as keeping in mind the needs of the users.

The nice thing about the book is that it does not cover only the successes, but also the failures. Some learn from success, others from failure, and those on the outside learn from both. It is an interesting viewpoint of the changes in the industry from the 90s DotCom Bubble to the new method of the successful sites and see what happens to make a successful business that is not custom-made solutions for clients but a service-oriented product delivered to the public for anyone and everyone to use. Most of these applications have simple to use interfaces, are geared towards the community as a whole (and not defining a specific community), and the most popular ones allow for unique customization (MySpace allowing for custom skinning and Facebook for the addition of a number of applications - most of which are just ANNOYING, as a personal note).

The book covers the growth of the new Web 2.0 industry and shows budding entrepeneurs the upsides, the downsides, and the growth of the new industry. It shows others what has worked and what has not (unlike the DotCom Bubble, there was still VC funding here but not as much as there was up front back in the 90s).

A nice review of how the industry has changed and where it is going for those of us in the IT industry. It gives ideas and shows that things change frequently. What was hot one day may not be hot the next day - complacency breeds failure. The companies have to listen to the public and make changes accordingly to keep the business thriving.

One book I read recently during my trip was "The Google Story" by David A. Vise and Mark Malseed. The book is approximately 300 pages and outlines the growth of Google from its beginnings at Stanford University to the mega-empire it is today. Taken from the back cover:

In 1998, Moscow-born Sergey Brin and Midwest-born Larry Page dropped out of graduate school at Stanford University to, in their own words, "change the world" through a powerful search engine that would organize every bit of information on the Web for free. Based on scrupulous research and extraordinary access to Google, this fast-moving narrative takes you inside the creation and growth of a fun-loving firm whose unorthodox ways have enabled it to challenge Microsoft's dominance, shake up Wall Street, and rewrite the rules of advertising on the way to becoming a $130 billion behemoth. The Google Story reveals ambitious and controversial new projects - including secret plans to build a searchable genetic database - as well as troubling personal-privacy issues that may come to test the founders' guiding mantra: DON'T BE EVIL.

Even though it was 300 pages long, it was an easy read. In fact, I started and finished the book during my flight to New York City. Even though it was not large print, it was a captivating read and was organized quite well. The book covers the humble beginnings and goes into some detail about how the company came to be, its growth, and the mindset as to how both Larry and Sergey grew the company. There was no code in the book (obviously), as this was a business profile of a technical company, but there was definitely one thing to have been learned from that book:

The way the rules are set out are not set in stone.

Case in point: The book discussed how the company went about their IPO in a manner that contradicted how Wall Street dictated it. Instead of following all the small rules and declaring shares the way that industry had dictated in the past, they decided to do something different and instead set up a lottery-type system where anyone could purchase the Google stock. This resulted in one of the largest IPOs in Wall Street's history, and they did it their way. It also showed that you have to follow SOME of the process, as the IPO almost didn't happen due to some potential legal issues, but with perseverence and the focus that what they are doing is right and needed, they succeeded.

It also showed some insight into the company as a whole. For example, their hired their own chef to feed the employees. It wasn't your standard burgers and fries type kitchen either; this was a full blown chef that fed the staff something different every day. Odds are they also served the normal cafeteria type food, but they gave that extra value to the employees which shows how much the company values the employees. 

The company also follows the 80-20 rule - 80% of the time is spent on company business; 20% on side projects that interest the employees. Many of the 20% projects have turned into real applications currently being used - Google Groups and GMail, for example. These were side projects that began by some employees, got buy in from upper management and resources allocated to it to expand it to a real project so it would fall into the 80% category, and then grow into a large service used by the public. Google has approached this uniquely in a few ways as well - their internal testing was done in-house with Google employees as their beta testers. They had a large base of people to test the applications on and then release to the public slowly but surely to ensure that there was minimal impact to those already on the system.

Overall, the book was well written and showed how the project grew from an idea of 2 college students to a full blown ... well, empire that covers a number of services and strives to keep their main basic premise.