Books Step Behind the Curtain of Tech's Leading Companies

Nearly three years ago, I made myself a public promise to stop buying books, CDs, DVDs, or basically any form of media that took up any space. (See: Physical Media Has To Go. I'm Digital Only From Here.) With media stores on practically every platform, whether you prefer Apple's, Google's or Amazon's, and streaming entertainment available from Spotify, Netflix and the aforementioned three, you can get just about anything you want straight to your computer, phone or tablet. So my all digital diet hasn't slowed me down a bit.

The end of 2013 brought us an unusual array of tales on technology going behind the public faces of some of technology's biggest names, including Apple, Google, Amazon and the newest $30 billion kid on the block, Twitter. So I spent a good amount of the holiday break taking in stories, with their own various embellishments, covering the challenges of building a mobile operating system at Google and Apple, the executive tug of war and pivot of Twitter, the focus on design in Jony Ive's laboratory, and how Amazon has craftily executed on its plan to become the single store for everything under the sun.

Taking in the tales of Silicon Valley companies is something I'll likely never get bored of, even if I'm covering the news as a blogger, living the news as an employee, or enjoying the benefits as an end user. So to get all four of these books at about the same time is an embarrassment of riches.

As I've read each of the books on Google Play, I've tried to be a good Web citizen and provide a rating and a short review. If we're connected on Google+ and you look at the book on Play, you'll probably see my take. If you aren't, or we haven't synched yet, here's a quick run through of what I thought on each title. Each title links to Google Play, where you can pick it up too.

Hatching Twitter (Author: Nick Bilton)

Review: "Many characters needed to make a mere 140. Politics over tech, and very public... similar to many startups that aren't quite under the microscope."

Expanding: As someone who's covered Twitter as a blogger for some time and used the service extensively for five years, I had hoped for more insight into how the Twitter team took on technology scaling challenges, worked through product decisions and managed the fast-growing community. Bilton focused primarily on the office drama at the highest levels, and the day to day challenges seem to happen practically invisibly. Also, as noted in my review, as a veteran of some challenging political environments in startups, the executive turnover is not unique to Twitter, but it's unusual for it to become so public, or for the company to survive even with the infighting.

Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products (Author: Leander Kahney)

Review: "Good story. Very one sided. Jony is an exceptional mind working on high quality and highly desired products. The author recaps the highlights and approaches the subject as if Apple is infallible and perfect, which get tiresome. Jony is made out to be a deity. The truth is already incredible. The fable is not needed."

Expanding: Jony Ive and Apple make incredible products. The iPod and iPhone and iMac are great examples of that. I liked Jony's origin story and how he was forged in the UK before making his way to Cupertino. What I liked less was the over the top, breathless deification of Jony that went well beyond what I felt ws necessary. It was so sugary, one had to put the book down every few minutes until you could get enough strength to start again. That's no slight to Jony or Apple, of course.

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (Author: Brad Stone)

Review: "The best book on tech in 2013 An intriguing dissection and chronicling of a truly modern company's rise to market dominance."

Expanding: The story of Amazon was by far my favorite of this group. What's striking is the drive behind Jeff Bezos and team to take on incredible challenges, and just get it done. Amazon, through perseverance and ingenuity, skated through the hardest times in the Web 1.0 crash, and came out a world leader, starting new businesses and categories at a pace and scale hard to fathom. If you had to read just one of these four, I'd pick this one.

Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution (Author: Fred Vogelstein)

Review: "Good stories and current! Only a few obvious inaccuracies, but well intended."

Expanding: This was a fun one, as someone who prefers Android to iOS, but has been a heavy user of both. As someone who knows some more color to much of the stories, I found some of the author's summaries and shortcuts to simply be wrong. I was mostly willing to forgive that, considering the book was entertaining and insightful. I only hope the parts that I liked were true. As a Googler, it actually gave me more knowledge about individuals on the team and their own efforts that I didn't have before, so I appreciated that.

If you're like me, and you live and breathe technology and the Silicon Valley, these four books are a great way to go beyond the day to day headlines and clickbait you see on the "news of the minute" sites. If you are an entrepreneur or even just an office drone like the rest of us, you could learn something, be it the why, or the how, but you can't say any of these books left you more lacking for knowledge at the end than when you started. So check 'em out - digitally.

Disclosures: Yes, I work at Google. Google makes Android and Google Play, and could be a partner or competitor to Amazon, Apple, Twitter, Spotify or Netflix, depending on which product or feature you're thinking about.

"I'm Feeling Lucky" Now on Google Books

Doug Edwards' book "I'm Feeling Lucky' is now available as a Google eBook for $14.85. You could get it from Barnes and Noble for $23 or Borders for $19, but doesn't this seem more pure? I've been waiting for the electronic edition for a while.

/via my Google+ Profile.

Tech Leaders Don't Win By Saying They'll Crush Somebody

The best technology companies in the world, be they in hardware, software or Web services, didn't get there by brashly saying they were going to take out #1, kill them or stomp on their grave. If you think about it, or do your share of reading up on Web history, you'll find that for the most part, the companies who we associate with leadership, be it through quality, market share or traffic stats, reached their position with a near purity of thought on their ability to deliver something new and differentiated. So when you read about company X targeting company Y or setting up to take them down, you can almost guarantee they either won't make it, or company Y is going to change the game again.

In the last few weeks, I've been doing a lot of reading on Silicon Valley history - away from the day to day news releases and rumor mongering, but a few years to a decade back in the past. I enjoyed reading "In the Plex" by Steven Levy, which walks through the rise of Google, and am nearing the end of "The Facebook Effect" by David Kirkpatrick, which goes beyond The Social Network's fight with the Winklevii and walks along Mark Zuckerberg and team as they try to change the world. In years past I've enjoyed plenty of books on Apple, Oracle, Microsoft, AOL and other tech titans, with similar paths.

In the recent cases of Google and Facebook, what you don't see is a lot of crowing about how they plan to "take down" Alta Vista, Yahoo! and Excite for the first, or to crush Friendster and MySpace for the second. In fact, as Levy points out, Google tried to sell itself to Excite in the early days, only to be turned down due to the engine's accuracy being so high it would reduce pages for ads to be displayed. Facebook quickly morphed from a single university system to a march on openness and increased social connections.

In Facebook's case, the failure of Friendster helped the company focus on system reliability to avoid issues that badly damaged the social pioneer, and contrasts with MySpace were common during the network's growth. But you don't see Zuckerberg targeting number one. Instead, he wanted to build a new platform with a higher mission.

Extend this to the world of mobile phones. If you remember the initial launch of the iPhone, Apple didn't talk about being the majority leader in market share. Instead, Steve Jobs set a target of one percent market share by 2008. Sure enough, in 2008, they reached 1.1 percent. (See: Ars Technica) They clearly beat that 1 percent goal, and kept going.

So when I read about challengers taking on big targets and swearing they will surpass them, I can't help but be skeptical. For example:

• An HP exec says the TouchPad will beat the iPad
• Jason Calacanis says Launch will have more traffic than TechCrunch.
• Palm said iPhone users would switch to the Pre in waves.
• Acer's CEO claimed they would outsell the iPad.

There are many many examples like this where the hubris outweighs the reality (all deference to the hardworking folks trying to make this happen). In 2008, I wrote that those talking about taking down leaders like TechCrunch and Techmeme only further proved how hard it is to be on top. In January of this year, I said there were no iPad killers, only alternatives. Don't get me wrong. Our iPads seemingly exist just so my kids can watch videos, while I'm much more open to using the Galaxy Tab, but I don't expect iPad sales to go anywhere but up for a while.

Look at who is on top today in whatever category makes sense for you. Social networking. Search. Mobile OS. Tablets. Storage systems. Operating systems. Printers. You name it. You would be hard-pressed to see those companies having talked big about taking down number one when they were on their pathway to success. They probably didn't do it at all.

I never saw Google commercials mocking Yahoo!. I never saw Facebook taking potshots at MySpace. Those throwing stones now should do what the big guys did to get here - focus on their business and do a fantastic job executing on something users really want. If they do, and they get a chance to get noticed, then they will get a chance to be number one. While bravado is fun for internal sales rallies and personal goals, it's probably not the best for a public press position. And those companies who are going to be the next Google, Facebook, Linkedin, Apple or who knows what... they're probably going to creep up on us and not tell the world they're going to do it. Just watch.

Physical Media Has To Go. I'm Digital Only From Here.

Moving across town last summer was a real eye opener in terms of seeing how tied we still are to physical things. Beyond all our sundry items needed to survive, there were boxes upon boxes of nice-looking and possibly interesting books and other media - DVDs, CDs, the occasional VHS tape nobody had bothered to toss. All of them took up room, and made for heavy lifting. But there's no real good reason, beyond nostalgia, to ever get any more. I want all my music, photos, videos and books to be electronic, and I want everything else gone - even if it looks great on the bookshelf. Same goes for my kids. Once they're done with their board books, I want them to get used to eReaders. By the time they reach school, textbooks should be relics of the past anyway.

Thirteen years ago, Apple did away with floppy drives on the iMac, ushering in a world where people did well enough to email items via attachment, or in later years, burn copies to compact discs. Ten years ago, I dumped my hundreds of cassette tapes in the garbage moving from one home to another on the Peninsula. Three years ago, I donated hundreds of my CDs to a coworker who liked the same music, and emptied my bookshelf to another friend who didn't mind dog-eared Stephen King and John Grisham novels. Even DVDs are too unwieldy at this point. For software installations, one installs once and the DVD is subsequently irrelevant. Purchasing DVD movies is completely silly in a world with significant storage space, and Blu-Ray never even entered my mind.

Now practically the only physical media I bump into is when a book author wants me to do a review, or when coffee table books are passed along as questionable gifts. Even USB flash drives are starting to feel like old media to me at this point.

In a world where I am constantly connected to some gadget, be it a phone, a tablet or a laptop, it takes serious will power to unplug and dust off an old tome whose number of uses is limited. The books I've been sent to review are piled in a corner on my desk - some probably good, but I might even buy the digital version rather than lug around a heavier three-dimensional copy. The stray Netflix DVD we have around the house just causes me to nag my wife into making our subscription digital only, and everything else I just want to give away in a massive garage sale - cheap!

The long-desired paperless office remains elusive, but for much of the home, it can be obtained. My music is streamed on Spotify, with some playlists and artists saved as digital files. My movies have a short shelf life, typically the 24 hours allotted by Apple TV before they disappear. And I've been reading all my books on the NOOKColor and on the Google Books app. There was a time when people would argue it was worth paying a premium for the physical copy of an item, but now it seems they should have to pay me for the inconvenience.

Being digital only means that exceptions to the rule can fall through the cracks. Bills delivered in the physical mail don't get paid as quickly. Notifications from the DMV can get missed, and late fees occur. It's a problem that hasn't been perfectly solved, and it could just be me making an excuse. But as I see it, if there's an option to go digital, that's my choice. With bandwidth and storage space being what they are, my infrastructure isn't optimized for yesterday's media delivery.

NOOKColor Combines Specialization, Potential & Android

In a world full of multi-purpose gadgets which ping, beep and blink at you to signal more messages coming your way to demand your attention, there's something remarkably comforting about a device like Barnes & Noble's NOOKColor, which is designed not to distract you with many things at once, but instead, to bring a powerful reading experience. I've been using the NOOKColor as my primary reading device for the last month, and it's easy to see what the product does very well. The availability of instant access to popular titles on demand, color magazines and newspapers, included apps and simple access to the Web if you want to take a break between books has made the NOOKColor an easy add to our house. I am reading more, and saving money as well as bookshelf space by going fully electronic.

Electronic book readers are not new, of course. Amazon's Kindle epitomizes the market, while the NOOKColor is B&N's second go at it, after their first generation black and white device claimed 20% share. The iPad has its iBooks application, and Sony is still somewhere out there with its eReader. But the NOOKColor hits a very interesting middle point of being impressively designed for reading, while building on extras in the background that actually make the device have incredible potential - including apps from their specialized market, and a real Web browser that can tackle even the oddest of page layouts, thanks to its Android core.


   
My NOOKColor Library, Reading the Big Short

I've long been interested in an electronic book reader device, but none of the Kindle's iterations have been appealing to me - looking like a 1980s throwback with 1950s TVs' color options. The iPad's iBooks application is nice, but the device honestly seems too heavy and cumbersome for long periods of reading. In contrast, the NOOKColor's reading space is about the size of one paperback's page, and is easily held with one hand, flipping pages with the other.

While it can be tempting for Android fans to beg the NOOKColor to add the full Android market and essentially become a low-priced 7-inch tablet, its focus on access to new reading material and having a versatile reading experience define the product. B&N's expertise is in its cultivated lists and access to titles, along with offering WiFi access in every store, along with the ability to preview any book while on their network, just as you could thumb through any book in any retail store. A nice twist.

Browsing Twitter.com On the NOOKColor

One of the reasons I was intrigued by the NOOKColor was its promise to bring interactive children's books that could be read aloud by professionals, and not tired dads. Sure enough, those titles are widely available, with all the bright color imagery in most youth titles these days. But for my age, I was more than happy to pick up the latest Stephen King and John Grisham novels, finally get access to The Big Short by Michael Lewis and yes, even read Decision Points by our 43rd president - something I had no dream of doing in hardcover. Using a fun feature, I was able to post that I'd finished the book to Twitter. You can even post your status mid-way through the book if you want to keep social connections updated.

You wouldn't even know you were running Android 99% of the time you use the device. The home button displays your purchased items, and a second click brings up options for the B&N store, your library, and more. Where Android kicks in are "Extras", which includes some apps, like Pandora and Chess, and "Web". While you're probably not going to make the NOOKColor your primary Web surfing device, it's great to have in the background if you absolutely must check a few news sites, blogs, or even Twitter. As the Market offerings expand with the NOOKColor's growth, I would expect the app experience to play a larger role, of course.

In contrast to my experience with my Android phones (the HTC Evo and the Samsung Epic 4G), battery on the NOOKColor is fantastic. I haven't had it go head to head with the iPad or the Samsung Galaxy Tab, but all three tablets can go days without a charge, and see several hours of use without decrease.

The NOOKColor can also be connected to a laptop via MicroUSB, to transfer files, charge, or pass over screenshots. I pulled MP3 files from my laptop to the NOOKColor and can listen to music in the background as I read, or I can take pictures of my kids and make them the device's wallpaper. This makes it much more like a simple Android tablet than a simple reader.

I Can Update Social Services With my Reading Status

The NOOKColor is only $249, which is lower than the Galaxy Tab or iPad, and comes with integrated WiFi, but not 3G. The low price is enticing, and actually plays into the same strategy of Apple's iPod, with the device leading to more software sales. I am now buying books for $10 again, when I had pretty much walked away from long-form reading off the Web. You can even buy editions of the Wall Street Journal for a buck, if you like. The device's form factor is sturdy and comfortable and is playing a major role in our home's gadget hierarchy.

You can find out more at Barnes & Noble's NOOKColor site. Sales have been fast and furious, so it's probably too late to pick one up for Christmas, but it should be on your personal list, even if you're not gifting it to someone. It's the best reading device in our house, and it's got a Web browser to boot.

Will The Crowdsourced Novel AirBorne Take Flight?

By Eric Berlin of Online Media Cultist (FriendFeed/Twitter)

It's always fun to watch new creative experiments on the Internet play out. When it comes to novelists dabbling in the electronic realm, I fondly recall Stephen King's The Plant, "a serial novel published in 2000 as an e-book."

King wanted to see if people would voluntarily pay $1.00 for each installment versus the option to download for free. Perhaps an early sign of things to come, many people chose not to pay, resulting in the story -- a rather fascinating one if you're interested in how the publishing world worked in the New York City of the 1980s, before the age of the Internet -- never being completed in full.

Now we have AirBorne, "the world's first chain novel inspired by James Patterson." The concept is that best selling thriller writer Patterson will write the first and last chapter of this "crowdsourced" novel. The 28 of 30 "middle chapters" will be written by selected writers, who get the honor of writing one chapter apiece. Presumably, the writer of chapter 14 has to wait until the first 13 chapters are completed, or have a strong idea of what's going on in the story, to pick things up. That fact alone must have made this project a logistically challenging one.

In the 2000 online world that The Plant was released into, distribution options were relatively limited (a Web site destination and viral means limited to things like e-mail and IM), whereas AirBorne will be rolled out a chapter per day starting on March 20th through such "web 2.0" channels as Facebook, Twitter, and RSS.

It will be interesting to see how viral and popular (and airborne?) a project such as AirBorne can get. While chapters are limited to a lean 750 words a pop, will people be keen to churn through it for 30 straight days -- a lifetime in the online realm? And that's to say nothing for the editorial challenge of maintaining some form of stylistic and storytelling consistency through a cavalcade of 29 writers (including one battle-hardened pro) telling one tale.

More than anything, the concept behind AirBorne reminds me of a game that my friends and I used to play. A person would start a story by stating one sentence aloud (usually it was as goofy and bizarre as possible, of course). Then the next person would pick up the thread, and around the circle we'd go. I'm sure that many others have done the same, and I can infer that collaborative storytelling is a tradition that many people can appreciate and potentially participate in, as reader or author.

And as ReadWriteWeb notes:

The roots of the collaborative writing movement can be found in many web startups, including those like Novlet, Potrayl, Ficlets, Unblokt, Protagonize, and others we profiled here. A popular activity for creative writers, these communities offer various takes on how a co-written story should be developed, some focused more on "choose your own adventure"-style stories while others focus more on linear narratives.

I like the idea behind AirBorne, and think it's a worthy project for a well known author to participate in. That said, I think things could have been made really interesting if the non-author part of the crowd -- the online public -- were let into the process somehow. Or what if the group of authors were entitled to vote to move the story in one direction or another after each chapter was finished. For example, maybe after Chapter 15 was completed, the author of Chapter 15 asks a question, such as: Do you think Mike should drop the gun and give himself up, take a hostage and hole up in the control room, or start shooting and try to make a break for it? And the group of authors vote and dictate where Chapter 16 begins.

And, finally, speaking of AirBorne, I'm pounding the medicinal variety today to fight off the onslaught of a cold!

Read more by Eric Berlin at Online Media Cultist

Guest Post: What Digital Media Can Learn From Books

Guest post written by Arvin Dang, currently writing for The Apple Blog.

We are the generation that lives through media. We don’t watch to pass time, we watch to learn and grow. I’m not sure what this reflects on our education system, but just as literature inspires, media can spark the same creativity and instill similar values.

What can media learn from books?

The inherent value we gain from a book's physicality is amazing. I can buy a book, write in it, store it, trade it, share it, sell it, copy it and burn it. I may not be able to physically hold a movie or a song, but I hope to be able to create the same utility surrounding it.

When comparing digital media and books, I’m not comparing E-books or E-Readers because they face the same DRM issues as most music and videos do. I understand the rules and regulations of copyright placed on books, and I understand the necessity of including plagiarism in context of this.

Now let’s have a look

With a book, I understand the author’s words and right of ownership, but I’m free to quote them and to share their words. I can literally copy every page of a borrowed book without ever paying for it. Will I have RIAA or the Government following my every move? Borrowing a book, if anything, builds reputation. Just as word of mouth is the best form of advertising, sharing someone’s content enables the ability for word to spread. Not only will the author or creator gain readership, they gain reputation. Ultimately, that seems to be far grander than any monetary benefit. Why can’t the same happen with digital media?

Libraries, where books can be borrowed completely free seems completely unconventional right? If video content were offered on a public level similar to libraries, who’s losing out?

Why hasn’t independent content caught on as successfully as the Industry?

I don’t know. You tell me. Is it quality of production? Is it the acting? Or the writing? All I know is media should be based on reputation, not profit. If it helps make you more known, provides meaning, and basic ownership is understood, then why can’t TV follow the same path as books?

I understand the role of money in media. Without monetization, the Entertainment Industry may not be able create the beautiful epics we see. I see the success of independent creators like The Next New Networks proving that the industry doesn’t need to equate profit with content. It makes me very curious to see the actual breakdown; to take a season of The Office and see how much total production costs verse how much is monetized and gained from commercials and sales (DVDs, etc).

It’s a greedy market and a demanding world, but if books can find a balance, can’t media?

Are You An ACTIVE Hub?

With about 14 hours of airplane time over the last week, I had plenty of opportunity to catch up on books I've been neglecting. One of those I took in was Emanuel Rosen's "The Anatomy of Buzz", which aimed to capture the concept of word-of-mouth marketing, analyzing how some products take off (see: the iPhone and Nintendo Wii), while others stagnate despite tremendous advertising (see: Microsoft Vista).

One of the most important elements of getting a product launch or news popularized, according to Rosen, is to influence "hubs", defined as people who act as references to friends and others, and who, if influenced, can help to spread the word to many people, helping your cause.

Rosen defines these people with the acronym of being "ACTIVE", namely:

* Ahead in Adoption
* Connected
* Travelers
* Information-hungry
* Vocal
* Exposed to Media

This, to me, defines a great number in the tech blogosphere, who are obviously unafraid to share their opinions, reach many people, and suck down as much information as they can, whether from the mainstream media, or hundreds of RSS feeds from fellow bloggers. There's also no question these ACTIVE folks are connected to others and ahead in adoption. It's the tech bloggers who first adopt (and later dismiss) new Web 2.0 technologies, who are the first to download (and later uninstall) beta products, and they are all too eager to announce having gotten their hands on something new.

While this is true, The Anatomy of Buzz amazingly already seems seriously outdated since its writing in 2000. The book tries to talk about how the Internet impacts buzz by mentioning newsgroups, shared opinions sites like Epinions.com and comments on Amazon.com (including his book), but has zero discussion of those hubs that influence buying decisions now - blogs and social networks being the obvious omissions. It's also amusing to see the word Google is nowhere in the book. As a result, I found myself a little less than impressed with some portions of the book, which as a whole does a good job explaining how the Palm Pilot took off, how Nintendo drummed up excitement around the launch of Super Mario Brothers 3, and how Cold Mountain became a best-seller.

Part of being a blogger is knowing that by being ahead in adoption, information hungry and vocal, that through your connections, you can act as an ACTIVE hub. Though authored in 2000, Rosen describes this phenomenon in an offline way but rings true in today's even more fully connected world. If you don't mind the occasional rolling of the eyes over Web 1.0, it's definitely worth a reminder that it often doesn't matter just how many advertising dollars you throw at a product if the end users don't extend your message to their friends and others.