A few weeks later, seated in his tiny conference room on the Mountain View campus, I discussed that speech with Schmidt. Why, I asked, didn’t he mention privacy in his Aspen talk?

There was a long pause before he said, “No particular reason. It’s sort of a given. If we violate the privacy of our users, they’ll leave us.”

And why no mention of copyright?

“Maybe it was the altitude! I was just chatting away.” Besides, he said, copyright “was not an absolute right” and had to be balanced by fair use.

Isn’t it true that Google wants to push the envelope on privacy and copyright?

“That’s probably correct,” Schmidt conceded. “If there’s a legal case, we’re going to favor the legal one that favors users.”

“Google, if it were a person, has all the flaws and all of the virtues of a classic Silicon Valley geek,” said Columbia ’s Tim Wu, who between jobs teaching law worked for a spell in the Valley. “In some ways, they are very principled.” He cited Google’s 20 percent time, saying that few “money-crazed companies would allow” such a thing. “But they have this total deaf ear to certain types of issues. One of them is privacy.” Why? Because, he said, “They just love that data because they can do neat things with it.”

(2007-2008)

For all its democratic ethos, its belief in “the wisdom of crowds,” at Google the engineer is king, held above the crowd. The vaunted 20 percent time that is parceled out selectively by management to nonengineers is given universally to the half of Google employees who are technically trained. Salaries for engineers are relatively modest-a beginning engineer starts at around $100,000 (versus about $50,000 for nonengineers), and rises to about $300,000, including a bonus-but stock rewards are extravagant. Google rewarded its employees with $868.6 million in stock in 2007, a one-year increase of more than 90 percent.

The importance the company attaches to engineers is spotlighted by the time Google’s founders and CEO Schmidt devote to meetings with them. Their Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoons are crammed with Google Product Strategy (GPS) reviews. Teams made up mostly of engineers meet in a long, dimly lit, low-ceilinged conference room named Mar rakesh, on the second floor of Building 43, next to the office that Page and Brin share. Industrial gray carpet covers the floor and melts into the gray walls. A massive, pale oak custom-made rectangular table stretches almost the full length of the room; at one end are billowy red-velvet couches, and at the other, large, flat LCD screens. Whiteboards line the walls. There are two projectors, so time is not wasted unloading and reloading projectors during multiple presentations, and all cables and wires are color coded to minimize time locating the right connections for laptops and other electronic devices.

Meetings last from fifteen minutes to two hours, and are scheduled one after another, like airport takeoffs and landings. “If you want to talk to Larry or Sergey, you can at one of these meetings,” said Vice President Megan Smith. “If you work at another company, can you get to the CEO within seven days? Probably not.” Often at these meetings, said Tim Armstrong, “Larry is going to take one side of the argument and Sergey is going to take the exact opposite side, and what you’re going to see is that everyone is going to argue in the middle and at some point it is going to be clear what the answer is.” This is a process that allows Page and Brin to learn, he said, “who comes to the meeting prepared” and who has the passion and guts to challenge them.

A meeting on October 9, 2007, did not quite follow this pattern. Brin and Page were to meet with an engineering team to review their proposal for an upgrade of AdWords 1.0. Since its introduction in early 2002, some parts of AdWords had been substantially upgraded while others had not. Small businesses complained that the system was too complicated. Larger customers, such as eBay or Amazon, complained that they wanted new features, including an ability to organize their accounts by products and to break out expenditures by country. To make these functions work, Google needed to enlarge its computers that retained data and enhance the speed of the advertising auctions. To demonstrate their commitment to a new architecture, the founders decided to skip 2.0 and christened this effort AdWords 3.0. The purpose of this session was to receive, and review, the new product teams’ recommendations.

Everyone around the conference table sat on gray-mesh ergonomic swivel chairs. Page was wearing his usual jeans, and a gray T-shirt under a black sports jacket; he sat in the middle of the table, a coffee cup in hand. Brin arrived a few minutes late in jeans and a black crewneck sweater, and plopped in the seat beside Page. More nattily attired in a blue V-necked sweater over a light blue dress shirt and gray slacks, Schmidt sat at the head of the table with a translucent container of salad and a Diet Coke. Schmidt opened the meeting by calling on the team leader, vice president of engineering Sridhar Ramaswamy, to describe the teams’ recommendations.

The upgraded system they proposed, said Ramaswamy, would be less complicated for advertisers, would produce search results faster, and would be “scalable” in that it would allow for the retention of more data. But, he cautioned, it was not quite the gut renovation that had been requested; it would be too expensive and require diverting too many engineers to both speed up AdWords, as Page had urged them to, and to make the sweeping computer changes needed to accommodate Page’s database growth projections.

To a nonengineer, the hour-long discussion was often incomprehensible-“three-tier architecture,” “middle-tier API,” “UI tier,” “end-to-end solutions,” “no latency,” “Java script bindings for third parties,” “10 percent CTR,” “SQL base.” But no translator was required to observe that Page and Brin were unhappy. At first, the founders were stonily silent, sliding lower in their chairs, and occasionally leaning over to whisper to each other. Intermittently, Page looked away from the engineers; Brin, appearing alternately distracted and irritated, would rise and stretch his legs on the empty chair beside his. Schmidt began with technical questions to the product team, but then he switched roles and tried to draw out Page and Brin, saying, “Larry, say what’s really bugging you.”

The room was quiet for perhaps ten seconds before Page responded. When he did, he scolded the engineers, saying they were not ambitious enough. Brin concurred, adding that the proposal was “muddled” and un-Google-like in its caution. “I named this 3.0 for a reason,” Page interjected. “We wanted something big. Instead, you proposed something small. Why are you so resistant?”

The engineering team leader held his ground. Ramaswamy said that his entire team concurred that the founders’ proposed changes would be too costly in money, time, and engineering manpower. Page countered that a significantly improved AdWords would make it easier for advertisers and result in greater revenues. “You are polishing up the program. I wanted to have a redesign.”

Schmidt stepped in to summarize their differences. He noted that Brin and Page were focused on the outcome, while the product team focused first on the process, and concluded that the engineering improvements would prove too “disruptive” to achieve the goal.

Brin said that neither he nor Page wanted to add patches to the system, something Microsoft has been criticized for when they stuff more code into their already bloated operating system. “I’m just worried that we designed the wrong thing,” Brin said. “And you’re telling me you’re not designing the optimum system. I think that’s a mistake… I’m trying to give you permission to be bolder.”