John Lanchester describes Google as “wired straight into The Global Id,” because it “in effect has a direct line, if not quite to the unconscious dreaming mind of the world, at least to the part of it which voices its wishes.” That direct line is worth a lot of money — more than IBM:
Just over eight years later, Google is the fastest-growing company in the history of the world — with, at the time of writing, a market capitalisation of $138 billion. Larry and Sergey, the Wallace and Gromit of the information age, are worth more than $10 billion each.
About Google’s founders:
Companies are a bit like people in that they tend to bear the imprint of the milieu in which they were formed. Google, spelling mistake and all, is a product of the intensely academic environment in which both Page and Brin were raised. Page was born in Michigan, Brin in Russia, but apart from that their backgrounds were eerily alike: ethnically but not religiously Jewish, educated in Montessori schools, their fathers both university professors of science (computer science at Michigan and maths at Maryland, respectively), their mothers both also super-numerate (database consultancy and Nasa — it must be fun to say ‘my mum works at Nasa’). Brin was 16 when he began taking classes at the University of Maryland, and 19 when he graduated. He went to Stanford to begin work on his PhD. Page, who had done his first degree at the University of Michigan, came there a year later to have a look at the computer science PhD programme. On a Stanford orientation day in 1995, looking round San Francisco, Page began arguing with the tour guide, a second-year comp. sci. PhD student whose opinionated obnoxiousness so closely resembled his own. You have seen enough buddy movies to know what happened next.