Hey, what happened to the warts?

The GOOGLE STORY
David Vise with Mark Malseed
Delacorte Press
Towards the fag end of the dot com bust, there used to be a buzz on the IIT campus in Mumbai. A spanking new incubator with access to some decent funding had just come up. Led by a few exceptionally good men like Dr Deepak Phatak, it had all the makings of a blockbuster.
And students, buoyed by success stories from the west, kept knocking at its doors.Most of them hoped the incubator and its promise to convert an intelligent idea into a viable business would be their ticket to fame and stardom.
I used to spend hours at this place, at times talking, at others watching, and very often chronicling accounts of graduate students working against time to infuse life into their ideas and earn a few million dollars in the bargain. It made for lovely copy. Those were exciting times indeed.
Over time, I followed the lives of a few who did make a lot of money. With the benefit of hindsight, I know it was not because their ideas were brilliant���but because a few brave (stupid?) venture capitalists made some wrong calls.
I also followed a few exceptionally bright ones, who I hoped, for India's sake, would make it big. And I wrote a few optimistic stories documenting their struggles.
To my eternal disappointment, they disappeared, like wisps of smoke. And then, like everybody else, I gave up tracking student entrepreneurs in the incubator.
Very often, I've wondered if the incubator and the experiments it spawned simply petered out from a lack of direction. Or was it a case study on how things ought not to be done?
Some insights and possible answers into these questions is why I liked The Google Story. It documents in fairly decent detail the intellectual environment at Stanford University where the founders of Google first met; and the catalysts that spawned an experiment, the outcome of which is one of the hottest technology companies in the world. Add to all of this a few other significant lessons.
It's all right to make mistakes. It's all right to be pig headed. Venture capitalists are not all right. And our country needs more men like Dr Phatak.
For this one reason alone, the book ought to be mandatory reading for policy makers, student entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and all those involved with attempting to recreate the Silicon Valley culture in India.
Having said that, the book suffers a serious flaw. It is hopelessly effusive. The book talks only in superlatives about Google and paints its founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin as demi-Gods.
If only, the Pulitzer Prize- winning David Vise had tempered the gushing. Even an unabashed Google fan like me would want to know of the downside to the founders' legendary arrogance.
Marketing guru Peter Sealey is quoted in the book as saying: "These guys are technologically arrogant...They don't know what their brand stands for. They are code writers." But Vise dismisses these concerns are rather insignificant. Apparently, they've earned their right to be arrogant.
Then there's the whole issue of privacy. What Google knows about its users' behaviour is unparalleled in the history of any technology company.
Privacy advocates across the western world are up in arms against the company. But once again, Vise glosses over the implications conveniently.
And not much is made of the impending battle between Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft to control the internet. In fact, nothing at all is made of it. To that extent, it seems unlikely this book will fetch the author another Pulitzer.