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combined advertising revenues of the five broadcast networks (CBS, NBC, ABC, Fox, and the CW). By 2011, Web advertising in the United States was expected to climb to sixty billion dollars, or 13 percent of all ad dollars. This meant more dollars siphoned from traditional media, with the largest slice probably going to Google. And Google had started initiatives to sell advertising for television, radio, and newspapers, which could boost its market share. Google also introduced other services: Gmail, Google News, Google Earth, Google Maps, Google Video, Picasa for sharing digital photographs, Google Books to search every book ever published, Orkut, a social network site, or additional “cloud computing” applications such as Desktop or Docs.
    By 2008, Mel Karmazin was no longer alone in questioning Google’s intentions. Nor were those intentions obscure. In the disclosure documents it filed with the SEC in 2008, Google declared, “We began as a technology company, and have evolved into a software, technology, internet, advertising and media company all rolled into one.” When Google adds mobile phones and a full menu of software applications to its cloud computing, and if it figures out a way to monetize YouTube, Eric Schmidt told me, he thinks it is conceivable that Google can become the first media company to generate one hundred billion dollars in revenues. It irritated media executives to hear Schmidt say, “We are in the advertising business,” yet hear Google employees constantly say they were on a quest to bring information to the masses, as if they toiled for a nonprofit that awarded no bonuses.
    Marc Andreessen, thirty-eight, who transformed the Internet into a mass medium by helping invent what became the Netscape browser when he was a student and who is today a successful Internet entrepreneur seeking to build his third billion-dollar-plus company, is suspicious of Google’s intentions: “Their game plan is to do everything. Google is Andy Kaufman. The whole thing with Andy Kaufman is you could never tell when he was joking. Google comes out with a straight face and said, ‘We’re just going to be a search engine. We’re not going to be doing any of this other stuff”—competing with advertising agencies, with telephone companies by getting into the cell phone business, with Hollywood, with publishers, with newspapers. “But I am quite sure they’re joking.”
     
     
     
    THERE IS A DISCONNECT between the way Google is often perceived and the way it perceives itself. “I sometimes feel like I live on another planet and speak a different language from traditional media companies,” Eric Schmidt said. And in a sense, Google does live on a separate planet. When it moved to its first Mountain View campus in August 1999, the move reflected the determination of its two young founders to keep employees focused inward. The current Googleplex in Mountain View is a collection of two-and three-story buildings with outdoor tables and park benches shaded by trees, a vegetable garden, and walkways pulsing with people and bicycles. Employees enjoy free meals and luxurious snacks (at a cost to Google of about seventy million dollars per year), and are offered bicycles to travel between buildings containing massage rooms and gyms staffed with trainers. Employees eat at large cafeteria tables, take breaks in lounges with pool tables and espresso machines. No need to leave campus for a car wash or oil change; they’re available on Thursdays. Also available are barbers, dry cleaners, day care, dog care, dentists, and five physicians to dispense free physicals and medical care. Comfortable, Wi-Fi-equipped, biodiesel commuter buses transport employees to and from campus from as far away as San Francisco, and they run from early morning to late at night. No need to buy laptop computers; employees choose their own for free. Maternity leave consists of five months off at full salary, and new dads can take seven weeks off