Kara Swisher

Recent Posts by Kara Swisher

Author Ken Auletta Talks About Google and Its "Lack of Emotional Intelligence"

Guess what? Google has too many Spocks and not enough Captain Kirks.

This is one of the many interesting insights BoomTown gleaned from a video interview last night–which you can see below–with well-known New Yorker scribe Ken Auletta, who has just written a new book, “Googled: The End of the World as We Know It.”

This “lack of emotional intelligence” at the search giant, said Auletta, reminded him a lot of the subject of one of his previous books: Microsoft (MSFT).

Oh, the delicious irony!

Auletta was feted at a lovely party last night at the San Francisco house of Common Sense Media’s Jim Steyer, where a range of Google (GOOG) execs, Internet folks and fans gathered to talk about the book.

It’s all about Google, its history and, most important, its impact on the world. And how you look at the powerful search giant depends entirely on whether you are the changer or the changed, as Auletta stresses in multiple anecdotes in the book.

Traditional media, for example, have certainly been mucho irked of late about the impact of digital technologies on their businesses and have not been shy about casting blame most heapingly on Google’s Silicon Valley plate.

And government regulators are also giving the company the hairy eyeball, much as they had previously done to Microsoft.

Auletta and I talked about all of this and more in the video interview below, in which he notes that he told Googlers at a talk at their adorkable Googleplex HQ in Mountain View, Calif., yesterday that they need to focus less on being engineering brainiacs and more on trying to understand how to deal with fears of their growing power.

Here’s my interview with Auletta about this, as well as what old media needs to do to deal with all the change Google has wrought. (And you can see interviews I did with guests at the party, too).

And below that is one of the disturbing number of mash-up music videos about “Star Trek” buddies, the highly illogical Kirk and the Vulcanish Spock, the geek bromance of all time.

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

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Nobody was excited about paying top dollar for a movie about WikiLeaks. A film about the origins of Pets.com would have done better.

— Gitesh Pandya of BoxOfficeGuru.com comments on the dreadful opening weekend box office numbers for “The Fifth Estate.”