Digital Media

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

That was one of the many interesting insights BoomTown gleaned from a video interview Wednesday night 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.

Oh, the delicious irony!

Auletta was feted at a lovely party on Wednesday night for at the San Francisco house of Common Sense Media's Jim Steyer, where a range of Google execs, Internet folks, and fans gathered to talk about the book.

It's all about Google, its history and, most importantly, 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, has certainly been mucho irked of late about the impact of digital technologies on their businesses and has not been shy about casting blame most heapingly on Google's Silicon Valley plate.

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

Auletta and I talked about all that and more in the video interview here, in which he noted that he told Googlers at a talk at their adorkable Googleplex HQ in Mountain View, Calif., on Wednesday that they needed to focus less on being engineering brainiacs and more on trying to understand how to deal with fears of their growing power. (You can see interviews I did with guests here too).

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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