Google is not an anomaly:
A blueprint for inventing and building innovative and successful user-centric products is a great talk I caught at Stanford a few weeks back, and forgot to post... the whole talk is online. Great stuff.

Michael B. Moore writes "A thin but very good primer on what makes good interfaces work. Even though they come from the Sun/X/Motif world their advice is platform neutral."

My two cents?

I have found too few good books on Interface Design that neatly combine theory and practice into a seemless learning and reference tool. Designing Visual Interfaces is special. It is often on my desk, the spine hopelessly cracked as it's been forced open to one page or another, post-its peering out along the edges. It belongs in the canon.