Facial recognition, completely unmonitored, can be used for very bad things. It can be used for stalking, for example.
— Eric Schmidt
We used to think that the enterprise was the hardest customer to satisfy, but we were wrong. It turns out, consumers are harder than the enterprise because the consumer will not give you a second chance.
Since I have access to every, every crisis in the world because it's always blaring at me on cable television, that doesn't mean I have to worry about every one of them. This is also known as knowing where the off button is.
I've come to a view that humans will continue to do what we do well, and that computers will continue to do what they do very well, and the two will coexist, but in different spaces.
Silicon Valley's involvement with Washington dates from one event, which was John Scully - who was the CEO of Apple - had dinner with President Clinton and Vice President Gore in 1993. And we're all going, like, 'What's going on? Why would we have dinner with the president?'
It's very difficult for governments to dominate the Internet because it's so difficult to control. People want to be free. People want to hear multiple voices. They want to make their own decisions. And people who see things will report things.
People who bet against the Internet, who think that somehow this change is just a generational shift, miss that it is a fundamental reorganizing of the power of the end user. The Internet brings tremendous tools to the end user, and that end user is going to use them.
The policy of America to deny visas to technically trained people in the U.S. and shipped to other countries, where they create companies that compete with America, has to be the stupidest policy of all the U.S. government policies.
Amazon has well passed any expectations of its ability to change distribution and marketing.
You have to fight for your privacy or you lose it.
There is a science to managing high tech businesses, and it needs to be respected. One of them is that in technology businesses, leadership is temporary. It's constantly recycling. So the asset has limited lifetime.
If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.
In our case, we focus on quality, and we have a very simple model. If we show fewer ads that are more targeted, those ads are worth more. So we're in this strange situation where we show a smaller number of ads and we make more money because we show better ads. And that's the secret of Google.
We know that Google Earth and Google Maps have had a tremendous impact on Google traffic, users, brand, adoption, and advertisers. We also know Google News, for example, which we don't monetize, has had a tremendous impact on searches and on query quality. We know those people search more. Because we've measured it.
In whatever number of years I have on Earth, I think that promoting the values of free expression, the openness of the Internet, that's the best use of my time.
Google is more than a business. Google is a belief system. And we believe passionately in the open Internet model.
I actually think most people don't want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.
YouTube's traffic continues to grow very quickly. Video is something that we think is going to be embedded everywhere. And it makes sense, from Google's perspective, to be the operator of the largest site that contains all that video.
I think it's pretty clear that the Internet as a whole has not had a strong notion of identity. And identity means, 'Who am I?' Fundamentally, what Facebook has done has built a way to figure out who people are.
If you look at the history of technology over a couple hundred years, it's all about time compression and making the globe smaller. It's had positive effects, all the ones that we know. So we're much less likely to have the kind of terrible misunderstandings that led to World War I, for example.
The characteristic of great innovators and great companies is they see a space that others do not. They don't just listen to what people tell them; they actually invent something new, something that you didn't know you needed, but the moment you see it, you say, 'I must have it.'
Washington - having spent a lot of time there, I grew up there and have spent a lot of time there recently - is largely defined by detailed analytical views and policy choices that are not very good. You know, each policy choice has a winner and a loser, right? Somebody's ox is getting gored.
Even though Google may do very well, there will always be an alternative to what Google is doing, and people will always have the free choice... because there's no way for us to prevent them from exercising that choice. That is one of the key aspects of why the Internet has been so successful. No technologies can dominate.
Washington is an incumbent protection machine. Technology is fundamentally disruptive.
The funny thing about advertising is that it's not a zero-sum game... Historically, in the digital ad world, pie has gotten larger and it's possible for everyone to win, and it's perfectly possible that will continue to be true for quite some time.
Google was founded to get information to everybody. A by-product of that strategy is that we invented an advertising business which has provided great economics that allows us to build the servers, hire the employees, create value.
When you use Google, do you get more than one answer? Of course you do. Well, that's a bug. We have more bugs per second in the world. We should be able to give you the right answer just once. We should know what you meant.
Google is very much a not-invented-here, build-it-ourselves culture.
There's nothing that cannot be found through some search engine or on the Internet somewhere.
Countries that have the Internet already are not going to turn it off. And so the power of freedom, the power of ideas will spread, and it will change those societies in very dramatic ways.
Remember, when you go to YouTube, you do a search. When you go to Google, you do a search. As we get the search integrated between YouTube and Google, which we're working on, it will drive a lot of traffic into both places. So the trick, overall, is generating more searches, more uses of Google.
The core problem is that the world is full of people who would like to take 99 per cent of the information that's on the Internet, and eliminate 1 per cent. Everyone has their own thing they don't like.
There's a set of people who are intrinsic oppositionists to everything Google does.
In general in technology, if you own a platform that's valuable, you can monetize it.
Google's architectural model around broadband and services and so forth plays very well to the powerful devices and services Apple is doing. We're a perfect back end to the problems that they're trying to solve.
I still believe that sitting down and reading a book is the best way to really learn something.
I do want to emphasize that we've seen an explosion in the use of Google Maps and Google Earth for education. The earth is a special place. It is our home and it's why we're all here. And the ability to see what's really going on the earth, the good stuff and the bad stuff, at the level that you can, is phenomenal.
I use Google+, and I find the quality of the comments are very sophisticated because there is more trust inside of Google+ than there is inside of Twitter and Facebook, for example.
The coach doesn't have to play the sport as well as you do. They have to watch you and get you to be your best.
One of the unintended negative consequences of online advertising has been the loss of value in traditional classifieds. It's simply quicker, simply easier for an end user who's online, on a broadband connection, to look things up and to figure out what they want to buy.
The average American doesn't realize how much of the laws are written by lobbyists.
I think of Google as a set of overlapping things. It's a consumer platform, consumer phenomenon of which search is its fundamental activity, but there are many other things you can do than search... I think of Google as an advertising company who services the broader advertising industry in the ways that you know.
I've never met a person who does not want a safer world, better medical care and education for their children, and peace with their neighbours. I just don't meet those people. What I meet, over and over again, as I travel around, is that the essential human condition is optimistic - in every one of these places.
I think to some degree one of the strengths of the high tech industry is that people are actually willing to tell you things. When I went to Novell, I didn't know how to be a CEO, so I went in and I called all sorts of CEOs I knew. I called in a favor. I wanted to come by and listen to them tell me what it's like to be a CEO.
If you think about the history of the PC industry, the PC industry has essentially been nothing but acquisitions by one company or another. Dell is the outlier. Dell built its own culture. They automated themselves to be the most efficient manufacturer.
A lot of the Google inventions came from engineers just screwing around with ideas. And then management would see them, and we'd say, 'Boy, that's interesting. Let's add some more engineers.'
If you think about YouTube, YouTube is a 'searching the world's videos' problem, right? They all have to be there, but how do you find them? What I guess I'm trying to say is that search is still the killer app.
The more broadband we can get globally, the better. It's better for the world; it's better for our advertisers; it's better for Google.
I think I could argue that the press has more impact on politics than corporations.
The issues of wireless versus wireline gets very messy. And that's really an FCC issue, not a Google issue.
