>>Larry Page: It's really great to be here
together with all of you. And I hope you've all been inspired by the last two days, like
I have been. I think it's always -- you know, it's kind of like being plugged into the Internet
directly when you come to this kind of event. And while I look forward to the day of actually
it being for real, this is about the closest that we can get to it today.
I know how precious all of your time is, too, so I really appreciate your spending that
time with us. And I also want to thank all of you, many of you, for your business and
your partnerships with us. We really appreciate that and look forward to many fine years of
that. Now, I also want to thank Chip from LuLuLemon
who presented earlier for the sweatshirt which I'm wearing, which I really like.
So I just wanted to give that quick ad also. Now, when I was 12 or so, my parents actually
gave me an autobiography of Tesla. And, you know, when I say Tesla, maybe some of you
think of the rock band. Maybe you think of the electric car company now.
But, actually, it refers to NIKOLA Tesla, which when I was 1 12, that was probably the
main choice. I thought I wanted to be an inventor when I grew up. I was really lucky to get
my first computer when I was six, because my dad was a computer science professor. That
was in 1978, so pretty unusual thing to do. I thought I wanted to be an inventor. And
this was, like, the greatest inventor you could imagine. He was kind of an evil, mad
scientist. You know, he made lightning bolts and he made the things that we use for electric
power now. We still use Tesla designs, basically, to generate and distribute our electric power.
And, you know, once I finished reading this story of his life, I basically cried at the
end, because I realized, you can be the world's greatest inventor and you can basically be
a failure; right? You know, you can have trouble funding your inventions. Tesla was actually
working hard on transmitting power across continents wirelessly. And it's still not
known exactly what he had in mind. And it might be if he was better able to fund his
research, we would actually have that today. That's not that unlikely, probably.
So what do you actually do about this? You actually need to invent things and you need
to get them to people. You really need to commercialize those inventions. And, obviously,
the best way we've come up with doing that is through companies.
And so I figured, you know, eventually, I want to invent things and get them to people
and get them to use them. And to benefit the world that way. That's kind of been my goal
since. And I think our goals for Google, if you understand
it in that context, make more sense. That's actually our goal for Google. It's super simple.
We want to build technology that everybody loves using and that really affects everyone.
We really want to create beautiful, intuitive, you know, services, technologies that are
so incredibly useful for people, so incredibly useful that people use them, you know, twice
a day, like you might use a toothbrush; right? And there aren't that many things you use
twice a day. It's actually pretty hard to come up with something like that.
Now, we actually just roughly hit our 13th birthday at Google. And I think we're running
a doodle now or something. It's always a little bit of a debate exactly when our birthday
is. We didn't really start paying ourselves or start working. It's a little bit amorphous.
But roughly. It's been a while. And I think that, you know, looking back on
what's been successful, well, what have we done that's really worked well? Having a user
focus and also iterating really fast have really been -- determined what was successful.
Now, I like -- in thinking back about search, why did we start doing search?
We were doing some research at Stanford. We thought it might be interesting. And we actually
were talking to all the people in the industry, you know, who were doing different kinds of
search. And we said, you know, if you type -- we had done some interesting research about
ranking things better. And, you know, we had typed in, you know, "university" into the
search engines at the time. And it was amazing, you know, when you typed that, you basically
got random Web pages. You got pages that said "university" twice in the title.
And we said -- you know, we went to the people who made these search engines and said, "Why
are you doing that? Why would I want a page" --
And they said, "Well, this is user error." Right?
"You shouldn't have typed 'university.'" We were, like, "What?" I can't possibly be
wrong. You know, I'm just a user; right? [ Laughter ]
>>Larry Page: And they didn't quite understand that. And that's how we went on to build a
search engine, because we realized nobody was focused on that.
Now, I think, you know, that's true for still very many areas in the world. There's still
-- sorry. I'm going to get a drink. I still see a lot of areas where people don't
have that user focus. And I think it's true for most of computing right now. I was remarking
to somebody here earlier, you know, if you look back, you know, you took a programmer
from 30 years ago -- maybe Eric can tell us --
[ Laughter ] >>Larry Page: -- and, you know, you transplanted
them today, I think they would roughly know what's going on. Like, it's not so different
than it was then. In fact, we still use some of Eric's code. It's still good.
So, look, let me talk about the user experience in terms of Google+. Obviously, we're super
excited about Google+. You know, it's -- I think, you know, really understanding people
better, understanding what you want, personalizing that is very, very important. And we want
to build a closer relationship with all of our users, with all of you guys.
And we want to integrate all of our products so they're easier to use, more intuitive.
And we want to make sharing on the Web happen like real life; right? You know, if you're
at this conference, you say different things than if you're, you know, in your family or
you're with your coworkers or whatever. And that's what Circles are. And we're really
excited about that. Now, we also wanted to have an amazing experience
for mobile. You know, you use, actually, your phone probably more than you use your computer
now. And that trend is only increasing. And, you know, one of the things we did and which
is amazing is, when you take a picture with Google+, it automatically gets uploaded and
in seconds, you can share it, decide who you want to share it with. It's just a totally
magical experience, like you don't have to worry about anything. It just happens.
Now, also, will.I.am, who is here, recently did a Hangout with us, which we're really
excited about. This is serendipitous interaction where you basically enter a video conference,
but with people from all around the world, and you can have a conversation with them.
He did this recently. He's going to do it again Friday, 6:00 p.m. eastern time. He's
running a concert, which will be really exciting. But we're looking forward to that.
Now, this -- you know, search is also very important to us, obviously. So when you do
search, we really want you to be able to have a great experience. And for that, you know,
knowing what other people like, what they're +1'ing, what things people are sharing is
super important. And you can already see that happening in search. We're really excited
about that. If you do a search on Google, someone's +1'd it, you'll see it right in
your search results. And that's a big, big deal.
I'm really pleased with Google+ so far. It's been a -- the team has been doing an amazing
job. It's really on fire. I'd love for all of you to sign up. I think you've got an opportunity
to do that. But I'd love for you to do that and see Will's concert on Friday and participate
and really help us build the future as a community. I'm really excited about that.
Let me just switch gears for a second and talk a little bit about really talking about
how you choose what to do. One thing I've noticed is that if you're super ambitious,
it's often easier. That sounds kind of counterintuitive. But if you have a healthy disregard for the
impossible, you actually get better people to work on your project. You know, they get
really excited, they work really hard. You know, they work late at night. And it also
turns out that most companies aren't crazy enough to do anything like that. And so you
don't -- they -- nobody else is doing it. So you're the only ones. And, again, you get
the best people. Now, you know, we try to do a lot of things
like that. And I'll just give you some examples from the past.
You know, when we bought Android, it was a small company. It was 2005 when we bought
it. And they had a dream that they were going to use an open source operating system for
phones to really standardize an industry and make things really productive. I mean, that
was a crazy goal; right? It was something like 20 people at the time. And we had a whole
industry; we had a whole closet full of phones that all didn't work, something like 100 phones
we had in a closet. And we had to write software for each individual one.
But having that ambitious dream and a long-term focus, they were really able to succeed. And,
obviously, Android's the largest shipping smartphone operating system now. That did
take six years; right? Now, I feel like, you know, in thinking about
this, I see the same movie playing out again and again. You know, people thought that Android
was crazy at the time. They also think that many of the businesses we're doing now is
crazy, crazy now. And, in fact, you know, I look at things like Chrome, say, oh, why
do you need another browser? There's plenty of browsers. Got 160 million people using
Chrome. And it's growing like crazy. And it's how you access the Internet. That's an important
thing; right? And display advertising, you know, people
said, oh, there's all these big providers of display advertising. You know, what are
you guys going to do? Now we're a huge provider of display advertising.
And I'm really excited about that, because it's growing like crazy also. But it's also
really funding all the content that's on the Internet. That's an important thing, is to
fund that content that gets created, and to do it better, to do it with a better user
experience, to make the ads more relevant to people and more useful to people. And we're
really applying the science of what we did with search advertising to display advertising.
It's working great. It's not that surprising. But, you know, if you watched Ray Kurzweil's
talk earlier, you know, people get confused, you know, when you have something that's growing
quickly, you know, you think it's small. And then the next day, basically, it's huge. And
that's what I've seen with all these businesses. YouTube, which Mark for some reason thinks
we shouldn't have bought -- I disagree. I think it was a great acquisition -- you know,
we have over 3 billion playbacks a day there. And that's growing like crazy also. And we've
multiplied our ad revenue by 3X for two years in a row, which has been amazing, too. And
that's going to -- it's a huge business. It's going to be a much bigger business.
So what's the takeaway from this? I think if you have a well-run technology business
and it has a lot of usage, you generally make a lot of money over the long term, if you
take a long-term view. And that's how we've operated our company.
And I think related to that, you know, if you look at short-term and long-term change,
it's very -- and this is a well-known kind of research fact -- people tend to overestimate
the next year what's going to happen. You know, you sort of see the trajectory, you
see what's going to happen, and you assume that it's going to happen much faster than
it actually does. But when you look at the next five years,
you really underestimate that effect, especially of the exponential type growth systems that
Ray was talking about. And I think that in technology, we're still
very, very, very early stage. So we're way overestimating the next year, and we're way
underestimating the next five years. And what we try to do is to make sure we're driving
the next five years. And I think that's our job.
Now, what are these things? Well, I think the tools that we use for interacting online
are going to be completely different five years from now. You know, if you think back
five years ago or six, seven years ago, we had no social network tools, really. You know,
just things were completely different. And I think if you look five years from now, they're
going to be completely different again. There's a lot of user interface issues with what we're
doing. There's a lot of potential to make people's lives better, to make things more
efficient, to make things more enjoyable for people, and we're trying hard to build those
tools as Google+. And we're super excited about that.
I also thought I'd mention mobile briefly. It's not that long since we've had a phone
in our pocket; right? And the phone is really a computer. It's connected to the Internet.
It's actually as good as your desktop computer was three or four years ago already. And it
knows where you are. It's always with you. And those capabilities are just going to completely
change the world. And we're very, very early on in that, too.
We just launched last week mobile payments, our Wallet product. And you can use Android
phone without a wallet, use our Wallet, and you can buy something. And it's an amazing
experience. You just tap and you can pay for it. Your phone keeps track of it. It's secure.
It's an amazing experience. And that's just the tip of the iceberg of these kind of applications
for phones. Now I'll just finish here and say that, you
know, technology's really changing the world. We all know that. It can really improve billions
of people's lives. And that's what we're excited about. I think we at Google, we have a tremendous
responsibility to really carry that mission forward to make the world better. That's why
I'm here, why I love technology, and why I love my job here at Google.
So thank you. [ Applause ]
>>Eric Schmidt: Larry. >>Larry Page: Now, I've asked Eric to join
me, because he knows how to answer the really hard questions. And --
>>Eric Schmidt: Why don't we have a seat. >>Larry Page: We're going to take some questions.
>>Eric Schmidt: I thought -- first, I think for everybody here, I really appreciate you
all spending two days with us. I was trying to think of a quote or one of the sessions
-- there were so many that I enjoyed. And I think feedback from you is consistent. I
know, Larry, you feel the same way. I thought I would read while you're getting your thoughts
together and your voice back, a quote from Cory Booker yesterday morning.
"But yet, we as Americans, who drink deeply from the wells of freedom and liberty that
we did not dig, we lavishly eat from the banquet tables that were prepared for us by our ancestors,
we are too often just sitting around and getting drunk on the sacrifice and struggle of other
people's labors and forgetting that we're part of a noble misinhumanity, the first nation
formed not as a monarchy, not as a theocracy, but as an experiment, an idea that a diverse
group of people, that when we come together, e pluribus unum, that we can make a greater
whole out of the sum of the parts." And I think if that gives a sense of what
we, as Google, have been trying to achieve, both with you in all the things we've talked
about, and if I may say, in the vision that you've outlined for our company, that the
sum is more than the -- than the parts. I think that gets a sense of what we're trying
to do here. I think it might be better, rather than me
asking Larry questions, for you guys to ask Larry questions and me, if you like --
>>Larry Page: The hard ones will go to Eric. >>Eric Schmidt: That's right. But we've done
this together a long time. And it's been a privilege for the two of us in these conferences
to meet at the end with everybody. So we have some microphones there, or people
can raise their hands. Whatever you'd like to do. We have a few minutes for this.
Don't be shy. Yes, sir. Let's get us started.
>>> Hi. I was wondering if you're having more fun in the last two years or in the first
two years in Google. >>Eric Schmidt: Larry?
>>Larry Page: Well, yeah, we should ask Eric for his first two years, too.
I think the first two years were really stressful. >>Eric Schmidt: As opposed to now?
[ Laughter ] >>Larry Page: Yeah, yeah. I think so.
>>Eric Schmidt: We had this debate. So -- so the company didn't have any money. So Larry
comes up to me and says, well, we have all this money. We're not doing anything with
it. I said, we're supposed to save the money, Larry.
>>Larry Page: Yeah. [ Laughter ]
>>Eric Schmidt: Don't you remember the near bankruptcy and things like that?
>>Larry Page: Near bankruptcy? >>Eric Schmidt: Yeah, yeah. Yes. We had this
conversation. [ Laughter ]
>>Larry Page: We actually never used all that much cash, I don't think.
But -- [ Laughter ]
>>Eric Schmidt: Don't you remember the cash restriction program, the CRP program, where
we wouldn't pay our bills? [ Laughter. ]
>>Eric Schmidt: Don't you remember the cash restriction program, the CRAP program, where
we wouldn't pay our bills? [ Laughter ]
>>Larry Page: No, not at all. >>Eric Schmidt: Boy.
>>Larry Page: I think the first two years were really stressful.
[ Laughter ] >>Larry Page: I think any of you who have
started companies probably know this, But it is really hard to start a company. It is
a lot of work. You don't really have anything. You know, we couldn't figure out how to pay
ourselves. You know, there is just a lot of things you have to do.
And I think we are lucky now to have a good infrastructure as a company and lots of really
great people working. Definitely, I think it's gotten easier as we've gone along.
>>Eric Schmidt: Next question? Yes, sir. John. Didn't you just do a panel?
>>John Battelle: I'm sorry. I just couldn't help myself with this question.
>>Eric Schmidt: You did actually write one of the authoritative books on Google.
>>John Battelle: I think almost every author on a Google book is here.
>>Eric Schmidt: Excellent. >>John Battelle: I'm curious, over the past
13 years, for at least 11 1/2 of them, when people thought "Google," they would think
"search." That was the Google brand. It was very, very simple, Google equals search.
What does the Google brand equal in the next phase of Google's life?
>>Larry Page: Yeah, that's an interesting question. I think that for me what I would
like the brand to be -- represent is some of the things I talked about. I think that
it would -- I think it is important that people trust the brand. I think that's very important
to us, that people know that we're acting in their interest and that we're trustworthy,
both stewards of information, information access and their own personal data, which
we've worked really hard to do, you know, with things like Gmail and security and other
things that we do. And I think also it should stand for kind
of a beauty of technological purity of really innovation and things that are important to
people but really driving technology forward. >>Eric Schmidt: Go ahead.
>>> I don't think it is on. Oh, there it is. So you just recently announced a substantial
acquisition of Motorola. And what I wanted to know is: Does this represent a new era
for Google of greater risk taking? And, also, can you talk a little bit about
how you will subsume this very large organization and essentially double the size of Google
once this transaction is completed? >>Larry Page: Yeah, doubling head counts.
I think, you know, obviously Motorola's significant -- Motorola Mobility's significant size, acquisition,
it is not doubling our market cap as much as we would like it to. It is relatively small
in that sense. So I think as a company we've always strived
to make investments -- make significant investments in the future. Remember, when we did the YouTube
acquisition, which was being debated, that was a very large acquisition at the time and
I think end up being an amazing acquisition for us.
But, relatively speaking, it was very large. So I think we've always strived to take those
kinds of risks and identify those opportunities. That's why we get paid, is to do that. So
I don't see it as particularly different. But I think we're really excited about the
opportunities in mobile. And you can see that with the tremendous growth of Android and
so on. And Motorola had that big -- being an Android partner basically before anybody
else had done that. So they went all Android. So there is a very natural partner for us
in doing that acquisition. >>Eric Schmidt: Go ahead.
>>> So my question plays a bit off the last one. There has been a lot of discussion this
afternoon about patent law and patent development. And your company probably epitomizes what
-- the best of the best of what can happen from technology transfer, from innovation
and patents, especially from within higher education.
Can you just talk a bit about that process of fostering and managing the transition and
the technology transfer from patent and creation, especially within higher education to actually
business development and what more maybe we can do to unlock what seems to be a tremendous
amount of hidden potential within university walls especially.
>>Eric Schmidt: Well, Stanford actually benefited a great deal from the invention of these two
young graduate students financially as well as in many other ways.
>>Larry Page: We did give Stanford a little bit of equity, which they appreciated, I think.
And return for the technology development we did at Stanford, we are very grateful for
that. And I think Stanford has been one of the greatest
environments to do that in, most successful place.
And I think it is a culture of, you know, they actually -- the computer science department
at Stanford would let its professors could start companies and they would do a company
for a couple of years, make some money, and then they would come back to school and be
a professor again. And I don't know very many other places where
that has happened repeatedly and with a large percentage of the faculty.
So actually when we went to start Google, we asked our professors, Hey, what should
we do? Just talk to this guy. He funded me, and this guy. And all of a sudden, we had
a check and we were able to get going. And so I think that culture of innovation
and academia being linked is a really important thing and doesn't happen very many places.
So I'd say that first -- I would say we did have patents and so on.
We have never sued anyone over those things, although we have been sued many, many times
ourselves; and, yet, somehow we have been successful. So I do think that there is an
element in technology and software moving really quickly and innovating and actually
doing new stuff rather than just trying to use the legal system to prevent other people
from doing things. >>Eric Schmidt: Okay. Go ahead.
>>> This is a question for both of you. How have your management styles changed at each
size of the company as it scaled from small, 20, 30, 40 employees, up to today?
>>Eric Schmidt: I'd say we're a lot smarter in how we manage -- One of the things about
Google that's always sort of bothered me is Google has always had this reputation of sort
of the craziness. But, in fact, the internals of the company are just remarkably tightly
managed. And it is always a surprise to people. If you look at the quality, the way our sales
force is run, the analytical nature of the decisions, we are very much at the state-of-the-art,
probably the best in the world, in my humble opinion.
So I think we as a management team developed systematic ways of managing innovation at
scale using data analytics that are the envy of the world.
Once everybody kind of buys into that, the environment becomes much less political. People
can't throw random facts around without proof. And we encourage all of this. I think Larry
-- while you are thinking about how you want to answer this, I would say Larry's contribution
which has not been told is Larry has a particularly good judgment around sort of the ability of
somebody to enter such a highly intense environment. It is a particularly good skill for recruiting.
And I think when you try to think about assembling corporations and obviously this is an ad for
ourselves of the kind of people who can do this, you need the kind of person who is quick
and smart but also able to change their views based on new facts.
>>Larry Page: Yeah, I was just going to say recently I reorganized a bit to focus on product
areas. I think any company as it grows, if the company is not static -- which it shouldn't
be -- as it grows and it changes, you need to reorganize it.
The question is: Are you keeping ahead of it? And looking at the -- our business, it
is pretty complicated. We have all these different products. And we have advertising, we have
search. We have Chrome. We have Android. We have YouTube and so on.
And those things are actually relatively different and have different -- different things going
on. So I think I kind of moved that up a level
in the company and made sure we are super focused in each of those areas on what our
user experience was. And I think that's helped. Just generally, as you switch to a company
-- as we got more offices, as we got time zone differences, we had to change how we
did our meetings, change how we do our employee communications and so on. So I just think
in a technology business growing rapidly, you just need to make sure you are changing
everything. You are being responsive to that change and changing everything every year
or else you are just not keeping up with it. >>Eric Schmidt: The other final comment is
when you are growing as fast as we did, most of your executives in our case were probably
in their 30s. So I tend to think of them as when we hired them at that age. But five years
later, they are battled scared veterans of our industry. So building that knowledge base
and keeping those employees and particularly those executives who can move so quickly is
a real art and fundamental, I think, to the success of fast growing high tech companies.
Why don't we go over here. >>> I was just thinking when you are saying
the company is 13 years old, that means you're in your corporate adolescence, which is shocking
considering the size. And then if you think of Ray Kurzweil, that technology evolves exponentially,
where are you going to be in another 13 years or 20 years? I mean, can you even envision
that? >>Eric Schmidt: Well, one way to do the math
is to simply assume that Moore's Law will continue. Moore's Law is roughly doubling
every two years, which turns out to be roughly a thousand times in 20 years. So pretty, pretty
amazing numbers. >>Larry Page: You will have a google in your
pocket. >>Eric Schmidt: Yeah, and so the ability to
ask questions when you have that amount of computing power with all the telemetry and
knowing everything going on in the world realtime is tantalizing, absolutely tantalizing what
will be possible. >>Larry Page: And some speakers have talked
about it but the automated car stuff is a good example of the possibility. And this
is a scenario where I just had some interest since I was a grad student. It seemed pretty
practical actually. I mean, you think that driving a car is hard,
but it is not actually that hard for a computer and if the computer actually has good data,
like about what's around it. >>Eric Schmidt: Our computers drive your car
better than you do when you are drunk. >>Larry Page: I hope so.
>>Eric Schmidt: Right? >>Larry Page: I hope so.
[ Laughter ] >>Eric Schmidt: That's our starting point.
[ Laughter ] >>Larry Page: Or when you are 16 or when you
are really old. [ Laughter ]
But they actually work better -- I think they will work substantially better than an average
person and get better from there and continue improving, as was mentioned. You get a software
update and your car will be safer, right, which is great.
So I think just looking at the potential there, there's -- the issues we have in a lot of
these areas are that people aren't working on them. And, you know, in fact, before the
DARPA Grand Challenge that happened, there was very few people working in the area.
The grand challenge gave it a big contest, got more people working in it. Then when we
asked the people who were working in the area, why don't we have an automated car? Why can't
I buy one? It should be a great thing to be able to do. There is something like 3 million
people killed worldwide a year in auto accidents. I mean, there is a lot of people that die
and a lot more that are injured. And there is a lot of other benefits you get
from the automation, too, that people spend two hours a day in the U.S. commuting, which
is a huge amount of time that they don't need to be spending. They could be doing useful
things during that time or watching TV or looking at ads or whatever.
[ Laughter ] >>Larry Page: So -- but, anyway, we asked
people why aren't you doing it? They said we can't actually figure out how to do it.
There are regulatory issues and all these other kind of things.
So I think part of our roles as a catalyst is to make sure that some of these things
actually start up and happen, and make sure we push through the difficult issues to make
it real. >>Eric Schmidt: I think it is a privilege
to be at Google in the sense that one of the privileges is that the gross margins are high
enough that we can afford some of these things to a reasonable scale. And other companies
are not so fortunate. Yes, sir?
>>> With that said, I mean, obviously there is a lot of ideas and opportunities here.
How does Google set boundaries and focus for their businesses so they don't get lost like
so many companies have before you? >>Larry Page: Yeah, I mean, I have done a
lot of thinking about other companies and how they have succeeded or failed and tried
to really be a student of that. I think most companies, as they add people,
they don't do more things. So just as a first approximation, if a company doubles in headcount
over time, typically it has much the same business as it had before. And so I think
that's somewhat frustrating both for the company to grow and for the people inside and all
that. So, you know, we've tried to actually maintain
kind of a linear number there, as we are adding people, we're adding businesses.
And I think that's challenging at our scale. But I think it is a really good goal to have.
But these things that we're adding need to be significant, right? They can't just be,
"We're going to do horoscopes or something." [ Laughter ]
>>Eric Schmidt: Go ahead. >>> Back in the '90s, the big giants, the
gorillas, the sort of secretive companies were IBM and Motorola way back when. And when
they did things, everybody in the industry would jump. Somehow that mental shifted over
in the oughts to Microsoft and AT&T which are still kind of wearing that mental.
We have had a little bit of light joking here about "Google is becoming a little Microsoft-like
and so forth." >>Eric Schmidt: I have an opinion on that
question. >>> Exactly.
[ Laughter ] >>> There has been a little bit of kerfuffle
about the real names policy on Google+, which turned into the nim wars, if you look that
up. In this new world, if you do really want to
be trustworthy, a piece of that is openness and transparency. And there is some openness
and transparency here. But another piece of it seems to be about intent and authenticity
and maybe even vulnerability in different ways.
What are you doing to communicate better than you do now? Because when I see the nim wars
transaction happening out there, I see you not being heard or not communicating well.
I see communities not really engaged there properly so this can simply be resolved in
a really great way for both parties, or for all parties. I don't think there is one answer
that makes everybody happy. But I think there is a way to conduct the conversation that
might be a lot better. >>Larry Page: I actually see this as our responsibility
to some extent. We had a panel on media and so on this morning. I think that we as important
people are trying to improve the Internet and how it works.
I think it is important for the Internet and that whole ecosystem, information, how it's
shared, how it's analyzed and so on to work better. And I think there is a lot of -- if
you ask anyone about how that information is getting propagated, how people are deciding
what to focus on and all those kind of things, I think it could work a lot better than it
does now. And so I see the issues we have with communication
as being a special case, kind of the world as a whole. If you ask any company that question,
they will have similar issues. Or if you ask any politician or anybody who's dealing -- who
is in that public eye. So I think we as an Internet community, we have a responsibility
to make those things work a lot better and to get people focused on what are the real
issues, what should you be thinking about. And I think we as a whole are not doing a
good job of that at all. >>Eric Schmidt: Go ahead.
>>> Since this conference is so much about innovation -- and we all appreciate how important
competition is to all of that -- let's say you had just made a new acquisition of a greeting
card company and you were sitting down with the management team and they gave you an assignment
of writing a get-well card to Yahoo! What would that say?
[ Laughter ] >>Eric Schmidt: I think that -- I appreciate
your question. [ Laughter ]
>>Eric Schmidt: I think as a good policy Google, Google should talk about Google. And aside
from my snide comments about one of our former competitors, we should keep our mouths shut.
With respect to Yahoo!, Yahoo! has both been a partner and a competitor for Google for
a very long time. And I think that they need to sort out their leadership issues, which
I know they are working very hard on. And I think that's probably all we should really
say. Go ahead.
>>> So my question is with regards to on the scale Google is going to be growing at. We
are all aware of how it's grown, thinking about the Moore's Law and it is just going
to go exponentially higher. In this process, you would require very, very
high-quality talent and students coming out of great universities.
Now, I know this is an incredibly challenging thing that's confronting you guys because
it is not like Stanford is also admitting an exponentially higher number of students
or the best universities. What's your plan? What are you guys thinking?
Is this something that's bothering you at this stage?
>>Eric Schmidt: Always. >>Larry Page: Yeah. I have been hassling universities
that they should be growing more. And they are working on that in various ways. I do
think it is a fundamental issue with the higher education, although we did see numberses this
morning that the numbers are increasing a lot over time.
We do have a very serious issue about people being excited about going into technology
and computer science specifically. Will.i.am and I were talking about that at
lunch. We were saying, how do make being a computer scientist sexy? How do we get people
to actually want to do that? I actually made the point that I think some
of the base technologies are very kludgey. It is kind of a hazing thing. You have to
learn these special command line things with weird names and so on. I guess it is Eric's
fault actually. But I think we could do a lot to make the
actual core technology more accessible, combined more with art and the beautiful aspects of
it and get that all going and more accessible to people. That would have a huge impact.
>>Eric Schmidt: There is a lot of diversion away from what we need, and we need to stop
that. I think the other thing is the mindless and stupid policy that we have with respect
to immigration of smart people into America needs to get fixed. And it is a national crisis.
Why don't we finish up with the questions -- folks who are standing right here. You
can -- You can be the last one, too. And that will be -- We are going to run over time.
I want to make sure we accommodate everybody's questions.
Steve, go ahead. >>> So when I talk about Google, which was
generous enough to cooperate with me when I wrote a book, I got asked two questions.
John Battelle sort of took over the first one. The second one is that people asked me
is, What is the biggest threat to Google's continued success? So to help me get it from
the horse's mouth, how should I answer that? >>Larry Page: Google.
>>Eric Schmidt: The problems -- the problems in a company of Google's scale are always
internal at some level. >>Larry Page: That's why I said Google.
[ Laughter ] >>> Actually, I have been saying something
like that. So thank you. >>Eric Schmidt: Larry, actually, you didn't
sort of talk about your management memo. But one of the things that he did after he
became CEO and correcting all the messes that I handed to him, were -- he wrote a very,
very defined memo about innovation, how decisions are made and so forth.
And it's a -- it's large companies are their own worst enemy, because, internally, they
know what they should do, but they don't do it. And, if I may say, my business partner
and close friend, Larry, what does he do all day? He's doing that. He's in there forcing
the discussion, forcing the choice, and forcing the resolution, sort of with his unique talents.
And I think that's -- that will, ultimately, determine how hugely successful Google is
or not. >>Larry Page: One of the interesting things
we noticed is companies correlate on decision making and speed of decision making. There
are, basically, no companies that have good slow decisions. There are only companies that
have good fast decisions. And so I think that's also a natural thing. As companies get bigger,
they tend to slow down decision making. And that's pretty tragic.
>>> Thanks a lot. >>> The acquisition of Motorola has given
you access to an important trove. But Motorola is also the largest manufacturer of set top
boxes in America, which also gives you an interesting springboard into digital television.
Was that part of the strategy? >>Larry Page: It's certainly something we
considered, yes. [ Laughter ]
>>Eric Schmidt: We have to be careful. Because, under the rules, we can't really talk about
Motorola. But I will tell you, when we both looked at Motorola, the quality of their feature
products, but also what's coming in the future is amazing stuff. So hold that question until
we see that coming out. Go ahead. >>> Looking back at these 13 years, which
ones do you consider the biggest mistakes? >>Eric Schmidt: Year 7? No, just kidding.
Prime numbers. no. >>Larry Page: I remember we, initially, did
not get a Yahoo! deal actually for ads way back when. And we, actually, were kind of
debating what to do. And we didn't have that much money, and we were going to have to spend
more money than we had. So I, actually, think we made a big mistake in not having enough
capital available in order to do that. And that caused a whole series of other things.
>>Eric Schmidt: I think, when companies grow as fast as Google does, you -- it's hard to
sort of look back and say what was the best year or the worst year. They're all good,
right? And whatever mistakes you made, you made because you were winning somewhere else.
So you can't really sort of look at it in isolation. I can think about, in my contribution
to the company, obviously, I worked hard. And I should have done 10 things. But what
was I doing? Oh, I was busy working on these other things, which worked out really well.
So I think you have to judge in total. And the total story is a good one, as we're all
right here. >>Larry Page: That's the frustrating thing
about businesses is you don't get to run them the other way. There's no control experiments
you can run. >>Eric Schmidt: By the way, Larry, you're
the only person in the world who would ever say that.
[ Laughter ] >>Eric Schmidt: Sir, you're going to have
the honor of the last question. >>> This one will be a good one. It won't
be a question. Just a great bravo. I was talking to Arianna. Is she here by any chance?
>>> She was just here. >>> We were having lunch. And I was fortunate
to have lunch with her. And everyone heard the conversation between Ted and Arianna.
So I'll throw something out to you we talked about.
If that conversation happened back in time with Rosa Parks, kind of stealing from the
mayor, and the argument was the news the way it's being produced today -- we'll go back
in time. If you had a camera crew and you followed Rosa Parks and you entered the bus,
you captured the story, put it on the network, phenomenal story, 1-hour documentary.
The advantage you have is that story -- I live in New York. We have 168 different languages,
five different boroughs. Can you imagine how that story would be translated being sent
to mobile and social and the ramifications of how that would impact society?
So, when news people talk about journalism, they really mean societal change. So I think
that before connected TV, before the 80% world gets connected, where you'll play with media
-- I represent local TV -- is a story will start. And through the Android and through
-- not just saying this to be nice. But through Google+, because Facebook won't let us embed
content and make money -- I'll say that again -- Facebook won't let us embed content and
make money, you will. You have the chance to have the droids talk to the community,
the community give us information back, and Google+ to be facilitator.
>>Eric Schmidt: Thank you. I like to think about in my lifetime how much information
is now current. I grew up during the Vietnam War. The negotiation
that ended up ending the Vietnam War consisted of letters going through the Pakistani embassy
that took a week and a half to go back and forth. Just think about it. Think about the
'60s and the red phone and Russia and so forth. So over a 50-year period, the impact of communications
and knowledge is so much more profound than any of us can possibly imagine. I think, if
you take the vision that Larry laid out, which we all fully support and are running with
him to make happen, the changes in society in the next 50 years will be equally as dramatic.
Larry? >>Larry Page: Yeah. Maybe we should get people
to their planes and all. >>Eric Schmidt: Thank you, all.
