Heute Mittag hatte ich die Ehre und das Vergnügen, zusammen mit einigen Kolleginnen und Kollegen von der Presse Eric Schmidt nach dessen Abschlussvortrag bei der Burda-Innovationskonferenz DLD noch eine gute halbe Stunde lang zu lauschen und Fragen zu stellen. Ich habe bis eben gut die Hälfte der Aufnahme von meinem Livescribe-Smartpen abgehört und ein paar Zitate herausgeschrieben, die ich interessant finde.
Watching the press, no one seems to understand that we’ve always run [Google] in an unconventional way–which has I think been our strength–and none of that’s gonna change.
The other thing to say is: We’re best friends, we’re computer scientists and we agree on literally everything. So I dont’t think there’ll be much change.
I’m actually commited to Google. A decade? Larry said such predictions are too short. And he’s younger than me.
At Google I would want to be a programmer. […] We have the best computing infrastructure to solve the hard computer science problems at scale.
Brain drain at Google? Another fiction of the media. We’ve actually studied this quite carefully and our retention, our turnover has been exactly the same for several years. People who are leaving get publicized. But all the incredible talent that comes to the company we choose not to publicize.
He [Larry Page] is fundamentally a deeper thinker than anybody else. So the things he does are so much more thoroughly thought out–you know, he’s a genius. When you talk to him, it’s a brilliant mind and his gift is that he just sees it, like in Chess–he sees that few moves deeper than I do.
What are the problems Google has? Usually the press are asking about our problems because they don’t wanna talk about all the good stuff. We’ve got very complicated government issues. [… ] Because we move quickly, we tend to be disruptive at scale–and because it’s about information. And everybody cares about information.
Our social view is quite different from what people are saying. The easiest way to understand this is: If you gave me your list of friends–with your permission–we could make that one of the signals to make your search quality better. We could give you better YouTube videos to suggest for you. If we can make Google more personal–in the same way that Facebook is very personal–then it makes all of Google better. It’s not a Facebook competitor.
If you read the stories, the press wants to write „Google launches Facebook killer“. Which is precisely what we’re not doing.
Google uses signals to do ranking. Hundreds of signals. If you give us–with you permission–a little bit more about who your friends are, we can make the results a little bit better. Because it becomes another set of signals. It doesn’t replace the existing signals. There are many, many other signals. And the list of signals is proprietary, it’s a Google secret.
It’s very, very important to keep anonymity possible in searches. For may reasons–privacy, government regulation…
The Oracle lawsuit against Android is without merit. Remember, I was at Sun and did the Java stuff. So we at Google are being sued about things that the team I managed did at Sun. I have a lot of information about this–it’s without merit.
Why are we giving this [Android] away? It’s simple: People who use Android search more than people who don’t. And we make money from searches. Android has paid for many, many times already. We love Android, it’s a huge revenue source for a free product.
