Q: Will Google ever grow to rival Microsoft in the operating systems market?
Ameer Ali, London
Ali,
Well, we haven't even built Chrome OS yet - so let's wait and see! The reason
Chrome is so important is that it fundamentally changes the way you think
about computing. The web has become far richer in terms of the information
you can access and the applications you can use. This means we need browsers
and operating systems that run faster--and are really geared to getting the
most out of the Internet.
And for Google there is a real benefit because when people spend more time
online, they search more and ultimately generate more revenue.
Q: I would like to know your thoughts on how Google has evolved since 1998
and where you think it will be in ten years?
Dan Jackson, Halifax
Dan,
Clearly some things have changed - we've grown from around 200 people when I
first joined to over 20,000. That's a big difference - apart from anything
else you need more process, for financials, human resources and so forth.
But despite our increased size we have managed to stay pretty informal.
Typically I'll get to know about something when an engineer grabs me in the
corridor and says, "I have to show you a demo. You have to see it and you
have to see it right now!"
I also think we have stayed very true to our values. We still obsess about how
to create the perfect search engine - getting the right results back in the
blink of an eye, and we have a long way to go there. We debate things a lot
internally, working to get to consensus - that matters. And we're constantly
seeking those technical insights that will drive real innovation, the big
ideas. As Larry likes to say, big problems are easier to solve than little
problems!
In terms of the future, one of the things I always worry about as Google grows
older is keeping the ability to innovate quickly. It's easy to become very
conservative as you grow, so instead of taking big strides you take small
steps. That's the road to nowhere - true innovation comes from doing things
differently, often radically differently, and that involves risk. I would
rather try something and fail, than never have tried in the first place. But
culturally that is hard, you have to work at it.
So we have 20 per cent time for example, which means that engineers can spend
roughly one day a week working on things they find interesting. We let
people create start-ups within Google -- Wave, Android and Chrome are some
examples of the company within a company model.
Ten years from now - that's hard because things change so quickly in computer
science. I think about Moore's law, which roughly speaking states that
computing capacity doubles every 18 months. So in a decades' time, the
computers we all use will be a hundred times faster, a hundred times more
capable, or a hundred times cheaper. That opens up a lot of possibilities
for a company driven by engineering.
Think about mobiles, they are already such powerful computers. In a few years
time the phone in my pocket will bring me a whole new world of augmented
reality. As I walk down the street I can point it at the buildings, and it
will tell me their design and history, or where the shops I am looking for
are.
Q: Regarding your plan for putting books online, do you think it will
hasten the day when authors will make deals directly with Google to get
their works online? If so, what would you think the direct impact would be
on the book publishing industry?
Jeff Gordon, Norwich, New York
Jeff,
Digitizing books so more people can read them has been a dream of Larry and
Sergey's for years. And for Google, getting more books online is core to our
mission to organize the world's information. Plus the more quality content
there is on the web, the better our search results become. That's why we
have been working with library's like the Bodleian to digitize some of their
collections.
In terms of authors, publishers have decades and in some cases, centuries of
experience, and they're very good at certain things — editing, marketing and
distributing books — that a technology company like Google can't and
shouldn't try to replicate. Where Book Search comes in is helping that one
reader find that one book that may be hugely meaningful to them, even if
it's never going to crack the bestseller lists - and then working with
authors and publishers to help create new revenue streams when someone wants
to read their work. This involves very close collaboration with the
publishing industry, and we've partnered with over 30,000 publishers and
dozens of libraries for the project.
Q: Why, if Google's motto is "do no evil", does the company collaborate
with the Chinese Government over censorship?
Gerry Smith, Dayton
Gerry,
The Internet is the strongest force for individual self-expression ever
invented and this has been problematic for governments across the world,
even some that are democratically elected.
Clearly filtering our search results on Google.cn is far from perfect, but we
think that it's better to provide more information in China, not less. If
you look at reports from human rights organisations, you'll see that Google
filters far less than other search engines in China, and we introduced the
concept of transparency by making it clear when links have had to be removed
from search results.
Your fellow readers are right that it's a very difficult area, but what's the
alternative? Not to engage with China? That in my opinion would be far
worse. Look what isolation has done for Cuba.
Q: There have been proposals to develop a two-tier internet: one tier being
ultra-regulated for banking and databases, and the other being more like
what we have today. Are you in favour of this idea?
David Knight, London
David,
The Internet's strength comes in large part from its openness, which has
allowed innovation to flourish and new services to emerge both for consumers
and businesses. So banks or other institutions should absolutely have the
right to build their own private networks — but when one talks of a
"two-tiered" Internet, I think of telecoms serving as gatekeepers, picking
winners and losers on the web. The bottom line is: if it's not open, it's
not the Internet.
Q: Which company other than Google do you admire most and why?
Elliot Crossing, UK
Elliot,
I admire Apple a lot - they have a single-minded focus on building great
products and they're doing a terrific job. I'm also a fan of Richard Branson
and his attention to customer experience - Virgin America's great,
especially the wi-fi!
And as someone who's lived in Silicon Valley for 20 years, I get huge pleasure
from watching new companies emerge and change the world, like Twitter,
Facebook, YouTube and many, many others.
Q: Has Google added to the problems of the beleaguered newspaper industry?
What is it helping to do to solve them? Do you believe newspapers are on
their way to becoming extinct? And if they are, what will be lost in the
bargain?
Marmaduke Percy, USA
Marmaduke,
What we are seeing with the current crisis in the print industry is an old
technology struggling to adapt to a new, disruptive world. Of course
technology has been disrupting established industries for generations, even
within news. It was, for example, the advent of radio and television that
tipped newspaper circulation on a gradual but steady decline.
Now the Internet has broken down the entire news package: with articles often
consumed individually, reached from a blog, search engine or another website
and abandoned if there's no good reason to hang around once that story has
been finished. It's what we have come to call internally the atomic unit of
consumption.
I think there are some ways we and the industry can work to solve this
problem, including:
Personalize the news - at its best, the on-line version of a newspaper should
learn from the information I'm giving it - what I've read, who I am and what
I like - to automatically send me stories and photos that will interest me.
Make the content available anywhere - as more "smart" or web-enabled phones
hit the market there will be even greater access to what can be considered
mobile reading platforms. Remember, these phones have the capacity to know
where you are, giving newspapers the opportunity to provide you with news or
information on-the-go and relevant to your location should you want it.
Embrace journalism as a two-way conversation - the advent of real-time
reporting the likes of which we recently saw come out of Iran means
micro-blogging and citizen journalism are here to stay. This phenomenon,
combined with the potential benefits to the reader of knowing what their
friends or others are reading or saying about events, means newspapers now
have a chance to be a 21st century community forum. The more this dialog
among and between the newspaper and its readers develops, the greater the
opportunity newspapers will have to make money from their content.
Q: Cloud computer is seen as the future of computing but many are still not
convinced by the security measures taken by companies to protect data
privacy. How do you think the web can be more made secure and safe for
everyone to migrate data online?
Keith Chan, Hong Kong
Keith,
Let me say first that cloud computing is the future. But the concerns that
people have about security in cloud computing are understandable: some
people like to be able to see their computer server to know that's exactly
where their data is. It's somewhat parallel to the banking system: early on,
people believed that their money was safer under their mattress than in a
bank, but all the systems and rules that have evolved over time do not
support that belief.
You can look at cloud computing in a similar way. We have built and continue
to build a lot of security protection into our applications to protect your
privacy and your information. Consider also that if you put your data on one
drive in your home and it gets stolen or damaged, then you have lost it
permanently - I remember reading various articles in the British press about
government officials losing sensitive data on laptops, CDs, memory sticks
and the like.
As well as trying very hard to ensure your data is kept private and secure, we
also recognize that you want to own your own data. We actually have an
initiative called Data Liberation that is dedicated to making sure you can
export your personal information — your mail, contacts, photos and so forth
— from any Google property anytime you want, and take it with you to another
service.
Q: Following from your recent legal victory regarding possible trademark
infringement by allowing advertisers to select keywords corresponding to
trademark, do you feel that this result, despite being a victory for Google,
will result in a loss of potential advertising with larger corporations that
feel like their brand name is being manipulated in order to maximize your
sales of advertising and perhaps encourage them to advertise with other
search engines instead. If so, how do you anticipate dealing with this?
Michael O'Donoghue, London
Michael,
No, and in fact more advertisers probably like this than dislike it because
they understand that establishing a monopoly on using certain words online
isn't an effective way to reach people. The best ads are information, and we
think it's right that users searching for a particular product should have
as many sources of information as possible. Consumers are smart, and they're
certainly able to distinguish between different ads that are shown against a
particular query.
Q: Do you feel businesses often overestimate the capacity for the Internet
to generate revenue, especially given that so many of its users expect
content to be free?
Alan Hay, Stirling
Alan,
Well that was certainly true in the early days, with many companies launching
interesting services with quirky names and absolutely no opportunities to
make money, but we're mostly beyond that now. If anything, the challenge is
toughest for offline businesses with high overheads, trying to fit their
existing business model into a new mould.
One of the most common models is advertising, and this becomes more attractive
as advertising becomes more targeted and therefore more valuable. Every time
I watch TV or open a newspaper and see an ad for a baby product, that's such
a waste. The web should be able avoid that scenario in the long term.
Advertising can pay for a lot, but perhaps not for everything, and there are
many other revenue models out there. The web is a tremendously powerful
e-commerce platform, as Ocado or Amazon will tell you, and charging for
particular services or content has every chance of succeeding as long as
consumers value what you give them and it isn't fundamentally disruptive to
the user experience. The web as a whole hasn't done a great job of making it
easy to pay for things online. We launched a payments product called Google
Checkout to try to tackle this, and there are lots of other technologies out
there that should make the process of paying for something online less
painful.
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