Netizen

Thursday, December 13, 2012

Larry Page Speaks

“Our job is to think of the thing you haven’t thought of yet that you really need.”

Fortune Exclusive: Larry Page on Google

was only Page's second wide-ranging conversation with a print publication since becoming CEO of Google in April 2011 ..... 70-minute discussion ...... It's my job and my personality never to be satisfied. ..... I've been saying the same thing about search in some sense for ten years or so. The perfect search engine would really understand whatever your need is. It would understand everything in the world deeply, give you back kind of exactly what you need. .... The fact that a phone has a location is really helpful for monetization. .... I view a whole bunch of things as additive that you can do on mobile that you couldn't do before. And I think with those things, we're going to make more money than we do now. ..... I think there's no company you would choose that would be better positioned to transition and innovate in mobile advertising and monetization. We've got all the pieces we need to do that going forward. ...... In general I think there's a tendency for people to think about the things that exist. Our job is to think of the thing you haven't thought of yet that you really need. ..... All the big technology companies are big because they did something great. I'd like to see more cooperation on the user side. The Internet was made in universities and it was designed to interoperate. And as we've commercialized it, we've added more of an island-like approach to it, which I think is a somewhat a shame for users. ......... it's actually hard to get people to work on stuff that's really ambitious. It's easier to get people working on incremental things ..... We had 18 different ways of sharing stuff before we did Plus. Now we have one way that works well ...... we actually need to understand things and we need to understand things pretty deeply. People are a component of that. ..... if you're vacation planning. It would be really nice to have a system that could basically vacation plan for you. It would know your preferences, it would know the weather, it would know the prices of airline tickets, the hotel prices, understand logistics, combine all those things into one experience. And that's kind of how we think about search. ....... we're very good at accepting worldwide payments ..... I think I have great advisors. There's a lot of people in our ecosystem and board members and so on who I rely on, and Sergey, as well, and Eric. ..... But I think again I'm a little bit in uncharted territory because I think what I'm trying to do is not -- I can't point to another company and say, "I want to do what they're doing." So I'm trying to cause something to happen, and it's not obvious how to make it happen. ....... As we start up new things, as we're working on new areas, as change needs to happen, I tend to get very deep. Then I make sure I have the right team and the right people are in place, and I'm confident they're doing the right thing. And then I'm gone for a long time. I might be gone for a quarter. ...... I don't see any particular reason why we shouldn't be much bigger, more impactful than we are now.