>>Larry Page: If you guys are going to take my picture, I will take your picture, too.
Let me share that with the whole company.
Okay.
Done.
So, it was a great session.
A little bit of a hard act to follow.
I was -- I'm upset if I have to follow Peter.
So thank you, Peter.
I think that these are obviously the Google Glass.
It is only "glass" because it is only on one side.
But it is still in a bit of an early stage, but I'm really excited to be able to have
one and to have it working.
And it was pretty exciting.
I just talked to our London Googlers, too, and I showed it to them.
They were very excited about it.
It doesn't yet show me all of your names, but I'm really glad that you are all here.
I think that -- And I really want to thank everyone for coming and for spending time
with us.
It seems like you're all having a good time.
Partnership is really important to Google.
We've been a company that's had a lot of partners and lot of business relationships.
I think that's been really important to Google's success, and I hope it's important to all
of you as well and to your success.
So it has been about a year since I became CEO again, and I wanted to share a little
bit of an update on what's happened and what my priorities have been and what we've been
doing.
So I think the -- the first thing, I'd say is that it is easy to think about technology
as being relatively static.
You know, Google is a search engine.
We've done these various things for a long time and not much changes.
But that's not really what's happening.
I think that the pace of change is really accelerating.
And, you know, there is more devices being sold every day than there ever has been.
People are more interested in them.
They're spending more money and more time using their phones and everything else.
And I think it's really exciting to see that everyone in the world is going to get a smartphone
now.
And for many people, for most people probably in the world, it's going to be their first
computer.
And it is really -- you know, it is not a question of "if" now, it is just a question
of "when."
You know you are going to have a smartphone and it is going to be connected to the Internet
and you are going to be able to do amazing, amazing things.
Now, it's hard -- even those of us in the industry, it is pretty hard for us to predict
what's going to happen 5, 10, 15, 25 years from now.
We do know things will look really different, and it's -- again, it is easy to -- it is
easy to forget that.
I don't think five years from now I'm going to be carrying a phone where if I drop it,
it is going to splatter into pieces because it is basically a thin piece of glass.
I'm sure that's not going to be the case.
So there's going to be a lot of change in ways that really affect us and will really
change our lives.
Now, for Google, you know, what should we be doing?
We should really be focusing on really important things that are going to matter a lot.
And we took a look at what we were doing and we thought, Well, we have an awful lot of
products, some of which people don't seem to care that much about.
So we went through and we -- we went through kind of a painful process where we shut down
or closed over 30 different things.
And we also made our products visually better.
You know, we made them much more coherent.
And I think that -- you know, I think that it's really important that when you use technology,
you know, you don't see our organization chart or you don't see all of our different products.
It just works together beautifully.
And we believe technology should really do the hard work for you, rather than you having
to do the hard work.
And that means that, you know, it should handle communication, discovery, memory, you know,
things like that that might be difficult for you.
And that means that you all can do what makes you happiest, which is living and loving and
really enjoying your life.
Now, let me talk about some of our areas of focus as a company.
The first one, for the last year, has been Google+ which is our social efforts, and people
are a bit confused about this.
I'd say that we think it's really important that when you're using Google, you be able
to easily share things.
You know, I just shared the photo of all of you with the company, and I did that in a
few seconds.
And the reason I was able to do that is using Google+.
You know, I had circles set up for the company, and that sharing was consistent.
And, you know, I think that we've had tremendous success with that, you know, around things
like photos.
You know, you can take a photo now also on your Android phone and share it and have it
uploaded automatically and share it really easily.
And, you know, we have over 170 million people now that are, you know, participating in that,
that have upgraded, you know, of Google+.
And the other part where people are a little bit confused about what we're doing, that's
the social spine of Google.
That means everything in Google gets better by being able to share and have identity and
things like that.
The other part of Google+ is the product itself, where you can follow people, you can read
your stream and so on, and that's a social network and it's starting from a growth -- it
started from zero people and it's grown a lot and it's grown much faster than any other
social network ever has.
But it's starting from zero, it's not starting from Google on day one.
You know, I have -- I think I have over 2 million followers now on Google+.
There's a whole bunch of people with over a million people.
And we've been really excited about the growth there, and the pace at which it's growing,
but it will take some time.
We're starting it from scratch.
So let me talk a little bit about search, too.
I think that's a really big area of focus for us, and it's an area where, you know,
I think if you used Google from five years ago, you'll be astounded at how bad it is.
Or how bad it was, right?
And, you know, search has gotten a lot better.
You don't always see it because we change it every day and we try not to distract you
too much with changes, but when I think -- one of the things I'm most proud of that we did
recently is that I have a friend at Google called Ben Smith, and that's a very common
name in the U.S.
You know, Smith's the most common last name.
And it's very -- it was difficult to find him before.
But now actually with Google+ and with our understanding of all that, you know, when
I search for Ben Smith, I actually get the Ben Smith that I know and he actually appears
in the search box and there's a little picture of him.
And if that's not the Ben Smith I want, I can, you know, delete him and put a different
one in.
But I'm actually searching for that person rather than the string, the combination of
letters.
And that's a really big deal for Google and it's a really important thing.
We don't want to just do that with people.
Also maybe in the last week or so, we released this thing called the Knowledge Graph, or
Knowledge Panels, we're calling them, and those actually give you -- if you search for
"Tesla" now, "Tesla," then you get the car and you get the scientist, and we know lots
of things about them.
So, you know, if you search about, you know, a different -- a lake or something like that,
we'll know the depth of the lake.
And what we're really trying to do is to really get to the point where we can represent knowledge
and we can do much more complicated types of queries.
What are the 20 deepest lakes?
What are the highest market cap companies?
Or whatever.
Things like that where we really understand what that query means, rather than just give
you, you know, the exact text that matches best on some Web page that's somewhere.
And so we're really looking at synthesizing knowledge and I'm incredibly excited about
that.
Now, search also is not just about finding things.
It's really about taking actions, and, you know, when you're doing searches, a lot of
times you want to actually do things.
You don't want to just look at 10 different links but you want to actually buy something
or you want to book a flight or you want to know what the weather is, you know, right
there.
And we've been doing a lot of this work over the years.
You know, a lot of it requires deep partnerships with probably many people in the room to make
sure that we have access to the right kind of data, the right business models, to make
all that work.
But ultimately in search we really want you to be able to take actions.
And that's even more important on mobile, right?
Where you have very limited screen space, you have the limited ability to do things.
It's really important that you be able to get directions, for example.
We've worked very hard on maps.
You know, on your phone, you can get directions right from your current location or you can
pay easily for something using your mobile phone, by using NFC payments which we're really
excited about.
Now, you know, in talking about mobile, I think that -- you know, I remember actually
I visited our London office many, many years ago and they actually had a closet in our
London office where we do a lot of our mobile development and they had a closet full of
100 phones.
And the reason why we had that closet is that's what was necessary, actually, to make our
phone software work.
And at the time, it actually didn't work very well.
I don't know if you remember using a phone, you know, five, seven, eight years ago, but,
you know, you were lucky to be able to -- you could make a phone call but that was about
it.
You know, you couldn't get maps or directions or upload your photos or anything like that.
And we were really, really frustrated by that, and that's why we developed Android.
And, you know, if you think back, you know, at the time when we realized that, it wasn't
obvious that, you know, there was going to be a good way of making a software platform
for phones that would get adopted by everyone and all that, but Android's really on fire
now, which I probably don't have to tell you all, and it's very, very exciting.
It's a big area of focus for us, obviously.
Now, you know, one of the things -- I'm talking about having a really, you know, integrated,
beautiful experience.
You know, on Chrome on Android, you can actually get all of your tabs that you see on your
desktop.
If you're signed in, you're logged in with us, you can get all the tabs you have open
that you have on your desktop and you can hit the "Back" button and it will go back
or you can get all the things that you have available there and it's just an amazing,
beautiful, seamless experience.
And that's really what we're aiming for, as a company.
Now, another example of that is Google Play, which we recently released, you know, where
you can basically have any movies, books, apps, or games, all accessible from the web
or your phone and you don't have to sync.
You know, you don't have to use cables, you don't have to download anything, it just works.
And that's, again, really what we're -- what we're aiming for.
Now, you know, I talked a little bit about focusing the company, and, you know, I think
that I want to talk a little bit about making some big bets.
And, you know, we always try to concentrate on the long term, what we're doing for the
long term, and, you know, I think that, you know, many of the things we started up that
are really big now, like Chrome, were seen as kind of crazy when we launched them.
And so how do we decide what to do?
What -- you know, how do we decide what's really important to work on?
Well, I like to call it the toothbrush test.
So the toothbrush test is: Do you use it as often as you use your toothbrush?
For most people, I guess that's twice a day.
Raise your hands.
Twice a day?
Yeah.
Okay.
Most people.
So I think, you know, we really want things like that, and I think things like Gmail,
obviously you use much more than twice a day, and YouTube, you know, I think that those
things are amazing.
And I think that -- you know, when we at things like YouTube, people thought, "Oh, you guys
are never going to make money with that.
You bought it for $1.4 billion.
You're totally crazy."
And we're reasonably crazy, but it was a good bet.
And we've actually been doubling revenue every year on YouTube for four years, and actually
if you're doubling things, it starts to add up pretty quickly, even no matter where you
start from.
So I think that's a good example of the -- how sort of our philosophy is.
That we see things that people use a lot, that they're going to -- that are going to
be really important to them, and we think that usually you can make money from those
things over time.
You know, a well-run technology business can be monetized over time.
And I think also having the courage to kind of fail on these things.
You know, our AdSense, which is how, you know, we help other partners monetize their Web
sites, that was the result of a failed experiment to understand the web.
So the way in which we target advertisements to Web pages was -- was a failed result to
better understand the web and to actually improve search.
So I think you really got to be prepared to try ambitious things, which really leads me
to my next point.
So I was a student at the University of Michigan, and I went to this sort of summer leadership
course, and their slogan was to have a healthy disregard for the impossible.
A healthy disregard for the impossible.
And I think that's a really good slogan.
And that's really stuck with me in all those years.
And I think that, you know, it sounds kind of nuts, but it's often easier to make progress
when you're really ambitious, and the reason is that you actually don't have any competition
because no one else is willing to try those things, and you also get all the best people
because the best people want to work on the most ambitious things.
And, you know, I've been really struck by this over the years.
One of the projects I wanted to talk about was we have this project for self-driving
cars.
You know, and that seems really crazy.
You're like, how can a car possibly drive itself?
You know, how's that ever going to work?
And, you know, we've had a team working on that and we've driven over 200,000 miles now
with no incidents.
And it's really amazing to ride in one of these cars.
It's just almost a life-changing experience.
You sit down, you drive through the parking lot, and you're like "Why am I driving," you
know?
It's just an amazing, amazing experience.
And think about -- you know, I have young children.
I'm sure many of you do as well.
Think about your children.
By the time that they're old enough to drive, there's no reason we can't have technology
that helps them -- teaches them to drive and learn all the things they need to know.
And that's like almost, I think, the leading cause of death, actually, for kids as they
learn to drive.
I mean, it's a big deal.
So I think, you know, my point was that I think in technology, if we take some ambitious
bets, we really have an amazing ability to transform people's lives.
Yesterday I was in New York City with Mayor Bloomberg and we announced this effort -- you
know, they have a new technology school going into Manhattan onto Roosevelt Island, and
I think that's really exciting thing, and Google contributed space to incubate this
new school, which is Cornell and Technion.
And the reason why I think that's important is I think that there's tremendous things
that are possible in the world through technology and we have relatively few people working
on those things.
We're not developing a lot of new scientists and engineers.
It's probably, you know, well under 1% of the population in most developed countries.
And I think a lot of our progress really comes from those people and their partnerships with
businesses and other things to really make things happen.
So I think, you know, I'm trying to give you a very positive world view, but I think, you
know, anything you can imagine probably is doable, right?
You just have to imagine it and work on it.
And things that we thought were almost impossible -- so we were interested in machine translation.
There is services on the web.
We had licensed one which could translate between different languages.
And obviously for search, you know, if you can't -- if the information's not in your
language, we can't find it for you.
And most information is not in your language, right?
This is sort of a -- by definition.
And so we thought, well, it would be great if we could provide search results for any
language for any query, and so we really focused on that problem.
And we focused on it and we developed Google Translate, and we found some machine learning
researchers and we said, "Do you think you can translate, you know, between any languages
and do it better than an average human translator?"
And they said -- they laughed at us, and said, "No, we can't possibly do that."
But they actually were willing to try.
And, you know, six years later, we can translate between 64 languages, and it's amazing, actually.
We're better -- in many languages, we're better than an average human translating.
We do it instantly and for free.
And between those 64 languages, we can translate between any two of the languages, so we have
something like 4,000 languages we can translate between.
And so I'm just trying to give you -- I guess I'm tremendously optimistic that whatever
things we try to challenge, whatever challenges we try to take on, we can solve with a little
bit of concerted effort, and some good technology.
And I think that's a really exciting place to be in the world.
So I think we want more people working on it, we want to have more ambitious goals,
and I think with that, we could easily double kind of human progress and the rate at which
we're developing.
So I think our job is to really make the world better, and, you know, I think that the world
has enough resources to really provide a good quality of life to everyone.
You know, we have enough raw materials and things like that.
I think we need to get better organized and really move a lot faster and really make -- work
on making that a reality, really by developing amazing technology that helps the world get
better organized, that helps people be more productive, and I think that's an amazing,
amazing thing to see happen.
So I think we take this responsibility really seriously and thank you.
[ Applause ]