It's been so great to be back in England or, as I've called it since the events of November
8th in the U.S., home, having been born in Sale, actually, just outside of Manchester.
But today, as Matt said, I am going to talk about two topics.
First, I'm going to tell you a little bit about our business today, where we've been
and where we're heading; and then I will talk a bit about Alphabet, what we did, why we
did it, and where we keep pushing ourselves to explore and excel.
So the biggest surprise for me when I joined Google -- now Alphabet -- besides the dress
code, continues to be how very early-stage we are in so many areas.
And we do believe we're on an extraordinary journey where we continue to embrace what
Larry's called "a healthy disregard for the impossible."
And that ethos very much reflects the way I was actually brought up, with parents who
taught me the importance of intellectual curiosity and persistence and the notion of daring to
dream big.
And one thing that I think about is: Where will Google be in 10 years?
And it's actually not just a rhetorical question.
It's actually a question that my dad, who's now 94, asked as he sat in the crowd in Mountain
View at one of our wonderful traditions, "Bring Your Parents to Work Day."
Most people do "Bring Your Kids," but we, of course, do "Bring Your Parents."
And as he was there, he was looking at all the demos and the presenters, and he looked
around and asked that question: Where will we be in 10 years?
And it wasn't relevant just because it came from my dad but because he's a physicist who
followed his dream and then spent the majority of his career they Stanford Linear Accelerator
Center, the team that built the instrumentation for the first atom smasher.
And he was a visionary in his area, and for me, that was most remarkable because he never
actually graduated from high school or college.
He was a refugee.
We've heard so many moving stories yesterday about refugees.
He, too, was a refugee from the war.
He enlisted in the British Army and he taught himself physics while fighting because he
concluded that education would be his passport to freedom, once the war ended.
And while fighting in the north of Africa, and in the Battle of El Alamein, his fellow
soldiers would tease him that he would die before he ever got to benefit from that education.
And his answer, as we were always told when I was growing up, is he preferred to die an
educated man.
And his vision was right because that bunker education eventuality led him to a Ph.D. in
physics, a passport to the United States, the opportunity to join Stanford.
And having spent the bulk of his career in Silicon Valley, he has seen generations of
technology companies, so it really struck me when he asked that question, a man who
has lived more change than most, "Where will we be and what will we have achieved?"
And even today, we remain mindful of our founders' goal at the time of the IPO, which was to
develop services that significantly improve the lives of as many people as possible.
And that very simple, yet powerful, objective, plus their spirit of curiosity and scrappiness
and creativity, has motivated us for more than the 18 years of this company's existence
when they were Stanford students and used off-the-shelf hardware and a Lego server track
to string together what eventually became Google.
So running through some of our products, we've always tried to delight users by giving them
the information they want when they need it -- obviously, Search -- by giving them a better
way to organize their lives and connect with the people who matter most -- Gmail -- getting
them from Point A to Point B -- Maps -- to surf the Web with speed and security -- Chrome
-- to join a global community of sharing and creating and watching videos that the whole
world can see -- YouTube -- and to carry all of that power around in your pocket -- Android.
And we are so grateful to the many partners around the globe who enable us collectively
to deliver the most useful information, the best experience and services, whether for
someone sitting here outside of London or sitting in a refugee camp in Jordan.
It's no doubt the publishers who keep us all informed, the creativity of the app developers
who bring the utility of phones to life, the brilliant creators who keep YouTube as vibrant
as it is, as fun and edgy -- we heard about some of the data yesterday, over a billion
hours of daily watch time, over a billion users around the globe -- the more than 400
distinct devices on Android that allow us to hold this supercomputer in the palms of
our hand, and the advertisers who give everyone the opportunity to benefit from access to
free useful extraordinary information.
So thanks to all of you for all that we do together.
And that brings me to the next phase of our journey, Alphabet.
So we chose to do something that nobody does.
We had this thing that was working well and said, "Let's try something new."
And the question we're often asked is: Why?
Why did we go move away from Google to Alphabet?
And we often think about when our founders told their Ph.D. advisors that they wanted
to download and index the entire Web, it seemed pretty crazy, and they've done a bunch of
things since then that people similarly said seemed a bit odd.
But Alphabet, in our view, it just really was a natural extension flowing from all that
they've created with Google.
And the Alphabet structure, what we like the most about it, is it really gives us flexibility
and the ability to push the frontier in as many directions as we think make sense, and
to do it at one time.
It gives us the ability to focus deep within Google, while similarly having a structure
and governance around these new opportunities, and going deep within them as well.
It enables us to be more ambitious by not putting a fence around that which fits within
Google but saying, "What else can improve the lives for billions?"
And two years on, as some of you may have seen, Larry just wrote our annual Founders'
Letter and his comment was that this is allowing us to push the frontier, it's working as intended,
and what we're able to do is make some of our biggest bets within Google -- we're going
to talk more about that -- but also, helping entrepreneurs really build new businesses
under this umbrella of Alphabet and run them with the autonomy and speed that they need.
So switching to the future, what we often discuss at the Googleplex, as I said, is that
some of our biggest bets are within Google, so I'm going to quickly run through a couple
of those, and you've heard about them yesterday.
You know, we're excited about -- bless you -- what Sundar calls "an AI-first world,"
where the very concept of a device will fade away and an intelligent assistant will be
there for us at all times.
And you heard a bit about that and saw that from David yesterday with the demo.
The whole idea is to give people answers that they need when they need them, even sometimes
before knowing that we want to ask them.
And our assistant is using machine learning to solve problems before we know we have them.
Our cloud products, led by our extraordinary Diane Greene, who I believe is still here
with us, are helping companies achieve greater effectiveness and efficiency by leveraging
not only the investments that we've made over many years in our infrastructure, in security,
in data analytics, but layering on as well machine learning so that we can work with
our enterprise customers to help them be even more efficient and effective.
Our Made by Google hardware family enables us to bring the best of Google hardware and
software to users, and we're just beginning to expand geographically.
And, again, there, the miracle of machine learning is particularly evident, through
things like language translation or what we can do with photos.
Even I can take an extraordinary panoramic view at this point.
And all told, just this past year, we had more than 350 launches in Search, Maps, Messaging,
Google Play, Google Assistant, Photos, truly every corner of the company that uses machine
learning to build better technology to bring more information to more people in more ways.
And the opportunity doesn't stop there.
With Waymo, our self-driving car business, our engineers will soon make self-driving
cars commercially available.
Meaning we're closer to the time when roads are safer, saving time and lives, and -- very
exciting, I think -- the ability to transform cities, preserving resources in cities.
In Palo Alto, you can see the cars driving around, and it's truly, I think, one of these
magical moments.
Our goal is to give people new ways to think of mobility and the freedom that comes with
it, and one particularly, I think, moving moment was one of our first riders was a gentleman
in Austin, Texas, Steve Mahan, who is legally blind, and these cars allow people like Steve
to have mobility that they never would have had previously, let alone for the rest of
us and what we're doing with cities.
At Verily and Google Brain, we've brought the same machine learning technology that
we use in Google Photos to help detect diabetic retinopathy, which is a disease that poses
a risk to 415 million people with diabetes.
And what we're doing in life sciences and healthcare, similarly, has really inspired
people within Google, the opportunity to continue to address so many of the needs, whether it's
in drug discovery or in disease management.
At DeepMind here in London, they're becoming famous for being the first program to be a
professional at Go, the most complex game humans have created, but they didn't set out
just to create an extraordinary game, they set out to solve much bigger problems which
you're going to hear about next from Mustafa Suleyman.
We've been truly fortunate that over the years we've been able to bring the same experience
of the Web to billions of people, no matter where they are or who they are, and to us,
technology is not just about devices, it's about giving people the tools they need to
live a better, fuller life, to have access to information, to be able to benefit from
the types of education that opens up so much of the world for so many of us.
And we do live and get motivated by this notion that through technology we can help open doors
for many people, solve problems for many people, and that's the way we approach the types of
issues that we want to take on.
We do know that we don't always get it right, and we are very humbled by that.
Throughout our life as a company, we've taken and are taking now very seriously all that
we can do to protect the ecosystem of publishers, of creators, of users, and when we have a
misstep, you have our commitment to work very hard to address it.
We care deeply about getting it right and we're grateful for all we do with you.
So in the end, you know, as we look everywhere we look, there's someone building something
that has the potential to fundamentally change the way we all work, and that brings me back
to my dad.
Another memory of my dad when I was living here, when we were living here as a family
here in England, was we used to build these crazy kits.
Built a transistor radio that unfortunately played nothing other than opera.
He helped me learn how to build a binary adding machine which was pretty simple but I was
the best solderer in my class.
And Google is about -- you know, it's about trying to do new interesting fun things, which
is where it all started.
We looked around -- we look around, we see a problem, we try hard to figure out how to
solve it, no matter how tough or how big, and so ending with the question that started
all with this, "Where will we be in 10 years as a company," my father's answer to that
when he looked around was, he said, "There are no limits."
And I think that is our view.
Very simply put, anything is possible and Alphabet and Google are very much driven by
that.
Thank you so much for being great partners.
We're excited about all that we can do together.
There are clearly so many problems and issues to be addressed to make this world a better
place, and whether it's education, health, the experiences we have every day, that's
what we get up and we're excited about doing.