>>Larry Page: It's really great to be here together with all of you. And I hope you've
all been inspired by the last two days, like I have been. I think it's always -- you know,
it's kind of like being plugged into the Internet directly when you come to this kind of event.
And while I look forward to the day of actually it being for real, this is about the closest
that we can get to it today. I know how precious all of your time is, too,
so I really appreciate your spending that time with us. And I also want to thank all
of you, many of you, for your business and your partnerships with us. We really appreciate
that and look forward to many fine years of that.
Now, I also want to thank Chip from LuLuLemon who presented earlier for the sweatshirt which
I'm wearing, which I really like. So I just wanted to give that quick ad also.
Now, when I was 12 or so, my parents actually gave me an autobiography of Tesla. And, you
know, when I say Tesla, maybe some of you think of the rock band. Maybe you think of
the electric car company now. But, actually, it refers to NIKOLA Tesla,
which when I was 1 12, that was probably the main choice. I thought I wanted to be an inventor
when I grew up. I was really lucky to get my first computer when I was six, because
my dad was a computer science professor. That was in 1978, so pretty unusual thing to do.
I thought I wanted to be an inventor. And this was, like, the greatest inventor you
could imagine. He was kind of an evil, mad scientist. You know, he made lightning bolts
and he made the things that we use for electric power now. We still use Tesla designs, basically,
to generate and distribute our electric power. And, you know, once I finished reading this
story of his life, I basically cried at the end, because I realized, you can be the world's
greatest inventor and you can basically be a failure; right? You know, you can have trouble
funding your inventions. Tesla was actually working hard on transmitting power across
continents wirelessly. And it's still not known exactly what he had in mind. And it
might be if he was better able to fund his research, we would actually have that today.
That's not that unlikely, probably. So what do you actually do about this? You
actually need to invent things and you need to get them to people. You really need to
commercialize those inventions. And, obviously, the best way we've come up with doing that
is through companies. And so I figured, you know, eventually, I
want to invent things and get them to people and get them to use them. And to benefit the
world that way. That's kind of been my goal since.
And I think our goals for Google, if you understand it in that context, make more sense. That's
actually our goal for Google. It's super simple. We want to build technology that everybody
loves using and that really affects everyone. We really want to create beautiful, intuitive,
you know, services, technologies that are so incredibly useful for people, so incredibly
useful that people use them, you know, twice a day, like you might use a toothbrush; right?
And there aren't that many things you use twice a day. It's actually pretty hard to
come up with something like that. Now, we actually just roughly hit our 13th
birthday at Google. And I think we're running a doodle now or something. It's always a little
bit of a debate exactly when our birthday is. We didn't really start paying ourselves
or start working. It's a little bit amorphous. But roughly. It's been a while.
And I think that, you know, looking back on what's been successful, well, what have we
done that's really worked well? Having a user focus and also iterating really fast have
really been -- determined what was successful. Now, I like -- in thinking back about search,
why did we start doing search? We were doing some research at Stanford. We
thought it might be interesting. And we actually were talking to all the people in the industry,
you know, who were doing different kinds of search. And we said, you know, if you type
-- we had done some interesting research about ranking things better. And, you know, we had
typed in, you know, "university" into the search engines at the time. And it was amazing,
you know, when you typed that, you basically got random Web pages. You got pages that said
"university" twice in the title. And we said -- you know, we went to the people
who made these search engines and said, "Why are you doing that? Why would I want a page"
-- And they said, "Well, this is user error."
Right? "You shouldn't have typed 'university.'"
We were, like, "What?" I can't possibly be wrong. You know, I'm just a user; right?
[ Laughter ] >>Larry Page: And they didn't quite understand
that. And that's how we went on to build a search engine, because we realized nobody
was focused on that. Now, I think, you know, that's true for still
very many areas in the world. There's still -- sorry. I'm going to get a drink.
I still see a lot of areas where people don't have that user focus. And I think it's true
for most of computing right now. I was remarking to somebody here earlier, you know, if you
look back, you know, you took a programmer from 30 years ago -- maybe Eric can tell us
-- [ Laughter ]
>>Larry Page: -- and, you know, you transplanted them today, I think they would roughly know
what's going on. Like, it's not so different than it was then. In fact, we still use some
of Eric's code. It's still good. So, look, let me talk about the user experience
in terms of Google+. Obviously, we're super excited about Google+. You know, it's -- I
think, you know, really understanding people better, understanding what you want, personalizing
that is very, very important. And we want to build a closer relationship with all of
our users, with all of you guys. And we want to integrate all of our products
so they're easier to use, more intuitive. And we want to make sharing on the Web happen
like real life; right? You know, if you're at this conference, you say different things
than if you're, you know, in your family or you're with your coworkers or whatever.
And that's what Circles are. And we're really excited about that.
Now, we also wanted to have an amazing experience for mobile. You know, you use, actually, your
phone probably more than you use your computer now. And that trend is only increasing. And,
you know, one of the things we did and which is amazing is, when you take a picture with
Google+, it automatically gets uploaded and in seconds, you can share it, decide who you
want to share it with. It's just a totally magical experience, like you don't have to
worry about anything. It just happens. Now, also, will.I.am, who is here, recently
did a Hangout with us, which we're really excited about. This is serendipitous interaction
where you basically enter a video conference, but with people from all around the world,
and you can have a conversation with them. He did this recently. He's going to do it
again Friday, 6:00 p.m. eastern time. He's running a concert, which will be really exciting.
But we're looking forward to that. Now, this -- you know, search is also very
important to us, obviously. So when you do search, we really want you to be able to have
a great experience. And for that, you know, knowing what other people like, what they're
+1'ing, what things people are sharing is super important. And you can already see that
happening in search. We're really excited about that. If you do a search on Google,
someone's +1'd it, you'll see it right in your search results. And that's a big, big
deal. I'm really pleased with Google+ so far. It's
been a -- the team has been doing an amazing job. It's really on fire. I'd love for all
of you to sign up. I think you've got an opportunity to do that. But I'd love for you to do that
and see Will's concert on Friday and participate and really help us build the future as a community.
I'm really excited about that. Let me just switch gears for a second and
talk a little bit about really talking about how you choose what to do. One thing I've
noticed is that if you're super ambitious, it's often easier. That sounds kind of counterintuitive.
But if you have a healthy disregard for the impossible, you actually get better people
to work on your project. You know, they get really excited, they work really hard. You
know, they work late at night. And it also turns out that most companies aren't crazy
enough to do anything like that. And so you don't -- they -- nobody else is doing it.
So you're the only ones. And, again, you get the best people.
Now, you know, we try to do a lot of things like that. And I'll just give you some examples
from the past. You know, when we bought Android, it was a
small company. It was 2005 when we bought it. And they had a dream that they were going
to use an open source operating system for phones to really standardize an industry and
make things really productive. I mean, that was a crazy goal; right? It was something
like 20 people at the time. And we had a whole industry; we had a whole closet full of phones
that all didn't work, something like 100 phones we had in a closet. And we had to write software
for each individual one. But having that ambitious dream and a long-term
focus, they were really able to succeed. And, obviously, Android's the largest shipping
smartphone operating system now. That did take six years; right?
Now, I feel like, you know, in thinking about this, I see the same movie playing out again
and again. You know, people thought that Android was crazy at the time. They also think that
many of the businesses we're doing now is crazy, crazy now. And, in fact, you know,
I look at things like Chrome, say, oh, why do you need another browser? There's plenty
of browsers. Got 160 million people using Chrome. And it's growing like crazy. And it's
how you access the Internet. That's an important thing; right?
And display advertising, you know, people said, oh, there's all these big providers
of display advertising. You know, what are you guys going to do?
Now we're a huge provider of display advertising. And I'm really excited about that, because
it's growing like crazy also. But it's also really funding all the content that's on the
Internet. That's an important thing, is to fund that content that gets created, and to
do it better, to do it with a better user experience, to make the ads more relevant
to people and more useful to people. And we're really applying the science of what we did
with search advertising to display advertising. It's working great. It's not that surprising.
But, you know, if you watched Ray Kurzweil's talk earlier, you know, people get confused,
you know, when you have something that's growing quickly, you know, you think it's small. And
then the next day, basically, it's huge. And that's what I've seen with all these businesses.
YouTube, which Mark for some reason thinks we shouldn't have bought -- I disagree. I
think it was a great acquisition -- you know, we have over 3 billion playbacks a day there.
And that's growing like crazy also. And we've multiplied our ad revenue by 3X for two years
in a row, which has been amazing, too. And that's going to -- it's a huge business. It's
going to be a much bigger business. So what's the takeaway from this? I think
if you have a well-run technology business and it has a lot of usage, you generally make
a lot of money over the long term, if you take a long-term view. And that's how we've
operated our company. And I think related to that, you know, if
you look at short-term and long-term change, it's very -- and this is a well-known kind
of research fact -- people tend to overestimate the next year what's going to happen. You
know, you sort of see the trajectory, you see what's going to happen, and you assume
that it's going to happen much faster than it actually does.
But when you look at the next five years, you really underestimate that effect, especially
of the exponential type growth systems that Ray was talking about.
And I think that in technology, we're still very, very, very early stage. So we're way
overestimating the next year, and we're way underestimating the next five years. And what
we try to do is to make sure we're driving the next five years. And I think that's our
job. Now, what are these things? Well, I think
the tools that we use for interacting online are going to be completely different five
years from now. You know, if you think back five years ago or six, seven years ago, we
had no social network tools, really. You know, just things were completely different. And
I think if you look five years from now, they're going to be completely different again. There's
a lot of user interface issues with what we're doing. There's a lot of potential to make
people's lives better, to make things more efficient, to make things more enjoyable for
people, and we're trying hard to build those tools as Google+. And we're super excited
about that. I also thought I'd mention mobile briefly.
It's not that long since we've had a phone in our pocket; right? And the phone is really
a computer. It's connected to the Internet. It's actually as good as your desktop computer
was three or four years ago already. And it knows where you are. It's always with you.
And those capabilities are just going to completely change the world. And we're very, very early
on in that, too. We just launched last week mobile payments,
our Wallet product. And you can use Android phone without a wallet, use our Wallet, and
you can buy something. And it's an amazing experience. You just tap and you can pay for
it. Your phone keeps track of it. It's secure. It's an amazing experience. And that's just
the tip of the iceberg of these kind of applications for phones.
Now I'll just finish here and say that, you know, technology's really changing the world.
We all know that. It can really improve billions of people's lives. And that's what we're excited
about. I think we at Google, we have a tremendous responsibility to really carry that mission
forward to make the world better. That's why I'm here, why I love technology, and why I
love my job here at Google. So thank you.
[ Applause ]