Geodog

The sayings of Chairman Schmidt:
Eric Schmidt of Google on Orkut and other topics at Berkeley

The highlight of today's UC Berkeley CSEE department Research Symposium, at least in entertainment value, was the keynote speech by Eric Schmidt of Google (Berkeley CS M.S. and Ph.D.). He gave a very intelligent and witty speech, much too long to reproduce here. He talked about the changes over the last 30 years in technology and in the information industry, about Google business, logistical and technology challenges, and he told a lot of funny stories. A few tidbits:

My policy for Google execs: for sixty minutes a day, they are required to be offline.

From every piece of data on the growth of the Internet that Google sees, we don't see anything slowing down. The information industry is booming.

Google cares a lot about power and temperature. Google servers use more than 10 megawatts of power. Fires are a big problem. Sometimes I think that Google's fundamental mission is to move air from one server rack to another server rack. Running a data center is a lousy business. Every data center we have been in has gone bankrupt.

Google's architectural problems are power, especially provisioning it, aggregating the data, since we have thousands of copies of the Internet, and scale problems. The speed of light is a problem.

If you can solve a real end user problem, you are guaranteed to be a big success.

There is a very interesting collision between the law and the Internet coming [he gave an example of kids buying prescription drugs over the net].

I know that the blogosphere is currently obsessed with Orkut, so I thought it would be worth reproducing to the best of my ability his response to a question about Orkut and its Terms of Service.

Orkut is an experiment by a 28 year old man named Orkut looking for a social life. My engineers are obsessed with it -- I don't see what it has to offer a married man in his 40's like me. [I feel the same way]. It is unlikely that we will use that information. We need some information to connect people.

Someone asked specifically about the provision in the Orkut TOS, By submitting, posting or displaying any Materials on or through the orkut.com service, you automatically grant to us a worldwide, non-exclusive, sublicenseable, transferable, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable right to copy, distribute, create derivative works of, publicly perform and display such Materials. Schmidt said:

The Orkut Terms of Service were debated at the exec level. There is a difference between intention and what lawyers make us write down. Take it from me, we do not intend to sell the data.

Ed. I personally still think that if you are Google, you have an obligation to get the lawyers to frame terms in a more reasonable way that reflects your intentions better.

He was asked the inevitable question about whether Google was going to go public, and he responded:

I'm going to give you the Greenspan answer. It sounds like it answers your question, but it doesn't. We have been lucky enough that Google has made enough cash and profits in the last 3 years to fund its own operations that we don't need to go public.

Ed. The quotes from Schmidt represent my best attempt at deciphering my contemporaneous paper notes. I am not a stenographer. They are not certified word for word correct. Hopefully, UC will put their recording of Schmidt's talk on their website.

Bonus points: Search Google for Bird Diapers and Australian Whips, and check out the ads on the right. As Schmidt said, you couldn't pay any adverting agency to make those up.

Cross-posted at The Berkeley Blog.

Posted by tbishop61 at February 28, 2004 12:25 AM | TrackBack