eyal matsliah's Library tagged apple →  View Popular

When you joined Google it was just a search engine. It has grown into much more. How should we think about Google today?

One is as an advertising system. Another one is as this end-user system (the search, email, and other applications Google delivers to users through an Internet browser). A third way to think of Google is as a giant supercomputer. And then a fourth way is to think of Google as a social phenomenon involving the company, the people, the brand, the mission, the values - all that kind of stuff.

You just recently joined the board of Apple and have talked about potential partnerships between Google and Apple. Explain.

Google's architectural model around broadband and services and so forth plays very well to the powerful devices and services Apple is doing. We're a perfect back end to the problems that they're trying to solve. And they have very good judgment on user interface and people. They don't have this supercomputer I'm talking about, which is the data centers. What they have is a manufacturing business that's doing quite well. And the obvious example is the iPhone, which they announced has in it Google Maps.

Which generates more pageviews, which generates more advertising revenue.

You got it.

The other interesting thing about pageviews is that we make our money by improving the quality, not the quantity, of ads showed on a page. This is very confusing to people. In a normal media business, you make money by showing more ads.

What does it take to improve the quality of ads on Google?

More computers, basically, and better algorithms. And more information about you. The more personal information you're willing to give us - and you have to choose to give it to us - the more we can target.

Don't you guys do that?

Well, we certainly don't make the ads, and we're certainly not the creative people. All we are is a targeting mechanism. We're just a distribution channel.

Google's revenue and employee head count have tripled in the last two years. How do you keep from becoming too bureaucratic or too chaotic?

It's a constant problem. We analyze this every day, and our conclusion is that the best model remains small teams running as fast as they can and tolerating a certain lack of cohesion. The attempt to provide order drives out the creativity. And so it's a balance.

What about "20 percent time" - the time everyone is supposed to allocate in their week to personal projects?

It's still essential. Virtually all of the innovation at the company is still coming out of 20 percent time.

Google gets its revenue from online advertising. One could make the argument that it is not diversified enough. Is that something that you think about? If so, what are some of the things you are doing about it?

The criticism is correct. We do get the vast majority of our revenue from advertising, and it's a business that a lot of other people would like to be in. So the first thing is, let's understand that we're in a great business. Also, there are some emergent models for revenue that are very interesting. The one that is probably most interesting is Google Apps. We're now beginning to get some significant enterprise deals. Basically, companies are tired of dealing with the complexity of the old model, and our products are now strong enough that they really can reliably serve a corporation.

Why do you place such a premium on hiring the smartest people and developing and releasing software so quickly?

Fast learners win. We're in new, uncharted space. So the traditional assumptions that you and I might have about the future might actually just be wrong. There might be a new answer. And the only way to discover that is to put out your idea and then test it. And we track the results of that very, very, very rigorously, and this is not something we talk a lot about, but it's critical for us. How are these new ideas doing? What's their growth rate? What are the issues around them? And we push. What can we do to accelerate the development of this feature? What's the new problem? What's the new opportunity?

I think there will be three sources of apps: (1) the basics that you mention, which will be supplied and served up by Google-Apple; various consumer apps, including games and web 2.0 stuff, that will be served up over the net as they are today (ad-supported or for fee); and specialized, pro apps that will be designed by developers to run on the Google-Apple platform (incorporating app-cacheing techniques to ensure the necessary speed and responsiveness) and that you'll either license for a fee, as you do today, or subscribe to for a monthly fee (with consolidated billing from Google-Apple).

Nick

Posted by: Charles

the centrally controlled system will be able to make use of local computing power and storage capacity to optimize the user experience (without shifting maintenance and other crap onto the user). It's all one system.

Nick

Posted by: Nick Carr at October 17, 2007 04:55 PM

"It will be cheap."

When's the last time Apple shipped anything cheap (in the low price sense of the word)? Its entire line is overpriced and a modest iPod Nano is $149-199. Even if the purchase price is subsidized by advertising or a monthly fee -- and don't forget that iPods and iPhones are subsidized by iTunes and phone bills -- a $99 price point is hard to believe.

"It will be flexible."

How flexible or universal will it be if Apple stays true to form: the software and content only run on Apple devices; Apple limits or prevents third-party application development while selling many apps itself; and there are platform lock-in problems?