Eric Schmidt Quotes

When the Internet publicity began, I remember being struck by how much the world was not the way we thought it was, that there was infinite variation in how people viewed the world.

Washington is an incumbent protection machine. Technology is fundamentally disruptive.

The average American doesn’t realize how much of the laws are written by lobbyists.

There’s nothing that cannot be found through some search engine or on the Internet somewhere.

The core problem is that the world is full of people who would like to take 99 per cent of the information that’s on the Internet, and eliminate 1 per cent. Everyone has their own thing they don’t like.

I don’t believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time.

If you think about YouTube, YouTube is a ‘searching the world’s videos‘ problem, right? They all have to be there, but how do you find them? What I guess I’m trying to say is that search is still the killer app.

I had a rule that I had to go to bed before the sun came up. So I used to look up the sunrise times because I thought it would be bad karma to be going to bed as dawn was arriving.

People who bet against the Internet, who think that somehow this change is just a generational shift, miss that it is a fundamental reorganizing of the power of the end user. The Internet brings tremendous tools to the end user, and that end user is going to use them.

People are good at intuition, living our lives. What are computers good at? Memory.

The Internet is really about highly specialized information, highly specialized targeting.

I’ve come to a view that humans will continue to do what we do well, and that computers will continue to do what they do very well, and the two will coexist, but in different spaces.

Since I have access to every, every crisis in the world because it’s always blaring at me on cable television, that doesn’t mean I have to worry about every one of them. This is also known as knowing where the off button is.

When the Internet publicity began, I remember being struck by how much the world was not the way we thought it was, that there was infinite variation in how people viewed the world.

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.

The more broadband we can get globally, the better. It’s better for the world; it’s better for our advertisers; it’s better for Google.

I do want to emphasize that we’ve seen an explosion in the use of Google Maps and Google Earth for education. The earth is a special place. It is our home and it’s why we’re all here. And the ability to see what’s really going on the earth, the good stuff and the bad stuff, at the level that you can, is phenomenal.

I don’t believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time.

The rise of Google, the rise of Facebook, the rise of Apple, I think are proof that there is a place for computer science as something that solves problems that people face every day.

The Internet is really about highly specialized information, highly specialized targeting.

I think I could argue that the press has more impact on politics than corporations.

The more broadband we can get globally, the better. It’s better for the world; it’s better for our advertisers; it’s better for Google.

We weren’t here to hope and hang on. We wanted to win.

I used to say that you’ll have 10 IP address on your body… and it looks like that’s going to happen through medical monitoring.

In general in technology, if you own a platform that’s valuable, you can monetize it.

Amazon has well passed any expectations of its ability to change distribution and marketing.

The adult way to run a business is to run it more like a country. They have disputes, yet they’ve actually been able to have huge trade with each other. They’re not sending bombs at each other.

Countries that have the Internet already are not going to turn it off. And so the power of freedom, the power of ideas will spread, and it will change those societies in very dramatic ways.

Silicon Valley‘s involvement with Washington dates from one event, which was John Scully – who was the CEO of Apple – had dinner with President Clinton and Vice President Gore in 1993. And we’re all going, like, ‘What’s going on? Why would we have dinner with the president?’

And the more broadband we can get globally, the better. It’s better for the world; it’s better for our advertisers; it’s better for Google.

The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn’t understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had.

Fast learners win.

A lot of the Google inventions came from engineers just screwing around with ideas. And then management would see them, and we’d say, ‘Boy, that’s interesting. Let’s add some more engineers.’

The coach doesn’t have to play the sport as well as you do. They have to watch you and get you to be your best.

Facial recognition, completely unmonitored, can be used for very bad things. It can be used for stalking, for example.

There’s a set of people who are intrinsic oppositionists to everything Google does.

When you use Google, do you get more than one answer? Of course you do. Well, that’s a bug. We have more bugs per second in the world. We should be able to give you the right answer just once. We should know what you meant.

Half of Google’s revenue comes from selling text-based ads that are placed near search results and are related to the topic of the search. Another half of its revenues come from licensing its search technology to companies like Yahoo.

There’s nothing that cannot be found through some search engine or on the Internet somewhere.

Google was founded to get information to everybody. A by-product of that strategy is that we invented an advertising business which has provided great economics that allows us to build the servers, hire the employees, create value.

Google is very much a not-invented-here, build-it-ourselves culture.

People are surprised to find out that an awful lot of people think that they’re idiots.

We want to make sure the thing you’re looking for is on Google 100 percent of the time.

The characteristic of great innovators and great companies is they see a space that others do not. They don’t just listen to what people tell them; they actually invent something new, something that you didn’t know you needed, but the moment you see it, you say, ‘I must have it.’

In general in technology, if you own a platform that’s valuable, you can monetize it.

The adult way to run a business is to run it more like a country. They have disputes, yet they’ve actually been able to have huge trade with each other. They’re not sending bombs at each other.

Your car should drive itself. It’s amazing to me that we let humans drive cars… It’s a bug that cars were invented before computers.

People are building communities of people who use video. They’re sharing them. YouTube’s traffic continues to grow very quickly.

Google is more than a business. Google is a belief system. And we believe passionately in the open Internet model.

If you think about the history of the PC industry, the PC industry has essentially been nothing but acquisitions by one company or another. Dell is the outlier. Dell built its own culture. They automated themselves to be the most efficient manufacturer.

You have to fight for your privacy or you lose it.

Google is very much a not-invented-here, build-it-ourselves culture.

People who bet against the Internet, who think that somehow this change is just a generational shift, miss that it is a fundamental reorganizing of the power of the end user. The Internet brings tremendous tools to the end user, and that end user is going to use them.

I had a rule that I had to go to bed before the sun came up. So I used to look up the sunrise times because I thought it would be bad karma to be going to bed as dawn was arriving.

If you think about YouTube, YouTube is a ‘searching the world’s videos‘ problem, right? They all have to be there, but how do you find them? What I guess I’m trying to say is that search is still the killer app.

I use Google+, and I find the quality of the comments are very sophisticated because there is more trust inside of Google+ than there is inside of Twitter and Facebook, for example.

I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.

I think I could argue that the press has more impact on politics than corporations.

I’ve never met a person who does not want a safer world, better medical care and education for their children, and peace with their neighbours. I just don’t meet those people. What I meet, over and over again, as I travel around, is that the essential human condition is optimistic – in every one of these places.

Washington – having spent a lot of time there, I grew up there and have spent a lot of time there recently – is largely defined by detailed analytical views and policy choices that are not very good. You know, each policy choice has a winner and a loser, right? Somebody‘s ox is getting gored.

In whatever number of years I have on Earth, I think that promoting the values of free expression, the openness of the Internet, that’s the best use of my time.

Google docs and spreadsheets don’t work if you’re on an airplane. But it’s a technical problem that is going to get solved. Eventually you will be able to work on a plane as if you are connected and, then when you get reconnected to the Internet, your computer will just synchronize with the cloud.

The computing world is very good at things that we are not. It is very good at memory.

The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn’t understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had.

The computing world is very good at things that we are not. It is very good at memory.

People assume that computers will do everything that humans do. Not good. People are different from each other and they are all really different from computers.

There’s a set of people who are intrinsic oppositionists to everything Google does.

In whatever number of years I have on Earth, I think that promoting the values of free expression, the openness of the Internet, that’s the best use of my time.

If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.

When you use Google, do you get more than one answer? Of course you do. Well, that’s a bug. We have more bugs per second in the world. We should be able to give you the right answer just once. We should know what you meant.

I think it’s pretty clear that the Internet as a whole has not had a strong notion of identity. And identity means, ‘Who am I?’ Fundamentally, what Facebook has done has built a way to figure out who people are.

If you look at the history of technology over a couple hundred years, it’s all about time compression and making the globe smaller. It’s had positive effects, all the ones that we know. So we’re much less likely to have the kind of terrible misunderstandings that led to World War I, for example.

People are surprised to find out that an awful lot of people think that they’re idiots.

Google docs and spreadsheets don’t work if you’re on an airplane. But it’s a technical problem that is going to get solved. Eventually you will be able to work on a plane as if you are connected and, then when you get reconnected to the Internet, your computer will just synchronize with the cloud.

Remember, when you go to YouTube, you do a search. When you go to Google, you do a search. As we get the search integrated between YouTube and Google, which we’re working on, it will drive a lot of traffic into both places. So the trick, overall, is generating more searches, more uses of Google.

A lot of the Google inventions came from engineers just screwing around with ideas. And then management would see them, and we’d say, ‘Boy, that’s interesting. Let’s add some more engineers.’

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.

We know that Google Earth and Google Maps have had a tremendous impact on Google traffic, users, brand, adoption, and advertisers. We also know Google News, for example, which we don’t monetize, has had a tremendous impact on searches and on query quality. We know those people search more. Because we’ve measured it.

I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.

And the more broadband we can get globally, the better. It’s better for the world; it’s better for our advertisers; it’s better for Google.