[LINK] 'Love and trust' Google

[stephen at melbpc.org.au]

2012 Update from the Google CEO 

 http://investor.google.com/corporate/2012/ceo-letter.html

Velocity, execution and focus 

Sergey and I founded Google because we believed that building a great 
search experience would improve people’s lives and, hopefully, the 
world.  And in the decade-plus that’s followed, we’ve been constantly 
delighted by the ways in which people have used our technology—such as 
making an artificial limb using old designs discovered online. 

But we’re always impatient to do better for our users.  Excellence 
matters, and technology advances so fast that the potential for 
improvement is tremendous. So, since becoming CEO again, I’ve pushed hard 
to increase our velocity, improve our execution, and focus on the big 
bets that will make a difference in the world.  Google is a large company 
now, but we will achieve more, and do it faster, if we approach life with 
the passion and soul of a start-up. 

Last April, I began by reorganizing the management team around our core 
products to improve responsibility and accountability across Google.  I 
also kicked off a big clean-up.  Google has so many opportunities that, 
unless we make some hard choices, we end up spreading ourselves too thin 
and don’t have the impact we want. So we have closed or combined over 30 
products, including projects like Knol and Sidewiki. In addition, we gave 
many of our products, such as Google Search, a visual refresh, and they 
now have a cleaner, more consistent, and beautiful look. 

A beautifully simple experience across Google
 
Creating a simpler, more intuitive experience across Google has been 
another important focus. I have always believed that technology should do 
the hard work—discovery, organization, communication—so users can do what 
makes them happiest: living and loving, not messing with annoying 
computers! That means making our products work together seamlessly. 
People shouldn’t have to navigate Google to get stuff done. It should 
just happen. As Sergey said in the memorable way only he can, “We've let 
a thousand flowers bloom; now we want to put together a coherent 
bouquet.” 

Think about basic actions like sharing or recommendations. When you find 
a great article, you want to share that knowledge with people who will 
find it interesting, too. If you see a great movie, you want to recommend 
it to friends. Google+ makes sharing super easy by creating a social 
layer across all our products so users connect with the people who matter 
to them. 

When you sign up for Google+, you can use Circles to group people into 
different categories, such as “Friends,” “Family,” or “Rocket 
Scientists,” and then engage with them just like in real life. You can 
recommend great news articles, websites, and videos to specific Circles, 
or share photos with “Family” straight from your Android device. And the 
photos are even uploaded for you automatically! To follow people with 
shared interests, such as photography, just add them to your Circles. And 
you can share your own ideas with the world, or a smaller group, via the 
Google+ Stream and have others respond. 

It’s still early days, and we have a long way to go. But these are 
tremendously important changes, and with over 120 Google+ integrations to 
date (including Google Search, YouTube and Android), we are on the right 
track. Well over 100 million users are active on Google+, and we’re 
seeing a positive impact across the Web, with Google users being able to 
recommend search results and videos they like—a goal we’ve had ever since 
we started the company. 

Activity on the Google+ Stream itself is increasing too. We’re excited 
about the tremendous speed with which some people have amassed over one 
million followers, as well as the depth of the discussions taking place 
among happy, passionate users—all evidence that we’re generating genuine 
engagement. When I post publicly I get a ton of high quality comments, 
which makes me happy and encourages me to keep posting. I strongly 
encourage all of you to follow me on Google+—I love having this new way 
to communicate and share with all of you! 

Next-generation search 

Understanding identity and relationships can also help us improve search. 
Today, most search results are generic, so two strangers sitting next to 
each other in a café will get very similar answers. Yet everyone’s life 
experiences are unique. We are all knowledgeable about different things; 
we have different interests and our preferences—for music, food, 
vacations, sports, movies, TV shows, and especially people—vary 
enormously. 

Imagine how much better search would be if we added… you. Say you’ve been 
studying computer science for awhile like me, then the information you 
need won’t be that helpful to a relative novice and vice versa. If you’re 
searching for a particular person, you want the results for that person—
not everyone else with the same name. These are hard problems to solve 
without knowing your identity, your interests, or the people you care 
about. 

We have an old-time Googler called Ben Smith, who is a good friend of 
mine. It turns out that he isn’t the only Ben Smith in the world! Today, 
it’s tough for Google to find the right Ben for me. Many people share 
only their public profiles, not their posts, photos, or connections. And 
privacy considerations certainly limit the information that can be shared 
between platforms—even if the third parties hosting it were willing to 
work with Google, which hasn’t always been the case. 

Google+ helps solve this problem for us because it enables Google to 
understand people and their connections. So when I search for Ben Smith, 
I get the real Ben Smith (for me), right there in my search box, complete 
with his picture. Previously, the search box would just have had the 
series of letters I had typed, with no real understanding that I was 
looking for a unique person. This is a huge and important change, and 
there’s a ton more work to do.  But this kind of next-generation search 
in which Google understands real-world entities—things, not strings—will 
help improve our results in exciting new ways. It’s about building 
genuine knowledge into our search engine. 

Taking actions 

In the early days of Google you would type in a query, we’d return ten 
blue links, and you would move on fairly happily. Today you want more. If 
you search for “weather san francisco”, chances are you want… the weather 
in San Francisco right there on the results page, not another click or 
two away. So that’s what we now provide. In fact, before you’ve even 
finished typing “weather” into the search box we give you the weather 
because we’ve learned that’s most likely what you’re looking for. 

Truly great search is all about turning your needs into actions in the 
blink of an eye. There is a huge amount of data in the world that isn’t 
publicly available today.  Showing it in our results involves deep 
partnerships across different industries in many countries. It’s very 
similar to the work we did to get Google Maps off the ground. 

Last year, for example, we welcomed ITA Software to the Google family. 
They have strong relationships with the airline industry, and using that 
data we can now provide more relevant results for travel queries. This 
means that if you search for “flights from chicago to los angeles”, you 
get a list of the most relevant flights with prices, and you can book 
directly with the airline—or click on an ad for an online travel agency. 
We’re also experimenting with a feature called Hotel Finder, which 
enables you to compare prices and book a hotel room right from the 
results page. It’s all about speeding things up so users can get on with 
the things that matter in their lives. 

>From desktop to mobiles and tablets, oh my
 
Getting from needs to actions lightning fast is especially important on 
smaller devices like mobile phones, where screen size is limited and 
context really matters.  That’s why I’m so excited about Android. Take 
Google Maps, one of our best-loved services.  With it, you can search for 
something, perhaps the nearest bookstore, find it, and be shown the way 
straight there.  And you can now turn your phone into a wallet using... 
Google Wallet.  So you can tap, pay, and save while you shop.  No more 
claiming you left your credit card at home when your friend asks you to 
pay for lunch! 

It wasn’t always that easy. I remember first meeting Andy Rubin, the 
creator of Android, back in 2004. At the time, developing apps for mobile 
devices was incredibly painful. We had a closet full of over 100 phones, 
and we were building our software pretty much one device at a time. Andy 
believed that aligning standards around an open source operating system 
would drive innovation across the mobile industry. At the time, most 
people thought he was nuts. 

Fast forward to today. Android is on fire, and the pace of mobile 
innovation has never been greater. Over 850,000 devices are activated 
daily through a network of 55 manufacturers and more than 300 carriers. 
Android is a tremendous example of the power of partnership, and it just 
gets better with each version. The latest update, Ice Cream Sandwich, has 
a beautiful interface that adapts to the form of the device.  Whether 
it’s on a phone or tablet, the software works seamlessly. 

As devices multiply and usage changes (many users coming online today may 
never use a desktop machine), it becomes more and more important to 
ensure that people can access all of their stuff anywhere.  Constant 
downloading is a terrible experience, so I am excited about products like 
Gmail and Google Docs that work well across Android and desktop. With 
Chrome now recently available on Android, switching devices becomes 
painless, too, because all of your tabs are just there across your 
desktop and Android.  You can even click the back button on a different 
device, and it just works! And with Google Play, movies, books, apps, and 
games are all accessible from the Web or an Android device—no cables, 
downloading, or syncing required. I think there is a theme here! 

In August, we announced plans to acquire Motorola Mobility, a company 
that bet big on Android very early on. We are excited about the 
opportunities to build great devices capitalizing on the tremendous 
success and growth of Android and Motorola’s long history of 
technological innovation. But it’s important to reiterate that openness 
and investment by many hardware partners have contributed to Android’s 
success. So we look forward to working with all of them in the future to 
deliver outstanding user experiences. Android was built as an open 
ecosystem, and we have no plans to change that. 

Long-term focus 

We have always tried to concentrate on the long term, and to place bets 
on technology we believe will have a significant impact over time. It’s 
hard to imagine now, but when we started Google most people thought 
search was a solved problem and that there was no money to be made apart 
from some banner advertising.  We felt the exact opposite: that search 
quality was very poor, and that awesome user experiences would clearly 
make money. 

Today it feels like we’re watching the same movie in slow motion over 
again. We have tremendous new products that were seen as crazy at launch 
yet now have phenomenal usage. They easily pass the toothbrush test: they 
are important enough that millions of people use them at least once or 
twice a day. Take Chrome, for example. In 2008, people asked whether the 
world really needed another browser. Today Chrome has over 200 million 
users and is growing fast, thanks to its speed, simplicity, and security. 
If you don’t use Chrome, just try it out, you’ll never go back! I promise 
it won’t take too long to install, and if it does you probably need a new 
computer. 

We are seeing phenomenal usage of our Web-based applications, too. When 
we launched Gmail in 2004, most people thought webmail was a toy, but its 
accessibility—all your email from anywhere, on any device—and insane 
storage have made it a winner with more than 350 million people. And our 
enterprise customers love it too. Over 5,000 new businesses and 
educational establishments now sign up every day. 

In 2006, when Google acquired YouTube, we faced a lot of skepticism. 
Today, YouTube has over 800 million monthly users uploading over an hour 
of video per second. It enables an activist in Syria to broadcast 
globally or a young star to build an entertainment network from scratch. 
YouTube channels have real potential to entertain and educate, as well as 
to help organize all the amazing videos that are available. So I’m 
excited we have a new effort working with media powerhouses such as Jay-
Z, the Wall Street Journal, and Disney to create channels that appeal to 
every interest. 

People rightly ask how we’ll make money from these big bets. We 
understand the need to balance our short- and longer-term needs because 
our revenue is the engine that funds all our innovation. But over time, 
our emerging high-usage products will likely generate significant new 
revenue streams for Google as well as for our partners, just as search 
does today. For example, we’re seeing a hugely positive revenue impact 
from mobile advertising, which grew to a run rate of over $2.5 billion by 
the third quarter of 2011—two and a half times more than at the same 
point in 2010. Our goal is long-term growth in revenue and absolute 
profit—so we invest aggressively in future innovation while tightly 
managing our short-term costs. 

Love and trust 

We have always wanted Google to be a company that is deserving of great 
love. But we recognize this is an ambitious goal because most large 
companies are not well-loved, or even seemingly set up with that in mind. 
We’re lucky to have a very direct relationship with our users, which 
creates a strong incentive for us to do the right thing. For every magic 
moment we create—like the ability to drop a photo into Google and search 
by image—we have a very happy user.  And when our products don’t work or 
we make mistakes, it’s easy for users to go elsewhere because our 
competition is only a click away. 

Users place a lot of trust in Google when they store data, like emails 
and documents, on our systems. And we need to be responsible stewards of 
that information. It’s why we invest a lot of effort in security and 
related tools for users, like 2-step verification and encryption, which 
help prevent unauthorized access to information. The recent changes we 
made to our privacy policies generated a lot of interest. But they will 
enable us to create a much better, more intuitive experience across 
Google—our key focus for the year. 

We have always believed that it’s possible to make money without being 
evil. In fact, healthy revenue is essential if we are to change the world 
through innovation, and hire (and retain) great people. As a child I 
remember reading about Nikola Tesla, a genius whose impact was severely 
limited by his failure to make money from his inventions. It was a good 
lesson. Today, most of our revenue comes from advertising. We take pains 
to make sure that users know when something is paid for, and we work hard 
to make these advertisements relevant for users.  Better ads are better 
for everyone—better information or offers for users, growth for 
businesses, and increased revenue for publishers to fund better content. 

Over one million businesses now use Google’s advertising products and 
we’re delighted with the ways in which we have helped other companies 
(both large and small) succeed. I recently heard about a Thai dressmaker 
whose store was destroyed by floods. To start rebuilding her business, 
she invested $5 a day in Google AdWords and doubled her revenue. Today 
over 80 percent of her orders come from the Web. Taylor’s Bike Shop in 
Utah, a family-run store, saw increase in sales of over 50 percent when 
they started using AdWords. Today they maintain a staff of eight people 
on a steady basis. 

At the heart of our business model has always been the belief that we’re 
better off if we can create a larger pie for our partners. We started 
with AdSense, and Google has paid out over $30 billion to support content 
on the Web since its launch over a decade ago. That is a mighty big check 
(actually lots of smaller checks!) and I’m delighted we’ve been able to 
support our partners with that much resource. The same is true for our 
newer technologies like DoubleClick for online publishers and AdMob for 
mobile developers. YouTube also generates healthy revenue for Google and 
our content partners—in fact, partner ad revenue has more than doubled 
for the fourth year in a row. One thing I've learned is that if you keep 
doubling things, it really adds up fast! 

All that said, we recognize that we don’t get everything right—and that 
the changes we make, like our recent visual refresh, can initially upset 
some users (even if they later come to love them). But we don’t operate 
in a static industry, and technology changes so fast that we need to 
innovate and iterate. Of course, when we do make mistakes we try to fix 
them as quickly as possible and, if necessary, change the way we do 
things to prevent problems from arising again. And we work hard to 
explain what we are doing—and why—because with size comes responsibility. 

Googlers 

People are a crucial part of Google’s long-term success, since companies 
are no greater than the efforts and ingenuity of their employees. Our 
goal is to hire the best at every level and keep them.  In our experience 
your working environment is enormously important because people want to 
feel part of a family in the office, just as they do at home. So we 
invest in great food, high quality medical care, gyms, and other fitness 
facilities, as well as cool workspaces that bring people together. 

Most important of all, however, we believe that work should be 
challenging. People are more motivated and have more fun when they work 
on important projects. Take Google Translate, which we started eight 
years ago and now enables anyone to translate text in an instant between 
any two of 64 languages—including Hindi, Arabic and Chinese. That's 
actually 4032 different pairs of languages you can translate! In fact, by 
combining it with our voice recognition technology, we’ve turned mobile 
phones into pocket translators for millions of users globally. When you 
work on projects of this magnitude, it’s impossible not to wake up 
excited about work; the chance to make a difference is the greatest 
motivation anyone can have. 

Happiness is a healthy disregard for the impossible 

When I was a student at the University of Michigan, I went on a summer 
leadership course. The slogan was “a healthy disregard for the 
impossible,” and it’s an idea that has stayed with me ever since. It may 
sound nuts, but I’ve found that it’s easier to make progress on mega-
ambitious goals than on less risky projects. Few people are crazy enough 
to try, and the best people always want to work on the biggest 
challenges. We've also found that “failed” ambitious projects often yield 
other dividends. Believe it or not, the technological innovation behind 
AdSense, which, as I mentioned earlier, has paid out over $30 billion to 
partners, was the result of a “failed” more ambitious project to 
understand the Web. The team failed at understanding the Web, mostly, I 
think, because they were distracted by their work making advertisements 
amazingly relevant. 

Last year, the Google+ team decided to integrate multi-person video into 
their efforts. They had a small committed team that was crazy enough to 
believe this was possible, and Google+ Hangouts was born. You can now 
video chat with anyone, anywhere, even from the Great Barrier Reef. It 
was the same with driverless cars, which we started on in 2008. Today we 
have driven over 200,000 miles, and Steve Mahan, who is legally blind, 
recently took a drive in one of them. So the one-sentence summary of how 
to change the world… work on something that is uncomfortably exciting! 

Today the opportunities are greater than ever. Things we used to think 
were magic, we now take for granted: the ability to get a map instantly, 
to find information quickly and easily, to choose any video from millions 
on YouTube rather than just a few TV channels. People are buying more 
devices and using them more because technology is playing an increasingly 
important role in our lives. I believe that by producing innovative 
technology products that touch people deeply, we will enable you to do 
truly amazing things that change the world. It’s a very exciting time to 
be at Google, and I take the responsibility I have to all of you very 
seriously. 

 

Larry Page, Google CEO 


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