Eric Schmidt Quotations

We used to think that the enterprise was the hardest customer to satisfy, but we were wrong. It turns out, consumers are harder than the enterprise because the consumer will not give you a second chance.

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'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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.'

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

YouTube's traffic continues to grow very quickly. Video is something that we think is going to be embedded everywhere. And it makes sense, from Google's perspective, to be the operator of the largest site that contains all that video.

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

There is a science to managing high tech businesses, and it needs to be respected. One of them is that in technology businesses, leadership is temporary. It's constantly recycling. So the asset has limited lifetime.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The funny thing about advertising is that it's not a zero-sum game... Historically, in the digital ad world, pie has gotten larger and it's possible for everyone to win, and it's perfectly possible that will continue to be true for quite some time.

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.

In our case, we focus on quality, and we have a very simple model. If we show fewer ads that are more targeted, those ads are worth more. So we're in this strange situation where we show a smaller number of ads and we make more money because we show better ads. And that's the secret of Google.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The issues of wireless versus wireline gets very messy. And that's really an FCC issue, not a Google issue.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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?'

It's very difficult for governments to dominate the Internet because it's so difficult to control. People want to be free. People want to hear multiple voices. They want to make their own decisions. And people who see things will report things.

One of the unintended negative consequences of online advertising has been the loss of value in traditional classifieds. It's simply quicker, simply easier for an end user who's online, on a broadband connection, to look things up and to figure out what they want to buy.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Even though Google may do very well, there will always be an alternative to what Google is doing, and people will always have the free choice... because there's no way for us to prevent them from exercising that choice. That is one of the key aspects of why the Internet has been so successful. No technologies can dominate.

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

The thing that people seem to miss about not just Google, but also our competitors, Yahoo, eBay and so forth, is that there's an awful lot of communities that have never been served by traditional media.

I still believe that sitting down and reading a book is the best way to really learn something.

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

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.'

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.

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

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.

I think of Google as a set of overlapping things. It's a consumer platform, consumer phenomenon of which search is its fundamental activity, but there are many other things you can do than search... I think of Google as an advertising company who services the broader advertising industry in the ways that you know.

I think to some degree one of the strengths of the high tech industry is that people are actually willing to tell you things. When I went to Novell, I didn't know how to be a CEO, so I went in and I called all sorts of CEOs I knew. I called in a favor. I wanted to come by and listen to them tell me what it's like to be a CEO.

We believe that the decision that we made to follow the law in China was absolutely the right one.

We believe that search networks as industries remain in their nascent stages of growth with great forward potential.

We're going to put our assets together so we can leverage one another's distribution,

We're going to figure out our roles. And I think last night they were just a little confused at what Warroad was throwing at them. But we're smart as basketball players.

We're seeing excellent results across Novell's directory business. Our three areas of focus: intelligent servers, directory applications and service, education and consulting are performing well.

We're seeing excellent results across Novell's directory business, ... Our three areas of focus: intelligent servers, directory applications and service, education and consulting are performing well.

There are some pretty high-powered interest groups on both sides, so it's anyone's guess. He's caught between a rock and a hard place and will likely come up with some compromise.

The only problem they have is the high valuation, ... This company has had a lot successes, they have a great pipeline, and I think they'll have many successes over the next few years. But it's an expensive stock.

We hope to have many other facilities in China. We hope...to take the great cultural works, the books, music and movies...and make them available.

Let's face it programmers want to program, they don't want to do their laundry. We make it easy for them to do both.

Obviously the more products you have and the more earnings you have, the less risk you have.

I don't know where (Chinese) revenue growth will be, but it will obviously be large.

But it's not giving them any significant cash flow.

Imagine having a wide selection of images from the Apollo space mission at your fingertips whenever you want it.

I don't think it's bad. I think that it proves that if we don't come out and show up with our 'A' game we're going to lose.

We surprised ourselves this quarter. Business was much stronger than I expected.

Going to these sites is a very tempting thing to do. People say they can earn anywhere from $5 to $500 a month, ... I try to gently remind them that going to these sites is wasting the firm's resources.

He seems to understand the industry's need for straightforward communication on the drug review process and the fact that time is money. Also, he realizes that there is a risk and a benefit to approving any new product and that decisions should be based upon this balance.

We lost our identity in Grand Forks and we needed to get back to doing the things that made us successful early in the year, namely playing better on defense and getting points in transition.

We look forward to exploring other areas of collaboration.

I wouldn't be shocked if someone was interested in acquiring them since there is real tangible value.

I think it's a good deal for both parties.

I think it's arrogant for us to walk into a country where we are just beginning operations and tell that country how to run itself.

I thought their guards played a lot better than I thought they could. I thought we would be able to turn them over a little more than we did. I thought we were a step slow.

I think we have an advantage in the post. We need to get Taylor involved down low in the offense. They'll have trouble matching up with her. She's not real tall, but Taylor is powerful and has a lot of skills.

I was worried about how our line would handle Thief River Falls' huge line, but they played well. Nick anchors things on both sides of the ball for us. We'll run behind him when we have to have yards.

People are moving to video because they can. Over the past several years, technology has diminished the barriers to entry.

People are moving to video because they can,

Our international gains were very, very strong this quarter as we expect that, of course, to continue. Europe is doing extremely well for us, much larger offices in the United Kingdom, France and Germany.

Our strategy is clearly working. Initial customer response to NetWare 5 and new Novell partnerships demonstrate that the market increasingly recognizes that directory is vital to managing information resources in an Internet world,

Our business in China is not about revenue, but about serving end users.

Our No 1 goal here by far is to serve Chinese users, who want useful information on the Internet.