Interesting interview with Larry Page
Hi, Habr!
I stumbled upon an interesting interview with Google co-founder Larry Page. It seemed to me very entertaining, and I tried as best I could, translating it into Russian, to share it with you. The translation may not be very accurate, I apologize for this. For a free English-reading audience at the end of the post a link to the source, in the original, you can naturally get more pleasure from reading. If you don’t like something from the interview, or you don’t agree with what Larry is saying, don’t be in a hurry to minus, think that I just translated it for you. Tim is the interviewer. Let's go:
')
Tim: Google is known for encouraging its employees to solve ambitious tasks and make big bets. Why is this so important?
Larry Page: I'm worried that something seriously went wrong with how we manage companies. If you read what the media writes about our company, or in general about the entire technology industry - we are always talking about competition. Everything is presented as if it were a sporting event. It is not easy to find examples of really impressive things that were made solely through competition. Many companies decline over time because they tend to do exactly the same thing as they did before, just making small changes. It is natural for people to do something in which they are sure that they will not fail. But just a gradual improvement is not enough.
Thus, a huge part of my work is to focus people on things, working on which you can achieve something more meaningful than just gradually improving an existing one. Take for example Gmail. When we released it, we were a search company - it was a big jump for us to launch a postal service, not to mention the fact that we gave users a hundred times more free space than they could get anywhere else. This is not something that could happen by itself if we just focused on the gradual improvement.
Tim: But you have to improve your existing products, right?
Larry Page: Of course. But from time to time, every few years, you should work on something new that you think is truly amazing.
Tim: Now you have a separate subdivision called Google X, designed for such “moon-shot” projects (author's comment: I didn’t know how to translate it exactly, that's why I left it, here are meant revolutionary projects like flying to the moon, etc. .), such as self-driving cars. Why did you decide that you need to establish a whole department for this?
Larry Page: I think we need to do breakthroughs, and not just improve what we have and this concerns our entire business. But now Google X does things that can be done more independently.
You know, we always have such disputes: We have all this money, we have all these people, so why do not we just produce more? You can say that Apple does a very small number of things, and it works quite well for them. But I find it unsatisfactory. I feel that there are so many opportunities to use technology to improve people's lives in the world today. At Google, we target only 0.1% of these features. And all together the technology companies cover only about 1%. This means that 99% are opportunities that are missed. Investors are always worried: “Ah, you guys are going to spend too much money on these crazy things.” But these are the very exciting things right now - YouTube, Chrome, Android. If you do not do something crazy, then what you do is wrong!
Tim: But on the other hand, pioneers always have a hard time. Look at what happened with Xerox PARK , it does not seem that their fantastic innovations particularly helped the corporation itself.
Larry Page: PARC had an impressive research organization and they made a great contribution to modern computing technologies. But they were not focused on making a profit from their inventions. And this can not be overlooked. Take for example Tesla , which I admire. They didn’t just make a truly innovative car, but probably spent about 99% of their efforts figuring out how to make their product mass and popular and really start to use it. When I was still growing up, I wanted to be an inventor. But then I realized that there are too many sad stories about inventors, such as Nikola Tesla, for example. These are amazing people who did not have much influence because they did not turn their inventions into a business.
Tim: Why do we not see more people of this kind of ambition?
Larry Page: It’s not so easy to succeed in moon-shot projects. And we do not teach people how to define such complex projects. What school should I go to so that they would teach me what technological projects to work with? You will probably need a fairly extensive technical education and knowledge of organization and entrepreneurship. For this there is no education. Our system trains people in a highly specialized manner, and does not teach how to find worthwhile projects that can make a big technological breakthrough.
Tim: I know that you and Google co-founder Sergey Brin have been thinking about such problems for a long time. In an interview I conducted with both of you in 2002, you vividly described the Google Glass specification to me.
Larry Page: You ask why we did not make them then? It would take us a huge amount of time to complete such a project! It is like with autonomous cars. I wanted to do them when I was at Stanford. That was over 14 years ago. The only thing that has changed since then is the fact that now we have become able to achieve success in such complex projects.
Tim: Let's leave aside Google X "moon-shot" projects, tell me what your time is spent on Google?
Larry Page: Most of my efforts are spent on ensuring that our key products are as user-friendly as possible. Whether it's Chrome or Search or Gmail, it's all just Google, with one consistent style. All our products are integrated with each other.
Tim: Now Google seems to be a powerful and perhaps even frighteningly powerful company, has it become harder for you to implement significant changes now?
Larry Page: Yes, it has become more difficult, but there are also many advantages. Billion users uses our products.
Tim: But do you explain your intentions well enough? For example, Book Search. Providing a simple search among the books of the whole world, everything looked very good. But in the end you faced criticism and bogged down in chronic litigation (English).
Larry Page: Of course it's not nice. But show me a company that would crash due to lawsuits. I just do not know these. Companies fail because they are doing the wrong thing or because they are not ambitious, but not because of litigation or competition.
Tim: Steve Jobs felt the competition strongly enough to declare that he was ready to "go on a thermonuclear war" on Android (English).
Larry Page: How well did it work?
Tim: In your opinion, the huge market share that Android took is convincing?
Larry Page: Android has become very successful, and we are very pleased with it.
Tim: Could you have imagined such a success at the time when you bought a small company of Andy Rubin in 2005?
Larry Page: We could well foresee what could be done with this, and the existing state of affairs did not hinder us. At the time when we acquired Android, it was obvious that the existing mobile operating systems were terrible. You could not develop software for them. Compare what was with what we have now. Therefore, I do not think that the bet on Android in its time was risky. You just need to be convinced when you make long-term investments and believe that the existing can be much better.
Tim: People say that Google is motivated by competition in the field of social networks, where for the last two years you have worked a lot in the same space with one dominant rival - Facebook. Do you agree with this?
Larry Page: I have other thoughts on this. We had real problems with how users share information, how they express themselves, and so on. And, yes, they are a company that is very strong in this field. But they also do not really good things with their products. Do we need to succeed for some other company to fail? Not. We are actually doing something very different. I think it is outrageous to say that there is only room for one company in this area. When we started with a search engine, everyone said: “You guys won't succeed, there are already five search companies.” We replied: “Yes, we are another search company, but we are doing something distinctive, something else.” This is how I see it all.
Tim: What is your Google+ rating?
Larry Page: I am very happy how it went. We are working on a lot of really cool stuff. And many of them are already copied from us by our competitors, so I think we are doing a good job.
Tim: Android has always been proud of the fact that it is a more open platform, compared to the closed approach of Apple. The bright contrast to this was how Apple removed Google Maps from iOS6 and launched its own maps application.
Larry Page: I do not want to comment on partnerships. But we have been working on our map service for a long time, and it's great to see that people understand that we have invested a lot of effort and investment in them. It is obvious that they are now valued more.
You may have the best cards in the world, but it will not matter if nobody uses them. Our philosophy is to bring our products to as many people as possible. Unfortunately, it is not always easy at this time and in the century in which we live. The internet was great; We had the opportunity to bring our products to everyone, quickly and with high quality. Now we are moving back with this huge number of platforms that we have. Companies are trying to protect everything, and I think it slows down the pace of innovation.
Tim: Google was challenged on the patent front; the question was about buying a Motorola portfolio.
Larry Page: We also bought the company itself.
Tim: That's right. But since then, the company produces only those products that were previously in the production line. We do not know what your plans are. Should we expect Google to be as destructive and innovative with Motorola as it was in other areas?
Larry Page: As we said when we acquired Motorola, we give it autonomy, and Dennis Woodside is responsible. But there is a lot that we want to do with Motorola and what Dennis wants to do. There is plenty of room for hardware innovation. Phones that we use now have glass, which everyone is afraid to break if you drop your phone. After 5 or 10 years, everything will be different. Big changes are coming.
Tim: As we said, anyone who comes to the main page of the Google search engine sees a link to information about the opposition of the proposal of the International Telecommunications Union, which can restrict the open Internet. Last year, you did something similar for the controversial SOPA bill. But then we did not see such lobbying on the Google.com home page. Why are you doing it now? (author's note: it looks like this interview is slightly out of date)
Larry Page: Given our own history. When we launched Google, it was not obvious that what we were doing would not be regulated. Remember, at that time, people argued that making a copy of a file in a computer’s memory you violated copyright. We put the entire Internet on our servers, so if this were really the case, then farewell to the search engines. The Internet was pretty good for society, and I think that in 10 or 20 years from now, we will look back and say that we were a millimeter from regulation to its disappearance.
Tim: I guess that communication with “regulators” is not your favorite activity.
Larry Page: I like talking to everyone. This is the path I follow. But I think that the Internet is now in more danger than it was in the past. Governments are now afraid of the Internet because of the Middle East, what I see are commercial interests, they just make money by limiting people's freedoms. But they also saw a powerful user response, as was the case with SOPA.
Tim: How do you support the company's culture - including the power to think big - inside such a huge company?
Larry Page: We are a medium-sized company, considering the number of employees. We have tens of thousands of employees. There are organizations with more than a million employees. This is about a hundred times larger than ours. Imagine what we would be able to do if we had a hundred times more employees.
Tim: You hold weekly meetings (TGIF meeting) where any worker can ask you a question either to another senior executive, either in person or by email. How can you keep this type of close relationship if the company grows more?
Larry Page: Everything is scalable. We should be more aware of the time differences, because we have a lot of people in different places. We are thinking of building a giant cosmic mirror that would allow us to illuminate the entire globe at the same time, but we can do little about it now. So we shifted our meetings on Thursday, now people from Asia can take part in them throughout their work week. This process works quite well now on our scale, and I am sure it will work just as well for a million people.
Tim: Wait, have you twice mentioned that potentially Google is a company with one million employees?
Larry Page: Doesn't Walmart have over a million employees? Well, maybe it’s not so important for us to have a million employees, but I like to think that we were able to build a company that is truly scalable to that size. We could add people and continue to be truly innovative. That would be great for us. We are one of the largest companies in the world, and I would like to see that we are doing more, not only that someone else has already done, but something really new.
Original interview author: Steven Levy
Interviewer: Tim O'Reilly
I stumbled upon an interesting interview with Google co-founder Larry Page. It seemed to me very entertaining, and I tried as best I could, translating it into Russian, to share it with you. The translation may not be very accurate, I apologize for this. For a free English-reading audience at the end of the post a link to the source, in the original, you can naturally get more pleasure from reading. If you don’t like something from the interview, or you don’t agree with what Larry is saying, don’t be in a hurry to minus, think that I just translated it for you. Tim is the interviewer. Let's go:
')
Tim: Google is known for encouraging its employees to solve ambitious tasks and make big bets. Why is this so important?
Larry Page: I'm worried that something seriously went wrong with how we manage companies. If you read what the media writes about our company, or in general about the entire technology industry - we are always talking about competition. Everything is presented as if it were a sporting event. It is not easy to find examples of really impressive things that were made solely through competition. Many companies decline over time because they tend to do exactly the same thing as they did before, just making small changes. It is natural for people to do something in which they are sure that they will not fail. But just a gradual improvement is not enough.
Thus, a huge part of my work is to focus people on things, working on which you can achieve something more meaningful than just gradually improving an existing one. Take for example Gmail. When we released it, we were a search company - it was a big jump for us to launch a postal service, not to mention the fact that we gave users a hundred times more free space than they could get anywhere else. This is not something that could happen by itself if we just focused on the gradual improvement.
Tim: But you have to improve your existing products, right?
Larry Page: Of course. But from time to time, every few years, you should work on something new that you think is truly amazing.
Tim: Now you have a separate subdivision called Google X, designed for such “moon-shot” projects (author's comment: I didn’t know how to translate it exactly, that's why I left it, here are meant revolutionary projects like flying to the moon, etc. .), such as self-driving cars. Why did you decide that you need to establish a whole department for this?
Larry Page: I think we need to do breakthroughs, and not just improve what we have and this concerns our entire business. But now Google X does things that can be done more independently.
You know, we always have such disputes: We have all this money, we have all these people, so why do not we just produce more? You can say that Apple does a very small number of things, and it works quite well for them. But I find it unsatisfactory. I feel that there are so many opportunities to use technology to improve people's lives in the world today. At Google, we target only 0.1% of these features. And all together the technology companies cover only about 1%. This means that 99% are opportunities that are missed. Investors are always worried: “Ah, you guys are going to spend too much money on these crazy things.” But these are the very exciting things right now - YouTube, Chrome, Android. If you do not do something crazy, then what you do is wrong!
Tim: But on the other hand, pioneers always have a hard time. Look at what happened with Xerox PARK , it does not seem that their fantastic innovations particularly helped the corporation itself.
Larry Page: PARC had an impressive research organization and they made a great contribution to modern computing technologies. But they were not focused on making a profit from their inventions. And this can not be overlooked. Take for example Tesla , which I admire. They didn’t just make a truly innovative car, but probably spent about 99% of their efforts figuring out how to make their product mass and popular and really start to use it. When I was still growing up, I wanted to be an inventor. But then I realized that there are too many sad stories about inventors, such as Nikola Tesla, for example. These are amazing people who did not have much influence because they did not turn their inventions into a business.
Tim: Why do we not see more people of this kind of ambition?
Larry Page: It’s not so easy to succeed in moon-shot projects. And we do not teach people how to define such complex projects. What school should I go to so that they would teach me what technological projects to work with? You will probably need a fairly extensive technical education and knowledge of organization and entrepreneurship. For this there is no education. Our system trains people in a highly specialized manner, and does not teach how to find worthwhile projects that can make a big technological breakthrough.
Tim: I know that you and Google co-founder Sergey Brin have been thinking about such problems for a long time. In an interview I conducted with both of you in 2002, you vividly described the Google Glass specification to me.
Larry Page: You ask why we did not make them then? It would take us a huge amount of time to complete such a project! It is like with autonomous cars. I wanted to do them when I was at Stanford. That was over 14 years ago. The only thing that has changed since then is the fact that now we have become able to achieve success in such complex projects.
Tim: Let's leave aside Google X "moon-shot" projects, tell me what your time is spent on Google?
Larry Page: Most of my efforts are spent on ensuring that our key products are as user-friendly as possible. Whether it's Chrome or Search or Gmail, it's all just Google, with one consistent style. All our products are integrated with each other.
Tim: Now Google seems to be a powerful and perhaps even frighteningly powerful company, has it become harder for you to implement significant changes now?
Larry Page: Yes, it has become more difficult, but there are also many advantages. Billion users uses our products.
Tim: But do you explain your intentions well enough? For example, Book Search. Providing a simple search among the books of the whole world, everything looked very good. But in the end you faced criticism and bogged down in chronic litigation (English).
Larry Page: Of course it's not nice. But show me a company that would crash due to lawsuits. I just do not know these. Companies fail because they are doing the wrong thing or because they are not ambitious, but not because of litigation or competition.
Tim: Steve Jobs felt the competition strongly enough to declare that he was ready to "go on a thermonuclear war" on Android (English).
Larry Page: How well did it work?
Tim: In your opinion, the huge market share that Android took is convincing?
Larry Page: Android has become very successful, and we are very pleased with it.
Tim: Could you have imagined such a success at the time when you bought a small company of Andy Rubin in 2005?
Larry Page: We could well foresee what could be done with this, and the existing state of affairs did not hinder us. At the time when we acquired Android, it was obvious that the existing mobile operating systems were terrible. You could not develop software for them. Compare what was with what we have now. Therefore, I do not think that the bet on Android in its time was risky. You just need to be convinced when you make long-term investments and believe that the existing can be much better.
Tim: People say that Google is motivated by competition in the field of social networks, where for the last two years you have worked a lot in the same space with one dominant rival - Facebook. Do you agree with this?
Larry Page: I have other thoughts on this. We had real problems with how users share information, how they express themselves, and so on. And, yes, they are a company that is very strong in this field. But they also do not really good things with their products. Do we need to succeed for some other company to fail? Not. We are actually doing something very different. I think it is outrageous to say that there is only room for one company in this area. When we started with a search engine, everyone said: “You guys won't succeed, there are already five search companies.” We replied: “Yes, we are another search company, but we are doing something distinctive, something else.” This is how I see it all.
Tim: What is your Google+ rating?
Larry Page: I am very happy how it went. We are working on a lot of really cool stuff. And many of them are already copied from us by our competitors, so I think we are doing a good job.
Tim: Android has always been proud of the fact that it is a more open platform, compared to the closed approach of Apple. The bright contrast to this was how Apple removed Google Maps from iOS6 and launched its own maps application.
Larry Page: I do not want to comment on partnerships. But we have been working on our map service for a long time, and it's great to see that people understand that we have invested a lot of effort and investment in them. It is obvious that they are now valued more.
You may have the best cards in the world, but it will not matter if nobody uses them. Our philosophy is to bring our products to as many people as possible. Unfortunately, it is not always easy at this time and in the century in which we live. The internet was great; We had the opportunity to bring our products to everyone, quickly and with high quality. Now we are moving back with this huge number of platforms that we have. Companies are trying to protect everything, and I think it slows down the pace of innovation.
Tim: Google was challenged on the patent front; the question was about buying a Motorola portfolio.
Larry Page: We also bought the company itself.
Tim: That's right. But since then, the company produces only those products that were previously in the production line. We do not know what your plans are. Should we expect Google to be as destructive and innovative with Motorola as it was in other areas?
Larry Page: As we said when we acquired Motorola, we give it autonomy, and Dennis Woodside is responsible. But there is a lot that we want to do with Motorola and what Dennis wants to do. There is plenty of room for hardware innovation. Phones that we use now have glass, which everyone is afraid to break if you drop your phone. After 5 or 10 years, everything will be different. Big changes are coming.
Tim: As we said, anyone who comes to the main page of the Google search engine sees a link to information about the opposition of the proposal of the International Telecommunications Union, which can restrict the open Internet. Last year, you did something similar for the controversial SOPA bill. But then we did not see such lobbying on the Google.com home page. Why are you doing it now? (author's note: it looks like this interview is slightly out of date)
Larry Page: Given our own history. When we launched Google, it was not obvious that what we were doing would not be regulated. Remember, at that time, people argued that making a copy of a file in a computer’s memory you violated copyright. We put the entire Internet on our servers, so if this were really the case, then farewell to the search engines. The Internet was pretty good for society, and I think that in 10 or 20 years from now, we will look back and say that we were a millimeter from regulation to its disappearance.
Tim: I guess that communication with “regulators” is not your favorite activity.
Larry Page: I like talking to everyone. This is the path I follow. But I think that the Internet is now in more danger than it was in the past. Governments are now afraid of the Internet because of the Middle East, what I see are commercial interests, they just make money by limiting people's freedoms. But they also saw a powerful user response, as was the case with SOPA.
Tim: How do you support the company's culture - including the power to think big - inside such a huge company?
Larry Page: We are a medium-sized company, considering the number of employees. We have tens of thousands of employees. There are organizations with more than a million employees. This is about a hundred times larger than ours. Imagine what we would be able to do if we had a hundred times more employees.
Tim: You hold weekly meetings (TGIF meeting) where any worker can ask you a question either to another senior executive, either in person or by email. How can you keep this type of close relationship if the company grows more?
Larry Page: Everything is scalable. We should be more aware of the time differences, because we have a lot of people in different places. We are thinking of building a giant cosmic mirror that would allow us to illuminate the entire globe at the same time, but we can do little about it now. So we shifted our meetings on Thursday, now people from Asia can take part in them throughout their work week. This process works quite well now on our scale, and I am sure it will work just as well for a million people.
Tim: Wait, have you twice mentioned that potentially Google is a company with one million employees?
Larry Page: Doesn't Walmart have over a million employees? Well, maybe it’s not so important for us to have a million employees, but I like to think that we were able to build a company that is truly scalable to that size. We could add people and continue to be truly innovative. That would be great for us. We are one of the largest companies in the world, and I would like to see that we are doing more, not only that someone else has already done, but something really new.
Original interview author: Steven Levy
Interviewer: Tim O'Reilly
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/168875/
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