Google’s ‘Relatively Scalable Values’ Called Model for Government
Google wants to index the space-time continuum and make “expertise” popular on the veracity-challenged Internet, CEO Eric Schmidt told the Economic Club of Washington Monday. Schmidt pitched the crowd, many older than Schmidt and wearing suits, on his “culture of ‘yes'” business philosophy and open platforms’ superiority. “We could run our country” on Google’s “relatively scalable values,” the Washington-area native said, not elaborating. He mostly left unspoken Google’s sprawling policy agenda, aided by a ban on reporters asking questions or buttonholing Schmidt after the event.
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“We always think, ‘God, is it over yet?'” Schmidt said of the Internet’s continuing advance. The world is home to 500 million servers, with 30 million photos uploaded daily to Google, he said. With 10 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, by 2019 the site will host 85 years of video, Schmidt said. Mobile phones are “another step on the ladder” to economic success for the poor, with users worldwide hitting 5.5 billion in his lifetime, Schmidt said. In a recent Google contest for applications on its Android mobile- phone platform, the winner developed a video-recognition system using a phone camera to pull up all known information on a scene, he said.
Schmidt illustrated Google Earth’s reach, from snapshots of space that he said show light from 13 billion years ago, to street views of neighborhoods. “Most people think ‘It’s just information, it’s just search,'” but the shift to cloud computing means “you can begin to live a lot of your life online,” he said. Schmidt only vaguely alluded to Google’s legal fights, noting that the media industry is “struggling” with distribution on YouTube and that the gap between demand and revenue in the Internet-era newspaper industry never has been greater. Technological advancement boils down to “open beats closed and competition is better,” he said in a passing nod to net neutrality. “It’s extremely hard to do exclusive deals anymore.”
Google is melding a positive office culture with minimal accountability controls, Schmidt said. The company’s famous dictum to engineers to spend a fifth of their time on personal projects has led to most “interesting” Google products, he said. (However, a recent report on Silicon Valley gossip blog Valleywag said the 20 percent figure is eroding amid backlogs on official projects.) Yet the company requires staff engineers -- as well as contractors -- to summarize their week’s work in a sentence. “You get into these cultures where everyone is negative,” Schmidt said, referring to his pre-Google days. The company’s goal is to “think big and inspire a culture of ‘yes,'” he said.
One thing Google wants to improve is the searchability of “expertise,” Schmidt said. He cited its Knol project, a sort of company-commissioned take on Wikipedia. Its search- ranking algorithms can’t identify “incredibly insightful” writing on any given topic, so Google is commissioning “genuinely pedigreed experts,” he said. The increasing glut of information will make librarians and others “who provide judgments” more relevant, Schmidt said.