Google's Page: Apple's Android Pique 'For Show'
Source: Brad Stone
On April 3, Google (GOOG) co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Larry Page sat down with Bloomberg Businessweek to discuss his first year at the helm of the technology giant, his plans for the future, and the company’s relationships with its competitors. Excerpts from our forthcoming magazine story:
When you took over as CEO, one of your goals was to take the clear accountability and decision-making of a division like Android and move that out to the rest of the company. How have you done?
I think we have done really well. There are bets that we made many, many years ago―on Android, on Chrome, on YouTube. Those were long-term bets that we made and they’ve been very successful. All of those things have continued to grow like crazy. We made a more recent one, obviously, which is Google Plus, and that’s a long-term bet as well. We’re not even a year into that and that’s going very well, much better than I expected. There are various worries people have, and we’ll address those, but we have a really good start.
I have over 2 million followers now on Google Plus. A number of other people are even ahead of me. And that’s with real engagement. So I’m very happy with the growth of the core Google Plus network. It doesn’t mean tomorrow it’s going to be bigger than any other social network out there. That’s not realistic. But it’s growing faster, I think, than other services have and I’m very happy with that.
We are in an interesting place in tech where almost none of the big companies―Apple (AAPL), Facebook, Amazon.com (AMZN)―are working together. Why is that?
Big companies have always needed and cooperated in areas where it made sense. I don’t know that I believe there is some huge, strange change in that.
We were real interested in getting instant messaging to work across networks back in the day, and we worked really hard with AOL (AOL) to do that. You know, integration between Google Talk and AOL Instant Messaging. It ended up being a tremendous amount of technical effort. There were some user benefits generated by it, but I’m not sure it was ultimately worth the effort. I would say that my experience with these things is that they have been somewhat difficult.
Google was once incontrovertibly a search company. But what is Google today?
I think you have―I mean, what does it really mean to be a search company? I mean, even at that time, I think at that time and now, basically our soul is the same. I think what we’re about is we’re about using large-scale kind of technology: technology advancements to help people, to make people’s lives better, to make community better. Obviously, our mission was organizing the world’s information and making it universally accessible and useful, and I think we probably missed more of the people part of that than we should have.
In your heart of hearts, do you really feel that getting into social networking has been worth it?
Oh, definitely. One of the things I’m just really excited that we launched is: For the first time you can actually search for a person. You never were able to do that. What I mean by that is, I have this friend, Ben Smith, who works here. That’s not a great name. You know, it’s―
I have some problems with Brad Stone, actually.
Yes, that’s a little bit of a challenged name. But Ben Smith is particularly bad. I guess it’s good if you want to have privacy and it’s bad if you want to have other friends find you. For the first time, we can actually deal with that very well. We can put that Ben Smith with a picture and a search box. Obviously, the search for that will get better over time, but having that ability to put an entity of a person in the search box is really a powerful thing. We have been able to get to there by having Google Plus, by having the social infrastructure we have. That’s super-important.
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