Eric Schmidt
29 quotes
Biography
Eric Emerson Schmidt is an American businessman and former computer engineer who was the chief executive officer of Google from 2001 to 2011 and the company's executive chairman from 2011 to 2015. He also was the executive chairman of parent company Alphabet Inc. from 2015 to 2017, and technical advisor at Alphabet from 2017 to 2020.
"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. You should look for information. We should get it exactly right and we should give it to you in your language and we should never be wrong. That’s our challenge."
"Technology will move faster than governments, so don't legislate before you understand the consequences..."
"If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place."
"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."
"Ultimately, in the Internet, openness has always won. I cannot imagine that the current competitive environment would reverse that."
"I fundamentally believe that disinformation becomes so easy to generate, because complexity overwhelms knowledge, that it's in people's interests, if you will, over the next decade, to build disinformation-generating systems. This is true for corporations, for marketing, for governments, and so forth." (Eric Schmidt in dialogue with Julian Assange, June 2011 c.f When Google Met Wikileaks, p. 174)"
"The current inclination of the company is to invest heavily ... we test stuff and, when it works, we put a lot more emphasis on it. So, Google+ — all the signs are very positive, so now the whole company is ramping up on top of it."
"Ultimately, application vendors are driven by volume, and volume is favored by the open approach Google is taking. There are so many manufacturers working so hard to distribute Android phones globally that whether you like [Android 4.0] or not … you will want to develop for that platform, and perhaps even first."
"By the summer of 2012, the majority of the televisions you see in stores will have Google TV embedded."
"Playing catch-up with the competition can only ever help you make incremental gains. It will never help you create something new."
"We have always been the leader in security and in encryption. Our systems are far more secure and encrypted than anyone else, including Apple. They're catching up, which is great."
"Everyone understands climate change is occurring and the people who oppose it are really hurting our children and our grandchildren and making the world a much worse place. And so we should not be aligned with such people — they're just, they're just literally lying."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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 don't believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time."
"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."
"A mind set in its ways is wasted. Don't do it."
"There is a mistake technical and scientific people make. We think that if we have made a clever and thoughtful argument, based on data and smart analysis, then people will change their minds. This isn't true. If yoy want to change people's behavior, you need to touch their hearts, not just win the arguments. We call this the Oprah Winfrey rule."
"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."
"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.'"
"People are good at intuition, living our lives. What are computers good at? Memory."
"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."