J
Jack Holt
Guest
“How Google Works,” a book cowritten by Google Chairman Eric Schmidt and former product manager Jonathan Rosenberg recently debuted and the co-authors are touring the country and participating in various interviews. In one of the more recent interviews with Bloomberg’s Market Makers, the authors sat down with hosts Erik Schatzker and Stephanie Ruhle to talk about rivals, search, and the Google mindset for innovation. In the interview, Schmidt told the hosts that he believes Samsung had iPhone 6 level products over a year ago. We have some highlights and a video after the break:
On innovation:
SCHMIDT: But Google is not first and foremost about revenue or earnings. It’s about innovation and impact, and the employees believe that. When we started, our goal was to systematize innovation, to make innovation occur over and over again. And you’ll notice, by the way, it’s not just been in search. It’s also been in other internet platform things as well as applications and YouTube and now many things through Google (inaudible).
SCHATZKER: The only reason I brought up the revenue figure is because for other companies it seems to be a size problem. Once you get to be a certain size, it becomes difficult to innovate in a transformative way. You’ve got your legacy business, which is what you built the company on in the first place, and then they just seem to run out of good ideas. And I don’t know how much of that is a function of culture or leadership or management or what.
ROSENBERG: I think you – I think you try to focus on small teams and you try to focus on small teams that are chartered to attack big problems. One of the things that we say in the book is think 10X, not 10 percent. And that allows us to really attract people who are much more aggressive and much more interested about solving something grand like a self-driving car or giving people all over the world internet access who previously didn’t have it through balloons or much faster connections.
On Apple and the iPhone 6:
RUHLE: You mentioned smartphones. How do you feel in the last week when you drive by any Apple store, San Francisco, LA, New York, and there are people lined up around the block? So even though way more people carry Android phones, how does Apple have that desire factor?
SCHMIDT: I’ll tell you what I think. Samsung had these products a year ago.
RUHLE: And nobody had a huge party. In the last month when Samsung came out with new products people weren’t losing their mind camping out. How does – what do you think about it?
SCHMIDT: I think Samsung had the products a year ago. That’s what I think.
Even with the rocky relationship between Google and Samsung before, it looks like the companies are making good on patching things up. If you’re wanting to listen to the interview in its entirety we have it for you below.
source: 9to5 Google
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