Even the search engine’s original mission is not big enough for what he now has in mind
Wouldn’t the world be a happier place if 90 per cent of the people with jobs put their feet up instead and left the robots to do the work? Why didn’t the last house you bought cost only 5 per cent of what you paid for it? And is there any reason why you or your children shouldn’t one day enjoy limitless cheap power from nuclear fusion and a greatly extended lifespan?
These are the sort of questions that occupy Larry Page. At 41, the co-founder and chief executive of Google is freeing himself up to think big. A reorganisation in recent days has shifted responsibility for much of his company’s current business to a lieutenant and left him with room to indulge his more ambitious urges. The message: the world’s most powerful internet company is ready to trade the cash from its search engine monopoly for a slice of the next century’s technological bonanza.Looking forward 100 years from now at the possibilities that are opening up, he says: “We could probably solve a lot of the issues we have as humans.”
It is a decade on from the first flush of idealism that accompanied its stock market listing, and all Google’s talk of “don’t be evil” and “making the world a better place” has come to sound somewhat quaint. Its power and wealth have stirred resentment and brought a backlash, in Europe in particular, where it is under investigation for how it wields its monopoly power in internet search.Page, however, is not shrinking an inch from the altruistic principles or the outsized ambitions that he and co-founder Sergey Brin laid down in seemingly more innocent times. “The societal goal is our primary goal,” he says. “We’ve always tried to say that with Google. I think we’ve not succeeded as much as we’d like.”
Even Google’s famously far-reaching mission statement, to “organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”, is not big enough for what he now has in mind. The aim: to use the money that is spouting from its search advertising business to stake out positions in boom industries of the future, from biotech to robotics.HT: Business Insider
Asked whether this means Google needs a new mission statement, he says: “I think we do, probably.” As to what it should be: “We’re still trying to work that out.”
When we met recently for a wide-ranging interview at his company’s Silicon Valley headquarters, Page displayed the characteristically tentative personal style that is a marked contrast to the definitive self-assurance of most corporate bosses. No doubt aware of the added responsibility that comes with running a company with 55,000 workers that is increasingly under the spotlight, he also chooses his words more carefully than he once did. But there has been no apparent change to the ambition and the expansiveness of his ideas – even if, as the father of two young children, he says he has become more conscious of long-term issues such as education.
Page finds himself at the helm of one of the world’s most powerful tech companies at a moment in history when the onrush of technological change is threatening to bring sweeping social and business disruption. Google’s goals are bigger than most – yet, even as it pours money into new ventures, the cash keeps piling up. It now exceeds $62bn.
“We’re in a bit of uncharted territory,” he says. “We’re trying to figure it out. How do we use all these resources . . . and have a much more positive impact on the world?” For Google’s investors, who have already become wary recently about the size of the company’s massive bets on the long-term future, this could be just the beginning.
As Page sees it, it all comes down to ambition – a commodity of which the world simply doesn’t have a large enough supply. In the midst of one of its periodic booms, Silicon Valley, still the epicentre of the tech business world, has become short-sighted, he says. While arguing that the Valley isn’t fundamentally “broken”, he agrees that it is overheated – though how much that matters is a different issue.“There’s definitely a lot of capital and excitement, and these things tend to happen in cycles,” he says. “But 100 years from now you’re probably not going to care about that.”
Much of the money pouring into the tech industry is drawn by the promise of easy profits from the latest consumer internet boom, he says. “You can make an internet company with 10 people and it can have billions of users. It doesn’t take much capital and it makes a lot of money – a really, really lot of money – so it’s natural for everyone to focus on those kinds of things.”
Page estimates that only about 50 investors are chasing the real breakthrough technologies that have the potential to make a material difference to the lives of most people on earth. If there is something holding these big ideas back, it is not a shortage of money or even the barrier of insurmountable technical hurdles. When breakthroughs of the type he has in mind are pursued, it is “not really being driven by any fundamental technical advance. It’s just being driven by people working on it and being ambitious,” he says. Not enough institutions – particularly governments – are thinking expansively enough about these issues: “We’re probably underinvested as a world in that.”...MUCH MORE
