Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Eric Schmidt, fully Eric Emerson Schmidt

American Software Engineer, Businessman< CEO of Novell, CEO of Google

"A lot of the Google inventions came from engineers just screwing around with ideas. And then management would see them, and we'd say, 'Boy, that's interesting. Let's add some more engineers.'"

"Even though Google may do very well, there will always be an alternative to what Google is doing, and people will always have the free choice... because there's no way for us to prevent them from exercising that choice. That is one of the key aspects of why the Internet has been so successful. No technologies can dominate."

"Amazon has well passed any expectations of its ability to change distribution and marketing."

"A mind set in its ways is wasted. Don't do it."

"Every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends? social media sites."

"Around 400 million people in the last year got a smartphone. If you think that?s a big deal, imagine the impact on that person in the developing world."

"Countries that have the Internet already are not going to turn it off. And so the power of freedom, the power of ideas will spread, and it will change those societies in very dramatic ways."

"And the more broadband we can get globally, the better. It's better for the world; it's better for our advertisers; it's better for Google."

"Facial recognition, completely unmonitored, can be used for very bad things. It can be used for stalking, for example."

"Everyone gets smarter because of this technology? and the empowerment of people is the secret to technological progress."

"Google is more than a business. Google is a belief system. And we believe passionately in the open Internet model."

"Google is very much a not-invented-here, build-it-ourselves culture."

"Google policy is to get right up to the creepy line but not cross it. I would argue that implanting things in your brain is beyond the creepy line. At least for the moment, until the technology gets better."

"Fast learners win."

"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."

"I don?t believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time ? I mean we really have to think about these things as a society."

"I had a rule that I had to go to bed before the sun came up. So I used to look up the sunrise times because I thought it would be bad karma to be going to bed as dawn was arriving."

"I think I could argue that the press has more impact on politics than corporations."

"Google's architectural model around broadband and services and so forth plays very well to the powerful devices and services Apple is doing. We're a perfect back end to the problems that they're trying to solve."

"I still believe that sitting down and reading a book is the best way to really learn something."

"I use Google+, and I find the quality of the comments are very sophisticated because there is more trust inside of Google+ than there is inside of Twitter and Facebook, for example."

"I think to some degree one of the strengths of the high tech industry is that people are actually willing to tell you things. When I went to Novell, I didn't know how to be a CEO, so I went in and I called all sorts of CEOs I knew. I called in a favor. I wanted to come by and listen to them tell me what it's like to be a CEO."

"If you forgo your plan, you also have to forgo fear."

"I think of Google as a set of overlapping things. It's a consumer platform, consumer phenomenon of which search is its fundamental activity, but there are many other things you can do than search... I think of Google as an advertising company who services the broader advertising industry in the ways that you know."

"If you look at the history of technology over a couple hundred years, it's all about time compression and making the globe smaller. It's had positive effects, all the ones that we know. So we're much less likely to have the kind of terrible misunderstandings that led to World War I, for example."

"If you have something that you don?t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn?t be doing it in the first place."

"If you have 14 pictures on the Internet, within a 95% confidence interval we can predict who you are. You say you don?t have 14 pictures? You have Facebook pictures, so there."

"If you think about YouTube, YouTube is a 'searching the world's videos' problem, right? They all have to be there, but how do you find them? What I guess I'm trying to say is that search is still the killer app."

"If you think about the history of the PC industry, the PC industry has essentially been nothing but acquisitions by one company or another. Dell is the outlier. Dell built its own culture. They automated themselves to be the most efficient manufacturer."

"In a networked world, trust is the most important currency."

"In a world where everything is remembered and everything is kept forever, you need to live for the future and things you really care about."

"In the future, the Internet will disappear? you won?t even sense it, it will be part of your presence all the time."

"It's very difficult for governments to dominate the Internet because it's so difficult to control. People want to be free. People want to hear multiple voices. They want to make their own decisions. And people who see things will report things."

"In whatever number of years I have on Earth, I think that promoting the values of free expression, the openness of the Internet, that's the best use of my time."

"New developments in machine intelligence will make us far far smarter as a result, for everyone on the planet. It?s because our smart phones are basically supercomputers."

"No anonymity. And the reason is that in a world of asymmetric threats, true anonymity is too dangerous. ? I think it?s reasonable to say that you need a name service for humans. ? The governments are going to require it in some form. They just are going to. It?s not going to be OK to have random terrorists doing random terrible things under the cover of absolute anonymity."

"I've never met a person who does not want a safer world, better medical care and education for their children, and peace with their neighbors. I just don't meet those people. What I meet, over and over again, as I travel around, is that the essential human condition is optimistic - in every one of these places."

"One day Larry and Sergey bought Android, and I didn?t even notice. Think about the strategic opportunities that has created. Sergey found Google Earth one day while he was surfing on the Web. And then he walked into my office and told me he bought them. And I said, ?for how much, Sergey?? And it turned out to be a few million."

"One day we had a conversation where we figured we could just try to predict the stock market. And then we decided it was illegal. So we stopped doing that."

"None of us is as smart as all of us."

"One of the unintended negative consequences of online advertising has been the loss of value in traditional classifieds. It's simply quicker, simply easier for an end user who's online, on a broadband connection, to look things up and to figure out what they want to buy."

"People are surprised to find out that an awful lot of people think that they're idiots."

"People are good at intuition, living our lives. What are computers good at? Memory."

"People who bet against the Internet, who think that somehow this change is just a generational shift, miss that it is a fundamental reorganizing of the power of the end user. The Internet brings tremendous tools to the end user, and that end user is going to use them."

"Silicon Valley's involvement with Washington dates from one event, which was John Scully - who was the CEO of Apple - had dinner with President Clinton and Vice President Gore in 1993. And we're all going, like, 'What's going on? Why would we have dinner with the president?'"

"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."

"Since I have access to every, every crisis in the world because it's always blaring at me on cable television, that doesn't mean I have to worry about every one of them. This is also known as knowing where the off button is."

"The adult way to run a business is to run it more like a country. They have disputes, yet they've actually been able to have huge trade with each other. They're not sending bombs at each other."

"Success is really about being ready for the good opportunities that come before you. It's not to have a detailed plan of everything that you're going to do. You can't plan innovation or inspiration, but you can be ready for it, and when you see it, you can jump on it."

"The average American doesn't realize how much of the laws are written by lobbyists."