Eric Schmidt

“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.”

“The Internet is really about highly specialized information, highly specialized targeting.”

“There is a science to managing high tech businesses, and it needs to be respected. One of them is that in technology businesses, leadership is temporary. It's constantly recycling. So the asset has limited lifetime.”

“The policy of America to deny visas to technically trained people in the U.S. and shipped to other countries, where they create companies that compete with America, has to be the stupidest policy of all the U.S. government policies.”

“The coach doesn't have to play the sport as well as you do. They have to watch you and get you to be your best.”

“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.”

“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?'”

“The issues of wireless versus wireline gets very messy. And that's really an FCC issue, not a Google issue.”

“We know that Google Earth and Google Maps have had a tremendous impact on Google traffic, users, brand, adoption, and advertisers. We also know Google News, for example, which we don't monetize, has had a tremendous impact on searches and on query quality. We know those people search more. Because we've measured it.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.'”

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

“We used to think that the enterprise was the hardest customer to satisfy, but we were wrong. It turns out, consumers are harder than the enterprise because the consumer will not give you a second chance.”

“The thing that people seem to miss about not just Google, but also our competitors, Yahoo, eBay and so forth, is that there's an awful lot of communities that have never been served by traditional media.”

“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.”

“The computing world is very good at things that we are not. It is very good at memory.”

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