IW: I think that people outside the company like to imagine that there's some sort of grand strategic vision that's driving everything.
Schmidt: [laughs] They've obviously not visited Google. We delight in the lack of such strategy. We're very careful to say we're not trying to build one thing. We're trying to innovate in all these interesting spaces. Every innovation is end-user tested and as they become more and more widely adopted, we figure out interesting things to do with them. These teams show off all day when we do product reviews and I say just don't talk to me about long-term strategy. I'm not interested. I want to know why is your product not shipping until next week. And then after this thing is released, tell me what you're going to do about it.
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| Google's prospects from a Google user and independent investor |
Schmidt: Google has no strategy - 5/26/2005 09:18:00 PM
Solving difficult problems for competitive advantage - 5/24/2005 05:50:00 PM
Google has offered free language translation services for some time. I use it a couple times a week to read sites like Spiegel since my German is pretty poor. But I've found Google's automatic translation to be pretty rudimentary - in fact it's identical to Babelfish which uses an engine from Systran. Certainly better than nothing, but no substitute for human translation.
At the Google Factory Tour, Google announced a quantum leap in translation capability (lots more detail on Blogoscoped). In short, Google harnessed their massive computing power to train their translation system using 200 billion words from human-translated United Nations documents. The results are astounding -- the new system produced perfectly readable text translated automatically from Arabic to English, while the old system gave virtually unintelligible results. This is another big, important problem that Google is uniquely positioned to solve, and it fits perfectly with their mission. Who else has the computing power, the engineering talent, or the economic motive? Just as importantly, who has the long-term perspective to make this kind of investment now, with no expectation of meaningful returns for years? Accurate translation is central to Google's mission to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. Imagine searching transparently across multiple languages, and reading the results in the lanugage of your choice. If Google can develop the best translation engine, and own that intellectual property, can you imagine the advantage this will deliver over competitors who have a singular focus on the current quarter's results? Note 1: Google is making a big bet on building an international brand. Today's Google Blog entry highlights the availability of Google Desktop in 10 languages. Looking at the Korean version, I noticed that the Korean Desktop indexes an additional file type that I haven't seen in the English Version. That file type is called '한글'. What does '한글' mean? Plugging it into Google Translation shows that it means "The Korean Alphabet." Note 2: a little work on the Wayback Machine shows that Google launched the search translation beta around April 1, 2001. Seems to be a popular time of the year to roll out new products. See the Google translation FAQ for more on the current version. |
Google jumps on S&P rumor - why is this news? - 5/23/2005 08:22:00 PM
I learned that markets are generally efficient, and that they price in all information publically available.
So why did Google leap nearly $14 a share today, based solely on the rumor that the stock would be added to the S&P 500 index? That's old news. Not only did I post about it repeatedly (see this February post), but there have been numerous big media stories as well. Maybe markets that want to rally just need a reason, any reason. |
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