Eric Schmidt Quotes

200 Eric Schmidt Quotes

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[On a hypothetical question of working for Obama as his chief tech czar] I love working at Google, and I’m happy at Google, so the answer is no.
Eric Schmidt

The best way to answer that is, it’s the law of [the] land and we have to follow it.
Eric Schmidt

Set audacious goals.
Eric Schmidt

[On Sergey and Larry] They now function in the company as the senior executives with the kind of skills and experience… Now we don’t have the same kind of arguments. In fact, they are running the companies they founded at the scale and with the insights that you would expect of people who are no longer young founders but are mature business leaders.
Eric Schmidt

Well, people give for all – for all sorts of reasons, but my own view is that Senator Obama, now president-elect Obama, touched a chord when he talked about making the world a better place for all of us. His focus on the middle class, his focus on making education stronger; his focus on science, and his focus on doubling the research budget. All things which have largely been ignored under the current administration, those are the things that I think that really hit a chord and of course they didn’t hit a chord with the opposition.
Eric Schmidt

I’ve always wanted to climb Mt. Everest. When you look at me, clearly that’s not going to happen.
Eric Schmidt

We are in the advertising business.
Eric Schmidt

We don’t provide guidance. We don’t want to get in the way of running the business and guidance could limit that if they give quarterly lines.
Eric Schmidt

Google’s ambition, is to solve big problems that impact a lot of people.
Eric Schmidt

[Google] thing about what should be and assume it is possible.
Eric Schmidt



We will eventually do 100 by 100 languages, to take this set of languages and convert to another. This alone will have a phenomenal impact on an open society.
Eric Schmidt

‘Don’t be evil’ is misunderstood. We don’t have an evil meter… the rule allows for conversation. I thought when I joined the company this was crap… it must be a joke. I was sitting in the first six months… talking about some advertising… and someone said that it is evil. It stopped the product. It’s a cultural rule, a way of forcing the conversation, especially in areas that are ambiguous.
Eric Schmidt

Frankly, the free service model with free advertising is still the best model.
Eric Schmidt

The goal of the company is not to monetize everything. Our goal is to change the world. Monetization is a technology to pay for it.
Eric Schmidt

We say we run the company chaotically. We run it at the edge.
Eric Schmidt

Out of conversation comes innovation.
Eric Schmidt

Innovation is not something that I just wake up one day and say ‘I want to innovate.’ I think you get a better innovative culture if you ask it as a question.
Eric Schmidt

The surprising thing about the long tail is how long the tail is, and how many businesses (at the far end of the tail) haven’t been served by traditional advertising sales. The recognition that businesses such as ours show a pareto distribution appears to be a much deeper insight than anyone realized.
Eric Schmidt

When the cycle comes back, we will be able to fund his brilliant vision.
Eric Schmidt

[On describing Google work attire] Disheveled student.
Eric Schmidt



It would be a disaster for a company if that privacy were compromised by a privacy leak or some very bad government action that we couldn’t stop under threat of tanks.
Eric Schmidt

Privacy, at the end of the day, is how you feel about your privacy. People feel ok with ads about what you are doing but not about who you are. Privacy will be an evergreen issue.
Eric Schmidt

[On copyright that Google is willing to push the envelope on the issue] That’s probably correct. If there’s a legal case, we’re going to favor the legal one that favors the users.
Eric Schmidt

Viacom is a company built from lawsuits, look at their history.
Eric Schmidt

The beauty of Larry and Sergey is that they are well-known quantities, that if you don’t want to work with them, please don’t. Slavery was made illegal years ago.
Eric Schmidt

Sergey, you can have whatever bed you want in your room; Larry, you can have whatever kind of bed you want in your bedroom. Let’s move on.
Eric Schmidt

Look, this is our plan. The sun is going to continue to shine, the wind is going to continue to blow, there’s a lot of heat in the earth. Wind, solar, geothermal. If we would just start using that and build a grid that would get that power to where the people are, which is usually not where all that power is, we could solve most of our energy problems. Another thing we think is really important is plug-in hybrids. So you sit there and you go, why plug-in hybrids? It’s more economically efficient and uses far less power, hugely, hugely less oil, and by the way they’re built in America. So, for example, in Michigan, which has this huge unemployment problem, you can build batteries. You can take all those laid-off auto workers and the people who are so terribly affected by this downturn and have them work on things like automobiles and also things like insulation for homes, which is paid back forever.
Eric Schmidt

We did calculations that said you could save $1 trillion over 22 years by investing in solar; wind and enhanced geothermal, and plug-in hybrids. The sum of those industries are American jobs in states that have high joblessness problems. There is lots and lots of sun, wind and heat in the Earth that is available all the time, whereas we are running out of oil. So this lowers energy prices, increases energy independence and helps to address the climate change issue. It seems like a perfect solution [to U.S. economic problems] if you can pull it off.
Eric Schmidt

Clean tech is a little more like the semiconductor business. The amount of capital required to do it is significantly higher than in the IT (information technology) businesses I’ve been involved with. The economics for clean thech may not be the same as Google economics. There are higher capital costs, longer supply chains, inventory risks, more manufacturing, and also the need to build that expertise into companies.
Eric Schmidt

We try to focus on the future. Internally we do talk about strategy and innovation, not about competitors. It’s much better to look forward to the kinds of things we can do. Media coverage is all obsessed about winners and losers. In fact what is really important about technology is you have the opportunity to redefine the game over and over… and the winner redefines the game.
Eric Schmidt



[On cloud computing] The basic argument is, if you think about it, it would be better for you to have all the data and all the applications that you use on a server somewhere, and then whatever computer or device you’re near you would be able to use. Let’s say you have a PC or a Mac at home and at the office, and you have a BlackBerry and a portable and so forth and so on. You’re constantly moving files around. What happens if you drop your ThinkPad and break it?
Eric Schmidt

[On cloud computing] It’s just a better model to have the computation and the applications use what we call a cloud, somewhere in the Internet. I, among other people, have been talking about this for 15 years, well before Google was founded. It turned out to be really hard to pull off. But now finally these broadband networks are fast enough that you can actually do it. You just don’t need to always have everything on your local computer.
Eric Schmidt

[In 2006 on competitors] Well, today we compete with Yahoo! All the time because they are the other company that has a targeted advertising network. And Microsoft continues to claim to enter the [search] market, but we really haven’t seen them yet, they’re just getting started. I’m sure eventually Microsoft will be a competitor. So it’s really those three companies, Google, Yahoo! And Microsoft.
Eric Schmidt

[On keeping a closer eye on expenses because] it’s the right thing to do.
Eric Schmidt

Mobil, mobile, mobile – it’s probably the most wide open space out there right now.
Eric Schmidt

We’re not building a phone, we’re building a Linux-based OS (operating system), which is likely to be quite different from the iPhone.
Eric Schmidt

I never worry about Microsoft.
Eric Schmidt

There’s no question in our view that an independent Yahoo! Is better, it will provide more competition in search and other advertising markets, in particular in display advertising.
Eric Schmidt

Microsoft has a long history of having deals that look quite good and end up looking not so good when you read the fine print.
Eric Schmidt

This is the sixth or seventh cycle I’ve seen in Silicon Valley. I think we’re better positioned than ever.
Eric Schmidt



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