Eric Schmidt Searches and Finds Success (Again)
by David Pescovitz
 Printer-friendly
version
| 
Photo credit: Yvette Subramanian Photo
|
Google CEO, UC
Berkeley alumnus, and Berkeley
in Silicon Valley symposium keynote speaker Eric Schmidt (EECS,
MS '79 PhD '82) is a rare breed in Silicon Valley — a technology
guru with an aptitude for business innovation.
After earning his Master's and PhD from Berkeley, Schmidt launched
his career at several of the digital age's most esteemed institutions:
Xerox Palo Alto Research Center and Bell Laboratories. In 1983,
he landed at Sun Microsystems, co-founded by other Berkeley Engineering
alumni, and served as Chief Technology Officer from 1983 to 1997.
While at Sun, Schmidt led the development of the platform-independent
Java programming language that universally heightened the Web browsing
experience. Prior to joining forces with the two founders of Google
in August 2001, Schmidt served for four years as CEO of Novell,
a 10,000 person software firm.
With Schmidt at the helm, Google is now the world's fourth most
popular Web destination and powers the Web search features on AOL
and Yahoo! (numbers one and three in the popularity contest).
Below is a brief interview with Schmidt. He'll share more of his
myriad experiences in his keynote at the Berkeley in Silicon Valley
symposium on March 1.
Do you consider yourself a technologist or a
business leader and which hat do you prefer wearing?
The interesting opportunity at Google is that we're trying to solve
some of the big networking challenges of the day. If you think about
it, information retrieval is perhaps one of the oldest, and hardest,
problems in computer science — and that's what we're working
on at Google... on a scale that is just stunning. At the same time,
we're developing a business model at Google that is sustainable
for a network-based enterprise in the 21st century. It really is
the best of both worlds. In addition to working on things that really
matter, Google is just a fun place to work with a unique culture
and an amazing collection of talent.
From a user's perspective, how do you envision
Google.com ten years from now?
One of the "unwritten stories" about the Internet today is that
a lot of people still don't have broadband connections. Consumers
are frustrated because they can't get broadband in their homes because
of where they live or because of price. Broadband is a no-brainer:
It improves productivity and allows people to use more information
resources. More significantly, ubiquitous broadband means more people
will be able to enjoy the benefits of being online.
Today, while everybody is talking about new devices, the more important
story is the adoption of broadband over the next year or two. Broadband
usage reached 10 million households about six months ago and is
expected to reach 20 million in the next six to nine months. That's
almost half of the 50-60 million eligible households.
So, when you look at the way traffic is growing at Google today,
we are ideally positioned to enjoy the benefits of broadband to
the home, which will likely occur in the next ten years or so. Moreover,
with that technology in place, we're likely to see the introduction
of a number of powerful new services and applications that take
advantage of virtually limitless bandwidth.
Lava
lamps adorn Google's lobby in Mountain View. "Google is just
a fun place to work with a unique culture," says Schmidt.
Courtesy
Google
|
What
do you consider to be the greatest power or potential benefit of
the Internet?
Contrary to the popular opinion, we're probably at the beginning
— not at the end — of something quite profound when people
begin living and working on the Internet. It's been amazing to see
my colleagues in the Engineering group at Google building services
and application enhancements on top of an infrastructure that no
one even imagined 10-15 years ago. It's equally astonishing to see
how adaptable the team is when a change occurs in the system or
infrastructure.
Clearly,
the Internet — both the boom as well as the bust — created
a huge amount of disruption... Now, there are two kinds of disruptions
— technology disruptions and business model disruptions. We
all understand technology disruption as being driven by Moore's
Law. Using PCs as an example, there's a point at which PCs became
useful enough that you could use them to compete with workstations,
which is what hurt Sun. There was a point later at which PCs became
useful enough that you could use them to compete against servers,
which is what we do at Google. Five or 10 years ago, Google would
have been using Suns or other UNIX machines because the PCs weren't
good enough. The underlying technology disruption was enabled by
Moore's Law.
The premise here is that innovation occurs at universities, and
that one way to try to understand where disruption will come from
is to look at what universities are working on. Graduate students
doing research are forced to deal in new ideas, and they disrupt
the status quo.
Business model disruption is much tougher to deal with. Imagine
a situation in which community-based wireless networks could route
cell phone calls. That would dramatically change the revenues of
the cellular phone industry. These companies have high fixed costs.
They have a billing structure. That kind of business model change
would be very disruptive.
It takes a CEO change to deal with a disruption in business model.
There are very few examples of companies whose executives correctly
foresaw and maneuvered their company through a transformative business
model event. There are some exceptions, but they're quite rare.
By the way, one
final example of a technology-enabled business model disruption
is unlimited long-distance phone calls at the same price as local
calls.
Taken as a whole, the disruption that the widespread adoption of
the Internet has caused has been, by and large, a benefit to society.
I just hope someone will at least tell me when the next disruption
is going to happen!
What was your most memorable experience at UC
Berkeley's College of Engineering?
In no particular order: 4 AM at Giant Hamburgers with Bill Joy and
Randy Katz, playing Adventure on the PDP-11 (a classic supercomputer)
in Evans, wearing my motorcycle leathers to class, my study group
for Orals, the satisfaction of a wonderful education from a tremendous
school.
What is your advice for young engineering students?
A few years ago, I was invited to address a group of graduating
students here in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer
Sciences at Berkeley. I encouraged them to give equal attention
to the "triumph of human values" as they do to the "triumph of technology's
values." Like today, a great deal of energy was focused on developing
technology for its own sake, without reflecting on why such developments
matter to people. The message was not intended to undermine the
role that universities and research groups have in developing innovative
technology. Rather, it introduced a new level of responsibility
to the awesome power that technologists and computer scientists
have in society. Aside from that, I'd encourage them to ride a motorcycle
across the country before they get a job!
Google
Inc. Corporate Information
Lab Notes is published online by the Public Affairs Office of the UC Berkeley College of Engineering. The Lab Notes mission is to illuminate groundbreaking
research underway today at the College of Engineering that will dramatically change our lives tomorrow.
Editor, Director of Public Affairs: Teresa Moore
Writer, Researcher: David Pescovitz
Designer: Robyn Altman
Subscribe or send comments to the Engineering Public Affairs Office: lab-notes@coe.berkeley.edu.
© 2003 UC Regents.
Updated 1/24/03.
|
