Google's CEO on the Power of Clouds

Eric Schmidt talks about the globe-spanning networks of computers known as clouds, and about discovering the next big idea

Forget about online advertising for a few minutes. Try (if you can) to put aside questions about Google's (GOOG) sky-high stock price, the rumors about the company's foray into mobile telephony, or its plans to extend its influence on media.

Instead, think about Google as a star-studded collection of computer scientists who have access to a fabulous machine, a distributed network of data centers that behave as one. These globe-spanning networks of computers are known as "clouds." They represent a new species of global supercomputer, one that specializes in burrowing through mountains of random, unstructured data at lightning speed. Scientists are hungry for this kind of computing. Data-deluged businesses need it. What will Google do with its machine?

BusinessWeek writers Stephen Baker and Rob Hof sat down recently at Google headquarters with Chief Executive Eric Schmidt to talk about Google's machine and its venture with IBM (IBM) to extend Google-style cloud computing to the entire world. The project begins with a pilot program in six universities.

On cloud computing:

What [cloud computing] has come to mean now is a synonym for the return of the mainframe. It used to be that mainframes had all of the data. You had these relatively dumb terminals. In the PC period, the PC took over a lot of that functionality, which is great. We now have the return of the mainframe, and the mainframe is a set of computers. You never visit them, you never see them. But they're out there. They're in a cloud somewhere. They're in the sky, and they're always around. That's roughly the metaphor.

On Google's place in cloud computing:

Google is a cloud computing server, and in fact we are spending billions of dollars—this is public information—to build data centers, which are in one sense a return to the mainframe. In another sense, they're one large supercomputer. And in another sense, they are the cloud itself.

So Google aspires to be a large portion of the cloud, or a cloud that you would interact with every day. Why would Google want to do that? Well, because we're particularly good at high-speed data and data computation.

On Google's software edge:

Google is so fast because more than one computer is working on your query. It farms out your question, if you will, to on the order of 25 computers. It says, "You guys look over here for some answers, you guys look over here for some answers." And then the answers come back very quickly. It then organizes it to a single answer. You can't tell which computer gave you the answer.

On the size of cloud computing:

There's no limit. The reason Google is investing so much in very-high-speed data is because we see this explosion, essentially digital data multimedia explosion, as infinitely larger than people are talking about today. Everything can be measured, sensed, tracked in real time.

On applications that run on a cloud:

Let's look at Google Earth. You can think of the cloud and the servers that provide Google Earth as a platform for applications. The term we use is location-based services. Here's a simple example. Everyone here has cell phones with GPS and a camera. Imagine if all of a sudden there were a mobile phone which took picture after picture after picture, and posted it to Google Earth about what's going on in the world. Now is that interesting, or will it produce enormous amounts of noise? My guess is that it'll be a lot of noise.

So then we'll have to design algorithms that will sort through to find the things that are interesting or special, which is yet another need for cloud computing. One of the problems is you have these large collections coming in, and they have relatively high noise to value.