Google's CEO on the Power of Clouds

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In our world, it's a search problem.

On Google becoming a giant of computing:

This is our goal. We're doing it because the applications actually need these services. A typical example is that you're a Gmail user. Most people's attachments are megabytes long, because they're attaching everything plus the kitchen sink, and they're using Gmail for transporting random bags of bits. That's the problem of scale. But from a Google perspective, it provides significant barriers to entry against our competitors, except for the very well-funded ones.

I like to think of [the data centers] as cyclotrons. There are only a few cyclotrons in physics and every one of them is important, because if you're a top flight physicist you need to be at the lab where that cyclotron is being run because that's where history's going to be made, that's where the inventions are going to come from. So my idea is that if you think of these as supercomputers that happen to be assembled from smaller computers, we have the most attractive supercomputers, from a science perspective, for people to come work on.

On the Google-IBM education project:

Universities were having trouble participating in this phenomenon [cloud computing] because they couldn't afford the billions of dollars it takes to build these enormous facilities. So [Christophe Bisciglia] figured out a way to get a smaller version of what we're doing into the curriculum, which is clearly positive from our perspective, because it gets the concepts out. But it also whets the appetite for people to say, "Hey, I want 10,000 computers," as opposed to 100.

On meeting young engineers who talk to him about their 20% time projects (where Google employees are given time to work on their own projects):

You basically never know when you're going to meet the next Christophe. They might show up in the parking lot. They might show up on the walk. Here's an example. Somebody walks up to me and starts showing me this demo. It was in AdSense, and all of a sudden I realize that he had invented a billion-dollar business. I'd rather not go into the specifics. And I said, "How long have you been working on this?" He was like, "Oh, you know, about a month." I said, "Is this your 20% time? Have you told anyone about it?" He said, "Yeah, I was going to tell my manager, but I was afraid he'd tell me to stop." And I said, "Let me talk to the manager." This project really has potential for some really significant applications in the advertising world.

On other favorite 20% projects:

My favorite one is spelling correction. It's a bizarre story. The fellow, an undergraduate at Berkeley, wasn't quite sure what he wanted to do. He interviewed O.K., was obviously brilliant, kind of unfocused. He comes in, hangs out with his friends, and says, "Why don't we apply artificial intelligence technology to spell correction?" So he invents, by himself, the spelling corrector we use today. The algorithm that he invented has been explained to me, by him, by others, a couple of times, and I still don't really understand it. It's magic. Magic is science insufficiently explained.