Eric Schmidt Thinking Quotations

The rise of Google, the rise of Facebook, the rise of Apple, I think are proof that there is a place for computer science as something that solves problems that people face every day.

If you think about YouTube, YouTube is a 'searching the world's videos' problem, right? They all have to be there, but how do you find them? What I guess I'm trying to say is that search is still the killer app.

I actually think most people don't want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.

People are surprised to find out that an awful lot of people think that they're idiots.

I think it's pretty clear that the Internet as a whole has not had a strong notion of identity. And identity means, 'Who am I?' Fundamentally, what Facebook has done has built a way to figure out who people are.

People who bet against the Internet, who think that somehow this change is just a generational shift, miss that it is a fundamental reorganizing of the power of the end user. The Internet brings tremendous tools to the end user, and that end user is going to use them.

I think I could argue that the press has more impact on politics than corporations.

I think of Google as a set of overlapping things. It's a consumer platform, consumer phenomenon of which search is its fundamental activity, but there are many other things you can do than search... I think of Google as an advertising company who services the broader advertising industry in the ways that you know.

I think to some degree one of the strengths of the high tech industry is that people are actually willing to tell you things. When I went to Novell, I didn't know how to be a CEO, so I went in and I called all sorts of CEOs I knew. I called in a favor. I wanted to come by and listen to them tell me what it's like to be a CEO.

Around 400 million people in the last year got a smartphone. If you think that’s a big deal, imagine the impact on that person in the developing world.

I had always assumed that the right way to do it was to these engineers, put them in offices by themselves with doors that they could close so they could think deep thoughts. This is a terrible idea.

The self driving car is not self-aware. It's just driving; it's not thinking.

We know where you are. We know where you've been. We can more or less know what you're thinking about;

To me, what you want to do is find a way to let this play out between the virtual world and the physical world...Ultimately, I think society will get there. It will be messy, but we'll get there.

We don't have a traditional strategy process, planning process like you'd find in traditional technical companies. It allows Google to innovate very, very quickly, which I think is a real strength of the company.