Eric Schmidt: evaluation

Transcript context

…Well, literally in the same company. You’d have a tech company and a hedge fund, and there would be a synergy because the hedge fund would use the data generated by the tech company for investment. So the hedge fund would have that data first. We don’t see that in the market. Well, I’ll give you a more generic answer, which is, from the moment I joined the company, there were many people who said, “Why don’t you take this information and do something that will use it for marketing purposes?” And the answer is always the same, which is that you need people’s permission to do that, and you can be sure you won’t get that permission, if you follow that reasoning. So we decided that was a pretty bright line. For example, if a tech company that were a consumer company were bundled with a hedge fund, you would have to disclose that it was being used in that context. The people would go crazy. But the other thing that’s true — and Google was good about this — is we took the position that it was important for us to disclose everything we were doing as well as we could. I’ll give you a governance argument. In a large company, the employees are independent citizens of humanity, and if they see corruption in your leadership — in other words, if they see you doing things which are inconsistent with the values, you will be criticized. Now, sometimes that criticism is incorrect and sometimes it’s correct, but the important point is that if you make a mistake, you better disclose it pretty quickly for obvious reasons. So, if we were to do that kind of stuff, which we are not going to do — so we’re clear — we would have to disclose it, it would have to get debated, and then we would eventually say, “What a stupid idea, why did we decide to do that in the first place?” You don’t have an option — you can’t do these things in secret, nor would you want to. Right now, there are various devices you can speak to, such as Alexa, and it will play a song for you or buy something for you on Amazon. Just in your mental wish list — something that doesn’t exist now — if there were a function where you could speak to a device, and the device would perform that function for you, what would it be? What do you want that you can’t get right now, as a consumer?…

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