Leader of the Free World

Or at least, that’s how I introduced Eric Schmidt at lunch today. =)

Even though the event was to be off the record, he preferred to have it videotaped and uploaded to YouTube (if someone finds the talk searching for WAVC and Eric Schmidt, please post it here).

In a nod to the transparent society, Eric told me that he has to assume that he is always on the record, and false rumors are less likely to form if all of the original source material is online.

Here are some of my notes (compared to the video which is now up, we can see how accurate they really are)….

On search, we are not done at all. We’re just getting started.

What happens when we have near-simultaneous translation across all the world’s languages? Will we be more or less friendly? I don’t mean the Western languages. If we mis-translate part of the Koran, people get killed. This is a problem for our engineers.

What happens to privacy in a transparent world? Nixon got in trouble for taping his life. When did we go from no record to a total record?

People ask “Are you the next Microsoft?” Google is built in a different way. We are built on open source frameworks. So, yes, we have made a commitment: We won’t prevent people from leaving Google. We won’t trap user data.

Several of our data centers are near dams. Dams are often under-utilized. We wish they were above the dams.

Massive data centers will be built by many companies for many years to come. It’s the return of the mainframe.