Larry pages: If you're not crazy, you will do something wrong.

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I have been worried that there may be serious mistakes in the way we operate the company.

I often see reports about Google, or read reports about the technology field. The topics I talk about are competition. These reports are as intense as reporting sports events. However, in reality, it is quite difficult to find a new thing that is fascinating and entirely because of competition.

　　Learn "Big thinking"

In the same industry, other companies are doing the same thing. If you beat it, it means you are doing the best. What is exciting about this? As a result, some enterprises gradually decline as time advances. There may be slight changes, but in general they tend to do the same thing as they did before, because people are willing to do things that they are confident will not fail. However, after a long time, the progressive improvement will become obsolete. Especially in the technology industry, there will be a non-incremental change here.

Therefore, most of my work is to focus on things that don't just happen incrementally. For example, when we launched Gmail, we were a search company, and this product was a big jump, in order to make users get 100 times the storage space of any other enterprise-level tool. If we only focus on progressive improvement, such products will not appear, and such changes will not happen.

So every n years, we have to develop new things and things that you think are really charming. The secret is to think about these products. Let's take Gmail as an example. before the launch, I had already imagined a list listing the ten problems with the existing products. Next, it is to improve and launch new products.

I have been trying to keep this imaginary list in mind and keep writing new projects.

Later, I promoted this practice to the company's operations and started to be a temporary organization like a laboratory. Now I have become an independent department. This is what you know about googlex.

I think we will do some breakthrough and non-value-added things in the entire department. Now googlex can do something more independently. We have always had such a debate: We have money, some people, why can't we do more? You may say that Apple only does very few and very few things, which is very useful for them. But I found it unsatisfactory.

In my opinion, the world is still full of opportunities to use technology to make people's lives better. Google may account for 0.1%, and all tech companies may only account for 1%. This means that there will be another 99% debut. Investors have been worried: "You guys have spent too much money on these crazy things ." But these things have now become our most exciting products, such as YouTube, chrome, and Android. If you do not do anything crazy, you will do something wrong.

(PARC is mentioned. Editor's note: A part of Xerox has had a dream-Style Innovation, but has not helped the company itself operate.) Parc has a large research organization that has invented many modern computing tools, but they are not focused on commercialization. I think both innovation and commercialization need to be focused.

Another example is Tesla, my most respected company. They didn't really create a revolutionary new car, but they spent 99% of their energy on developing cars. As I grew up, I always wanted to be an inventor. Later I realized that inventors had a lot of sad stories, such as nikolatesla, a Serbian American inventor, physicist, mechanical engineer, electrical engineer and futuristic scientist, during the 1856-1943 years. He is considered to be an important promoter of Power commercialization, and his many related patents and the theoretical research work of electromagnetism are the foundation of modern wireless communication and radio, because he did not translate the invention into a business.

It is not easy to have such a "big thinking. In traditional education, we have not taught everyone how to identify these difficult projects. If I want to know what technical projects I should be engaged in, I should go to which school to study, almost entirely relying on my personal exploration. You may need to receive a wide range of technical education and learn about organizations and entrepreneurship. However, our systems cultivate people in a professional manner, but do not tell people how to select the right project, resulting in a wide range of technical impact.

Why didn't I do this kind of "Big thinking? We must have enough time to complete it. For example, automatic cars are what I want to do when I study at Stanford University. That was 14 years ago. The only difference is that we have money to do it now.

　　Greater update

Currently, 1 billion people are using our products. In my opinion, the failure of an enterprise is due to wrong or no ambition, not litigation or competition.

At the company, I spent a lot of energy ensuring that all core products have a good user experience. When you use chrome or search or Gmail, It is Google, with a consistent feeling. In other words, if there are 50 methods to share content, it is not a good experience. This indicates that it needs to be integrated.

We have been developing maps for a long time. We are very happy to realize that we have spent a lot of energy and invested a lot of money. These scores should be appreciated now. Look, you may have the best map in the world, but it makes no sense if no one uses it.

We have also invested a lot of energy in the social networking field. For example, Google +, we are satisfied with its previous performance. But it is also developing something cool. Many of them are also copied by competitors, so I think we have done a good job.

I admit that we do have problems with user information sharing and how to express their identities. Facebook is a powerful enterprise in this field, but it is also bad on its own products. If we want to succeed, do we have to fail other companies? This is not the case. We are actually doing different things.

Our philosophy has always been to make more people use our products as much as possible. Unfortunately, in this age, it is often difficult to do so. The network in the past is good. We can quickly provide high-quality products to everyone. Now we have moved back. There are many platforms on the market. I think this hinders competition when enterprises leave other places out.

It is surprising to say that only one company can be accommodated in these fields. When we started searching, everyone said, "You will fail. There are already five search companies ." We said, "We are a search company, but we do different things ." We also look at all fields.

(About M & A) I am mainly concerned with looking at the possibility that it will not be blocked by the status quo. We have the ability to identify this issue. For example, when we acquired Android, the operating system was quite bad, which is obvious. You cannot write software for them. You only need to have a firm belief in long-term investment and believe that things will be better.

From the perspective of the number of employees, we are still a medium-sized enterprise with tens of thousands of employees. Some enterprise employees will reach millions, and their scale is hundreds of times that of ours. What if we have hundreds of times more employees in the future?

Isn't Walmart having 1 million employees? There are 1 million employees, which may not be important to us, but I like to think about whether we can establish such an enterprise. We can add people, but we still have the true innovation power. This is good.

There will be many larger enterprises around the world. We are one of them. We like to do more, not only what others have done, but also new things.