Most people think companies are basically evil. They get a bad rap. And I think that's somewhat correct.
Big companies have always needed and cooperated in areas where it made sense.
If you're changing the world, you're working on important things. You're excited to get up in the morning.
It's quite complicated and sounds circular, but we've worked out a way of calculate a Web site's importance.
It really matters whether people are working on generating clean energy or improving transportation or making the Internet work better and all those things. And small groups of people can have a really huge impact.
I like going to Burning Man, for example. An environment where people can try new things. I think as technologists we should have some safe places where we can try out new things and figure out the effect on society. What's the effect on people, without having to deploy it to the whole world.
I think it is often easier to make progress on mega-ambitious dreams. Since no one else is crazy enough to do it, you have little competition. In fact, there are so few people this crazy that I feel like I know them all by first name.
My grandfather was an autoworker, and I have a weapon he manufactured to protect himself from the company that he would carry to work. It's a big iron pipe with a hunk of lead on the head. I think about how far we've come as companies from those days, where workers had to protect themselves from the company.
Especially in technology, we need revolutionary change, not incremental change.
You know what it's like to wake up in the middle of the night with a vivid dream? And you know that if you don't have a pencil and pad by the bed, it will be completely gone by the next morning. Sometimes it's important to wake up and stop dreaming. When a really great dream shows up, grab it.
The idea that everyone should slavishly work so they do something inefficiently so they keep their job - that just doesn't make any sense to me. That can't be the right answer.
I really like using my Samsung (005930:KS) tablet. I previously used the Motorola Xoom for a while and liked that.
I have always believed that technology should do the hard work - discovery, organization, communication - so users can do what makes them happiest: living and loving, not messing with annoying computers! That means making our products work together seamlessly.
The ultimate search engine would basically understand everything in the world, and it would always give you the right thing. And we're a long, long ways from that.
Many leaders of big organizations, I think, don't believe that change is possible. But if you look at history, things do change, and if your business is static, you're likely to have issues.
Invention is not enough. Tesla invented the electric power we use, but he struggled to get it out to people. You have to combine both things: invention and innovation focus, plus the company that can commercialize things and get them to people.
We want to build technology that everybody loves using, and that affects everyone. We want to create beautiful, intuitive services and technologies that are so incredibly useful that people use them twice a day. Like they use a toothbrush. There aren't that many things people use twice a day.
