The first official message dispatched by telegraph — the Bible verse “What hath God wrought” — was relayed by Morse code 175 years ago, across 40 miles.
I think the important point is the internet changed so much of the world, and yet the people who founded it started off with a vision not to change the world, but to get everybody interconnected.There were probably some people who saw it in the 1980s. But it’s important to remember that in the 1970s and 1980s, the internet was not allowed to be used for commercial purposes.
And we would have all these meetings and all the technical people would get together and collectively design what the next iteration was. This is remarkable because I have never — and I worked at the time at Sun Microsystems — I’d never seen people act in such a non-self-interested way. And in fact, the industries at the time, the email providers, figured out relatively unsophisticated and now extremely sophisticated filters that would largely eliminate the spam problem. Had the government come in early and written down some long set of rules, then all of a sudden that would have been harder. It might not have been possible. So I always urge only doing that at the last possible way, not preemptorily.
But I’m going to go back to what I said earlier. The goal was to get everyone interconnected. Now that we’ve got everyone interconnected or, more technically, we have half of the world interconnected, we don’t like some of the things that we see. That doesn’t mean our goal was wrong. That just means we need to evolve the technology.
If I look at it over my decades doing it, the groups that started were groups of technical people who had a shared vision to get everybody interconnected. And everyone sort of understood that there would be different levels of service and different kind of connectivity problems. So it took a while to figure out how to make money on this thing. You had the connectivity, which is great, but it took five or 10 years for people to experiment with different modernization models so that once the monetization worked, it scaled very dramatically.
There are many different approaches to how you run your company. Google has one. There are other approaches. My general answer is that customers are now very sophisticated. They understand exactly what quality looks like. I think it depends. You have the little old lady problem. The little old lady problem is one we’ve had forever, since we’ve had little old ladies, that they can be taken advantage of by sharks and people who manipulate them. And I’m using that as a metaphor; I think of little old men, too.
I’ll give you a general answer for that question. Democracies have differing definitions of rights, responsibilities and speech. In the years that I’ve worked at Google, what I learned was that each country is different, and each country thinks it’s right. The fact that the internet is available in every country in the world is an achievement. The fact that it’s not available to every human being is still a problem.
The countries are wiring up. The businesses are paying for it. In many of the African countries, as a good example, the most profitable business is the telecommunications business, because people pay for their service. So other things being equal, should prices then be variable? We talk about the information superhighway; should there be toll lanes on that?
By toll lanes, I mean the people who pay more get free or faster access than people who pay less or nothing at all. Does the hiring alone of women at some companies, which is something between 20% and 40%, I gather — do numbers alone address this problem? American companies, I think, have all settled onto a pretty straightforward rule that there is a no-retaliation policy and that kind of stuff.
But I mean, come on, guys — you’re going to do far, far better with a diverse workforce. We know this. There’s a great deal of evidence that the products are better, that the quality of management is better with diversity.The technology that enables people to live their lives more openly, more interestingly, has also, as you know, been used for purposes like recently Ring, the home monitoring system. Police in California have been using those videos in exchange for giving people free cameras.
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opinion You can never trust the market, the markets only motivation is profits.
opinion Perhaps a better question might be, “ Why can’t we trust?”
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