Nikesh Arora

Transcription

TINA: Imagine that you had a company, that your company name could be turned into a verb. So there would be something called to Carlsberg. Like, why don't you come over on Saturday, we'll Carlsberg and hang out. Or if you could say, I need to have this big load Maersked off to Hong Kong. That would be quite an achievement brand wise and I'm sure Chuck Bremer would be very proud of you if you could manage that. Well, our next speaker is actually fortunate enough to have had seen his brand name turn into a verb. We no longer say, look that up on the internet. We say, why don't you Google that? Nikesh Arora is the senior vice president and chief business officer of Google. And maybe we might have to double check that actually because I understand there's a bit of shifting around in the executive rooms these days. But we'll see if he isn't still that when he gets here. Nikesh oversees all revenue and customer operations. And earlier on he developed and managed the company's operation in Europe, Middle East, and African markets. And he is bracing himself for the next decade. God knows where that will take Google and the rest of us. Here's his view, please welcome Nikesh Arora. [APPLAUSE] NIKESH ARORA: Good morning, everybody. It's always scary to be the last speaker at a conference. I woke up this morning at 6 o'clock in Munich. I got dressed, I got here and my team is very good. They were very efficient. They told me in the car about almost everything you guys have heard in the last day and a half. And as they kept telling me, I kept getting less and less comfortable. Because first they told me about the growth of India and China as superpowers and the impending bankruptcy of the United States. Having just moved from London to the US I said, that's nice. Then they talked to me about the age of super connectivity and how the internet is going to fare in the next 10 years. And as they kept telling me they thought they were doing a wonderful job because I was getting more and more advice on what was said yesterday. And here I was saying, OK, that takes care of the first two slides. That's the next two slides. And then I sat in the other room and I saw Chuck Bremer present everything about marketing. I said, well, that's the second half of my presentation. So we're done. That's the good news. The good news is this is highly unlikely that I'm going to tell you anything that the previous 10 speakers haven't told you. The bad news is you still have 45 minutes of me here. So we're going to have to figure out what to do. So I thought since I woke up this morning at 6 o'clock in Munich, and we all make choices. I had to sacrifice something to be here and to be with you guys. I said, what would happen tomorrow if all of us vanished in this room? If he did not exist tomorrow, would there be more innovation 10 years from now or less? What do you guys think? That's pretty depressing isn't it? I sat there and finally said more. Because there'd probably be younger people who are more excited about making a change who will take our jobs and our places and put a fresh perspective and do something different. Highly likely. Or when I was hearing Ray Kurzweil talk about potentially the next business will be created by two high school kids, and how Google and Facebook was created by people who went to college or didn't finish college. Why is that? Why does it happen that innovation comes from people who are not in these rooms who are still in their early stages of life who probably decide not to take the traditional path? You guys can speak anytime you want. Please feel free to engage. This is going to be a dialogue because I've decided to destroy my PowerPoint slides, which are going to say pretty much everything previous people have said. So we're going to have some fun for 45 minutes. It's your choice. Why is it that more innovation comes from younger people and people who are willing to operate in a world of less constraints? Now, Tina just said that-- TINA: [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE]. We have the microphones walking around. NIKESH ARORA: She's going to help me. We're going to work together because I threatened to ask her questions otherwise. TINA: Please go ahead. NIKESH ARORA: Yes. TINA: Do we have a microphone coming this way? AUDIENCE: They probably work without existing boundaries, structures. NIKESH ARORA: Yes. Well, that's how new companies get created. Existing structures are thrown away. Existing constraints are thrown away. So I'll ask you a different question and perhaps this is where I would really like your help, is based on the last day and a half, a., what is it that you're going to go do differently tomorrow morning? You spend a day and a half and you've sacrificed yourself for your day and a half. You could have been doing something else. What are you going to do tomorrow that is going to be different, that is going to change the shape of things to come over the next 10 years? That's a question for you to answer now. Then the second question, which is going to justify my existence over here is, what else can I talk to you about in the next 40 minutes which could be useful that would make you change things even more? Or else I'll just talk about Google, which I can. So those are the two questions. Anybody feel free to answer. And when I feel I have enough questions, bullets, or answers, both on what are you going to do different. And secondly, what would you like to hear about Google or from me about technology that is going to help you make a difference. Because I want to make a difference. I want my 45 minutes spent here to have a lasting impact on you. I'm not going to have that until you tell me what is going to have a lasting impact on you. Because you already probably have enough constraints and boundaries and barriers and thoughts that you already believe. Preconceived notions. So either let me help destroy them. AUDIENCE: So Mr. Nikesh, one of the things that we employ to do with as CEOs of companies is to maximize bottom line. And somehow it seems easier to do by scaling what you're already doing while investing in innovation is fairly risky. It hurts the bottom line in the short term. I think one of the things that I am going to do differently having watched Kurzweil and being convinced that the growth can actually be dependent upon-- NIKESH ARORA: You do realize this is going to be public information? So your stock price is going to impacted by this, what you're going to say. But please keep going. Don't let me stop you. AUDIENCE: But in this case I think the situation is that it's worthwhile starting to forecast what all the technologies may look like in 7 to 10 years if we have this million fold increase in processing power, and start to actually do R&D with a very strong focus on what would that mean that we could do with our products? I'm in the education industry and-- NIKESH ARORA: Let me work with you a little bit here. AUDIENCE: Just one second. We told yesterday that the African market reaching consumers in Africa with education on mobile phones, for instance. I mean, that would require some pretty nifty technology and cloud computing. NIKESH ARORA: I agree. But you did say you were going to forecast technologies. So which of the technologies we have seen in the last five years have been accurately forecasted? AUDIENCE: I'm not saying I would forecast them. I would just forecast the availability of power and then play with it. NIKESH ARORA: That's fair. That's very useful. What else can I tell you which will help you make that even more interesting? AUDIENCE: Well, you seem to have been very, very early in actually doing fantastic things, like for instance, Google Voice and Google Earth. You must have had planned that three years before it came out, right? NIKESH ARORA: No. AUDIENCE: All well, I mean, before I became aware of it, you must have been a little-- so what are you doing? What are you doing internally in Google to keep so agile? NIKESH ARORA: That's fair. That's a good question. I will answer that question. What else? Anybody else wants to help us here? So that's a very interesting observation about trying to figure out what's going to happen in the future. And therefore, try and adapt the business, and adapt what you're doing in that direction. And he asked me a good question, which I will try and answer. Yes, sir. TINA: There's someone over there and then we'll get the microphone down here. AUDIENCE: Can I ask the next question? TINA: Go ahead. AUDIENCE: OK, I would like to just reflect on the fact that it seems that we have to work across borders in many, many ways. And it's not only national borders, it's also across different industries. How can we get better at doing this? And how do we get acceptance of the role of coordinators in a different than before? NIKESH ARORA: Great. TINA: Precise question. And then we'll just-- NIKESH ARORA: I'm just recording these and then I will answer. And if I don't answer, I'm sure you will hold me to it. At some point she promised this clock will run out and then I will not be able to answer. So I'll save one of the hard ones till the end. Because I'm in Denmark I have to stick to the clock. That's what I was told. AUDIENCE: Yes, could you also tell us a little bit about your company culture? What is it that enables you to develop constantly new, great, crazy things? How is compiled your organization, what's the culture, the competences, the work flows, et cetera? NIKESH ARORA: OK, so good. That's a follow on to your question in terms of what's in store for the future? How does this work? How do you continue to try and maintain a culture of innovation? AUDIENCE: Well I had a question pretty much in line with that because I read in an article the other day which questioned-- NIKESH ARORA: Be careful of what you read in the press. AUDIENCE: I know, this is why I want to hear what you say because it said, can Google stay on being agile? We all remember Microsoft being the most exciting things. And now, perhaps to upset you, there was a headline which says-- NIKESH ARORA: If I got upset by everything people said about me, I would not be here. AUDIENCE: --might Google need to be inspired by Microsoft again? So that was more a provoking headline from-- NIKESH ARORA: But do you realize, fear is a bigger motivator than greed? But fair enough. It's a good question to ask. I'm not sure if I have a good answer, but I'll try. AUDIENCE: We've learned about the pervasiveness of the internet, but also the intrusiveness that can cause, let's say, discomfort, to privacy, et cetera. We also learned that a good crisis shouldn't be wasted. I'd like to hear what you at Google learned from your experiences with privacy invasion, et cetera. NIKESH ARORA: If I am to believe this gentleman here, we have a crisis at Google, so we shouldn't waste it. AUDIENCE: I was talking about the Google Maps experience. NIKESH ARORA: The fear of becoming my father. AUDIENCE: What did you learn from that? NIKESH ARORA: I constantly live in the fear of becoming my father. I want to make my own mistakes. But fair enough. AUDIENCE: One of the things I want to do different tomorrow is I'm going to listen even harder to young people, to employees, and to customers. Could you help me then in the future, aggregate all this information in a sensible way? Because you're going to get so many impressions, so many different impressions, and how do you aggregate that into sensible information on which you can react? NIKESH ARORA: Fair enough. OK. AUDIENCE: I heard you say that you have to stay paranoid. What do you mean by that? NIKESH ARORA: Where are you? AUDIENCE: I'm here. Hello. TINA: He's down there. NIKESH ARORA: OK, sorry. Oh, you're back. AUDIENCE: I'm back. NIKESH ARORA: Why don't you come here, we can just do this right here? AUDIENCE: I want to get into the culture of Google. So what is this about staying paranoid, what do you mean by that? NIKESH ARORA: OK, fair enough. Or eventually we will answer our own questions because he already knows the answer how we try and maintain our culture. So should I start a little bit, and youl guys can then get warmed up a little bit, and then you'll ask me more questions? TINA: Good idea. NIKESH ARORA: This is the last session. After this your choices are finished. You have to go back to your day job. So let's try and make this fun. OK. I've been at Google six years. I joined Google from a traditional company. And when I joined Google there were 2,000 people. And even the first day I struggled to decide, how should I dress up to go to the company? Because I was used to wearing a tie and a suit and it's pretty comfortable. And I'd read about these two guys who, in their best dressed form, I wouldn't dress like that. So I was struggling to decide what to do. So I decided to wear a jacket. It was a good day because my boss at that time was wearing a suit because he was meeting a traditional company. And from that day, it has been a very different experience the last six years. I've had to rewire my brain and had to think differently about, how do you operate in this new environment? And everything you heard about all the different speakers talking about we have to connect people to people, we are going to live in a connected world, this is the age where the young people are trying to figure out what's going to happen, all those things are true in the microcosm of Google. Almost everything that you hear about is true. And the thing that really inspired me to go work there was I read this thing called the founder's letter, which Larry Page and Sergey Brin had written as we were going public. And effectively, it suggested that we were not going to be a conventional company. And that not being conventional sort of forms the essence of who we try to be. Now it doesn't mean that we do things unconventionally for the sake of being unconventional. It's not like we work from 5:00 PM to 9:00 AM because everybody else works from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM. No, we don't do that. But still, we sit down and challenge anything that seems that it's conventional. And as you might have noticed earlier this week, or was it end of last week? We had a bit of a management change and the three people who run our company decided to reallocate responsibilities. And the whole world is wondering how is that going to work? Guess what? There's no need to follow convention. We've decided one of our founders is going to take a more active role versus our CEO. Who used to be our CEO or will be our CEO till April 4. So we're constantly looking at things, re-evaluating and deciding what makes most sense. And if you encapsulate how that works in our company is, conventional wisdom is to optimize the bottom line and try and focus on profits and focus on all those other things. We've taken on a view, let's try and solve large problems of scale with technology and try and create amazing products for end users. And the rest of it, it will work itself out. So we don't make decisions based on how much money is this product going to make? We don't make decisions based on, what is the bottom line going to look like? We make a decision based on how much resources do we have and what interesting problems can be solved? The good news is because of the growth and the progress as a company, we seem to get more resources, which allows us to target more problems. But that's how we think about it. Now to solve really good problems of technological scale, or solve the hardest problem in the world, you actually have to have the best people with you. That's the other thing we focus on. We go out and see, how can you find the best people in the world? Wherever they are, whatever they do, how do we bring them and have them come work for us? When I talk about these things, I run into people with conventional, traditional thinking. And I had this conversation with the king of marketing who used to talk about 4 P's. The 4 P's of marketing. Product, promotion, price, placement. And we had this debate. He was speaking [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. He was speaking after me at a conference in Dubai. And I said to him, Mr. [UNINTELLIGIBLE], when I went to business school I learned the 4 P's of marketing. And most of us who went to business school thought about that. But at Google we have a different philosophy. For those of you who are economists, we set three P's to zero. We don't worry about price. We don't worry about promotion. We don't worry about placement. You're only left with one P to concentrate on. It's called product. It's phenomenon of life that you eliminate constraint and you take away conventional thinking, and you try and focus on one element, how well you do. And actually, if you think about life, you'll find people who when they dedicated themselves to one aspect, they become really good at it. Because they've dropped away the constraints and the barriers which are being caused by the other things. So one of the things we focused on from early on is to try and create the best products. And products which are unconventional. So when people talk to me about, well, this company is also building this kind of a product, what are you going to do? It seems a bit alien because at Google we don't worry about what somebody else is doing. We worry about, how are you going to take this and how are you going to make it so interesting and so exciting to the end user and the end consumer that they're going to love this experience? And you asked me a question on Google Earth and Google Maps. There was no competitive product on mapping the world. If you think about what Google maps does, I actually prefer not to talk about our products because you guys already know most of these things. But it's an illustrative point. There were two mapping companies in the world. They pretty much had mapped the world and there was not much innovation you could do. Until we decided one day-- I'll tell you the story. One day I was in a plane ride with our founder, Larry Page who is now to be CEO. And we were flying on a clear day from San Francisco. We were going to Spain. And we're in the plane and he says, what a clear day. It'd be a great day to fly small planes, which can take pictures of every part of the US so we can actually have a much clearer picture and a much better resolution of the US than we do when you get from a satellite. And as we were flying, we continued to fly. After about 45 minutes he had calculated how many hours you would need to fly to cover the United States. And then he adjusted for the cloudy days to see how many clear days you can get. And then he'd adjusted for the number of planes you would need to do that. He says, that's about six months of three planes. That's not hard to do. He didn't talk to me about P&L. He didn't talk to me about shareholder value. He didn't talk to me about how much revenue we're going to make. He said, wouldn't that be cool if, as a user, you could have that perspective? You can follow that logic. There's another guy who sat down to figure out based on that theory how many roads-- what's the total number of kilometers of roads in the United States. At what speed can you drive a car on a road which would allow you to take pictures as you're driving? And at that speed, how many cars would you need to drive in how many cities around the world? You may have seen a product called Google Street View. It has been in the news for multiple reasons, not just one as you know. And that's OK. We can talk about the other reason as well. So that ability to sit and think about how do you create great products for end users is, I think, what this is about. What business is about. Business is an after effect of great products for consumers. Brands are an after effect of great products. Chuck and I can have a big debate. The reason Google has become a brand and I think Tina mentioned it, we actually don't spend money in advertising. You will never see an ad that says, come use Google. We change your life. We don't. Because we want you to experience our product. And if by that experience you believe your life has been changed, there is a higher probability you will believe that your life has been changed and tell other people as opposed to me showing you a television ad which says, we are going to change your life. It seems a bit dangerous anyway to try and say I'm going to change your life. So that's sort of the philosophy in terms of the products, how we build our products. Now that requires us to have great people. And so we have a very, very tough hiring process. We go out and try and find the best people in the world. And in that process of trying to find the best people in the world, we look for people who have shown passion in life outside of the normal things you would look for as CEOs or people who hire great people. We look for people who have passion in life. So my favorite example is one of my colleagues who runs or used to run another Scandinavian market for us, he was an Olympic gold medalist figure skater. And we went to the interview process and people said to me, why do you want to hire him? He didn't spend as much time in advertising when other people were spending time in advertising and business school. He's an Olympic figure skater. I said, no, he has passion. He knows what it takes to succeed. Because to win something and be the best in the world, you must have to sacrifice a lot of other things in life. That means he woke up at 4 o'clock in the morning, and for 6 hours at a stretch he practiced. And he gave up everything else in life because he was focused. So we go out and find people who have passion. My most obscure example is this girl had won awards for knitting. Now, would I want to spend the whole day or whole evening in a cocktail party with her? Maybe not. But the fact that she had a passion and the ability to pursue the passion and be the best made me think this is a person who would do well at our company. And in our philosophies, we'd much rather not hire people and have an empty position, than to hire somebody who's not going to be able to fit that culture. So that's the idea of having great people. Once you have a focus of building great products, once you have the notion of hiring great people, then you've got to figure out how do you keep them and how do you maintain that culture of innovation? Because great people do not like too many constraints put upon themselves. I don't. I'm sure many of you have risen to the top of your careers. You have not gotten there by living conservatively, or down the traditional path, or having too many constraints imposed upon you. So great people don't like constraints imposed upon them. However, great people, because they think they're really smart, like to impose constraints on other people. They do. The smartest people in the world-- and this is an interesting social experiment. We go out and hire the best people from 10 colleges. Then we put them in one room. And they were all first in their class, in 10 top universities in the United States around the world. They're used to being good. They're used to being the best. The biggest struggle we have sometimes is trying to get those 10 to work with each other. Because they're not used to other people being smarter than them. How do you take 10 really smart people and get them to work with each other? That is a challenge. That is a challenge, by the way, all of us face. Because typically, the smartest person has gotten there in life by doing it their way. Because they knew best. And in the context of Google, that's a challenge when you hire the smartest people in the world. What do you do? You learn to respect other opinions. You learn to live outside your comfort zone. You learn to say yes. And I had to rewire my brain. I had 1,600 people who used to work for me in my prior job. And I was a product manager and I was very young and I was very successful. I go into a place where everybody's really smart. And as Larry likes to say, the next person we hire is most likely going to be smarter than you. By that logic, 20,000 people have been hired after me. Which means I am getting to the bottom quartile of bottom percentile of the company's smarts now. How do you deal with that? How do you take really smart people and allow them to succeed? Is you take away constraints. Is you learn to say yes. Is you try to figure out how to respect somebody else's opinion. So you will often notice in a meeting at Google, there will be 10 people and 8 people will say, that's a bad idea. Let's not do it. Yet we will do it. Because if you don't try it, you're not going to know if it was going to be successful or not. And most interesting ideas are not ideas which are generated by consensus in the world. Yet, in every one of our roles as CEOs or as leaders of our companies, we try and come up with a consensus model. We try and see how many things are people going to agree with it? It sort of is against the face of convention. You really don't want to be conventional. If you want to be unconventional, you have to be willing to live outside your comfort zone. But that's not how we're used to operating. So the whole idea of trying to maintain the culture of innovation is to be willing to take risks and operate outside of your comfort zone. And funny enough, the more resources you have, the bigger risk you have to take. Which is counterintuitive. Startups are willing to take lots of risks early in their lives because they have nothing to lose. In fact, I'm pretty sure all of you in your careers have taken-- or in your lives are willing to take risks at a younger age. I was talking to a colleague of mine who just said to me, you just moved from London to California. That must be a big change. I said, yes, it was. He said, you leave your friends, you leave your comfort, all the things you've gotten settled into. I said, but that's the fun of life, is to be able to drop your comfort zone and go to a different place and start from scratch. But we tend not to do that. As we get successful, we remember those days fondly when we had to scrap around and we didn't have enough money. But we really don't want to go back there, do we? How many people would like to go back to their student days with the less resources they used to have? I'm presuming there's enough affluent people who don't want to go back there. So you get comfortable. You get comfortable. You're capacity and desire to take risk decreases. I want to ask a risky question. How many people want to throw their jackets and threw off their ties and dance right now? If you were young, you just come out of college, you'd say, yeah, sure. I'll do it. The older we are, the less likely you are going to do that. So we into a place where we're not willing to operate outside of our comfort zone. And it's very important for us, at Google, to maintain our culture of innovation. Is to figure out a way to say yes. Have you seen the movie, Yes Man? Yes, you know this movie? I do not recommend that as an operating model. However, there is an interesting lesson over there. Which he learns at the end of the movie. And the interesting lesson is find a way to say yes. Because finding a way to say yes allows you to try out new experiences, allows you to try out new ideas, allows you to live outside your comfort zone. And that's something we're trying to practice. And it's hard, by the way. It's not like we have the sample book of how we're going to operate. But we're trying. And we're hoping that trying to think of this this way, trying to create amazing products for our users, trying to focus on hiring the best people around the world, trying to find a culture of innovation where there is a bit of order and chaos, we can continue to maintain this notion of innovation. We can continue to not become like our father. Not become Microsoft. Not quite that Microsoft is the father of Google, but you understand the logic. Not become like somebody in the past. Try and continue in that path and try and be sort of innovative and different. Did I answer everybody's questions who asked me questions? Yes? Kind of? OK. So in that context, should we talk about the future? Since you guys are here to listen about what's going to happen 10 years from, want to talk about futures, talk about products, and what's coming up in front. I think it's fair to say given that so many smart people have stood here and talked about all the different things that have gone on, all the different things that are happening in society, this is my view because I can't pretend to tell you Google's view. Because unfortunately, sir, there is no collective view of 24,000 people. The collective view of 24,000 people is every extreme opinion that you'd find in the world. So it'll average to every individual's opinion. So right now what I'm speaking to you is my view, which becomes Google view. Tomorrow somebody else stands here and speaks to you. That is Google's view as well. But having said that, I think we've come to a point in life where the revolution we are going through, the technological revolution we're going through, we will remember fondly as one of the four or five big revolutions that have happened in the history of mankind. And I think we're passed the tipping points, and you've heard from different people up here about what the world is going to look like. I think we're going to live in a very different world, or people after us are going to live in a very different world. Or maybe if the doctor on aging helps, we could all be living in a different world for the next 900 and pick your rest of the years. [UNINTELLIGIBLE] from getting a hundred. But we are at a point where the world is going to look very different. And I don't want to stand and make predictions because I can't remember many accurate predictions that remain. I can actually remember a lot of people who made inaccurate predictions. I tried to search on the internet with Carlsberg? No sorry, Google. And I tried to find accurate predictions. There's a very small list. They're all interesting ones about how there are only three pieces in the world that are going to be needed, or how this is never going to happen, or that is never going to happen. So it's very scary to stand here and try and make predictions. I will, however, say when I read that I learned we have a tendency to overestimate the short-term and underestimate the long-term. Happens every day. You find a project manager who will say, I can get this done in a month. And he'll miss by another month. Or this is definitely going to happen this year. But you if you try and predict for 10 years, you almost always get it wrong. I have very simple examples. How many of you have a non-digital camera that you actually use anymore? AUDIENCE: I do. NIKESH ARORA: There's always one in a crowd. Unfortunately, this one has a mic. Otherwise you wouldn't hear her. OK, one. That's great. Fantastic. But you guys remember those days? Definitely not lifetimes. We all had cameras, which were not digital. And you remember when digital cameras came out how we all reluctantly bought them? Somehow they were not of high enough quality, remember? And then slowly now it's a pain in the-- to go find that camera and take a picture and find, oh shit, they really got washed out. Remember those days? I'd go on a holiday, take pictures and come back and say, sorry. It really got washed out. We have no pictures for you. Yet, nobody was willing to predict that the SLR cameras were going to be a thing of the past. You guys remember video tapes? Our lifetimes. How many of you still use VCRs? You know those things? You have one? I have many of them as well. I don't know what to do with them, but I do have them. Because I'm very reluctant to throw them because I'm a technology kind of a guy. Even though it's an old technology. So DVDs have taken over. So we hesitate to call change. So come on, somebody make a prediction. Something that's going to be gone in the next 10 years. DVD's going to be gone. What else? AUDIENCE: Computers. NIKESH ARORA: Computers are going to be gone. What are we going to have? Visual displays without actually having to see anything? Ambiguous computing. Ambiguous sounds uncertain. But yes, pretty much everything is going to be ambiguous. They'll be ambiguous. What else? AUDIENCE: Landline telephone. NIKESH ARORA: What are those things? He said landline telephones. I have one, but it's like an antique piece. Somebody tried to pick it and use it. I said, it doesn't have a wire. It's a wireless one. Anybody else, what else? Come on, you guys spent one and a half days over here learning about the future. You can't tell me what is going to be the past? AUDIENCE: Language barriers. NIKESH ARORA: Language barriers will be gone. AUDIENCE: [? Smartphones. ?] NIKESH ARORA: They'll be a thing of the past. What else? Probably. Probably the way we know it. It's possible. Although I did see a quote that somebody from Coke was here and they've been in existence for 120 years. So I'm taking hope, but maybe we should have gone for a real physical product. Maybe next time we'll start selling-- here's your Google or something, which you'll have to keep with you for the rest of your life. What else? AUDIENCE: Newspapers. NIKESH ARORA: Newspapers. I thought they were already? No, just kidding. AUDIENCE: Cars. NIKESH ARORA: Cars. AUDIENCE: TVs. NIKESH ARORA: TVs. AUDIENCE: Glasses. NIKESH ARORA: Glasses as in reading glasses, those glasses? Or these glasses? OK, glasses. What else? Computer screens will be gone. Sorry? AUDIENCE: Disease. NIKESH ARORA: Disease will be gone. They'll have different diseases. Actually that's true. Most of the diseases of the past have been eradicated. What else? AUDIENCE: People. NIKESH ARORA: People will be gone? AUDIENCE: Keyboards. TINA:NIKESH ARORA: Keyboards. I heard somebody was going to hire 100,000 robots, right? Like, what is that movie we saw? Yes, I, Robot. AUDIENCE: Conventional meetings. NIKESH ARORA: Conventional meetings. I actually met a very interesting guy the other day. He only does 15 minute meetings and does not allow you to make a presentation. Honestly. That's his thing. He only does 15 minute meetings. Does not allow you to bring a presentation. He says, if you can't explain it to me, I don't have time to understand it. AUDIENCE: [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. NIKESH ARORA: He's there. He's running a very big company unfortunately. That's how he got there. What else? AUDIENCE: [UNINTELLIGIBLE] physical money. NIKESH ARORA: Cash. AUDIENCE: Cash, yeah. NIKESH ARORA: What, gold coins? That's fair. It's possible. That's interesting. Look, just the words that you guys have thrown out, you have just created tremendous amounts of business opportunities. If all you can figure out what is going to take the place of those things. Yes, sir. Sorry? AUDIENCE: Euro. NIKESH ARORA: The Euro will be gone. That's a political comment. I will ignore that. Maybe it will be. AUDIENCE: Credit cards. NIKESH ARORA: Credit cards. Yes. Credit cards, wallets, those things. Yes. AUDIENCE: Handwriting. NIKESH ARORA: Handwriting. It's probably true. Unfortunately, I have a 14 year old girl and they've given her a laptop at school and she does all her homework on her laptop. And I said to her, darling, you should try practice writing. It's good. You'll have good handwriting. She says, Dad, what do you write? I said, checks for your education. She's like, no, I saw you paying online bills the other day. You're not writing checks. She said, Dad, the only thing I've seen you do with a pen is a signature. I can do a signature. So I think you may be right. Which is so sad, you feel like that's such a skill. But it's just the remorse of us older people about things that we cherished, which kids may not cherish. They may cherish something else. What else? AUDIENCE: Kitchen. NIKESH ARORA: Kitchen. You won't have time for cooking. At the same time, I'm told that you have one of the best restaurants in the world in the city of Copenhagen. AUDIENCE: The best. NIKESH ARORA: The best. So I'm going there for lunch. So I'm told it's the best. I better hurry before they decide to shut down their kitchen. What else? AUDIENCE: [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. Schools. NIKESH ARORA: Schools. Data privacy will be gone. We can talk about that if you want to. Would you like to talk about data privacy? No? OK, good. Nor do I. AUDIENCE: McDonald's. NIKESH ARORA: Some things will stay forever. Our desire to store food forever in our bodies will stay for a while. Yes, sir. AUDIENCE: [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE] the north and south pole. NIKESH ARORA: Will be gone? The north and south pole will be gone. OK. AUDIENCE: Intellectual rights. NIKESH ARORA: What is that? That is the smart people trying to claim that they're smart. But please don't write this down, I'm just-- intellectual rights. Well to be honest, if you think about the world of Facebook, people are willing to share so openly with their friends. People are not holding things back. Most of the kids are taking their creativity and putting it on YouTube. The generation of the future is actually a generation, which is being very, very, very generous with sharing their creativity. Now I'm not trying to make a comment of intellectual rights of copyright, but if you think about it, I can go to Youtube and find pretty much almost every expression of creativity off the next generation. Our current generation holds back and we have all these copyrights and [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. But the next generation is actually using that as a medium of free expression. And in that context, we're finding the best people from that generation for creating content in the future. Anybody else, what else are we getting rid of? AUDIENCE: [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE] NIKESH ARORA: Single line search engine user interface. You'll probably just think about it and it's going to come to you. That's possible. There are people at Google who are sitting there-- Larry Page will tell you that he wants to try and answer your question before you have formulated it and willing to ask it. And we're thinking about that and maybe it'll get there. OK, what else would you guys like to talk about? What else can I tell you which is going to add to your collective experience for the last day and a half? You asked me to talk about Google, I talked about Google. Yes, sir. You're my savior. AUDIENCE: Give us two or three glimpses of what are some of the products that you're working on that may appear in the next 10 years. NIKESH ARORA: OK, what I can tell you is some technological trends that I see, and as a consequence you can assume that we would have some ideas about what we're working on with it. So going down the path, it is very fair to assume we're going to live in a connected world. And a lot of our ideas about how we're connected will come true, ie we will not have dumb phones to start with and we may all live on smartphones. And over time, those smartphones might change. Over time, the distinction between mobility and no mobility is going to go away. People talk about mobile as a different way of life versus a fixed life. Just the way we don't think about fixed line phones anymore because we think of communicating with people. And you don't think about having to sit somewhere and communicate to somebody, you think about being able to communicate from wherever you are. In that context, you should be able to think about being connected from wherever you are. I think the distinction of what device is more useful will go away. You will not think about PCs versus tablets versus mobile phones versus televisions versus refrigerators. You will think about devices being connected. Over time, you'd expect most devices to be connected. I am building a new house. My security system is connected to me somehow. I'm not going to worry about the technology, but it is connected to me. I can turn on and off my security from here in California. I can move the camera behind my house in whichever side of the house I want to see from here. This is not about the internet, it's not about PCs, this is not about technological terms. This is about you being able to be connected to whatever device you own anywhere in the world. If you play that movie and say, that is what life is going to be. Suddenly you will realize-- to somebody's earlier point-- we're going to be living in a cloud. A cloud of information, which is no longer dedicated to your own PC. I had this conversation yesterday with somebody and I, said what is it-- they asked me, should I buy a PC, or a Mac, or a tablet, or whatever? And I said, look, how many things do you do on your PC anymore? Just on your PC. So other than storing music or movies or pictures, which are also a pain because if they're on my PC at home I can't show you the pictures from my last holiday. I don't do much with my PC anymore because I trust that I can have connectivity wherever I am. Therefore, I will be able to show your stuff you just stored in the cloud. And if you believe that is going to be true and you fast forward just a few years, maybe not as far as 10. If you're going to live in a world in a cloud and each device is going to be connected to the cloud, you have to fundamentally rewrite the infrastructure of the technology world. Because if you think about it, the forms were created in the past where the forms didn't have to be connected to anything. If you remember the old forms, at least in our generation, there were forms-- actually I was watching this movie, have you seen the new movie, the Wall Street 2? Where Michael Douglas goes back, comes out of jail, and he says one mobile phone. Remember. They give him a mobile phone. Doesn't look quite like our mobile phones anymore. And I'm pretty sure it can't do pretty much anything-- I don't even think it makes a phone call anymore, that phone. But we are now used to a world where our phones are capable of doing all these different things. So we're going to live in the cloud. Stuff in the past was designed for an unconnected world. Everything was designed to be self-sufficient. And I think somebody made the point earlier about getting rid of barriers and how things are going to operate around the world with no barriers. It is becoming really hard to maintain barriers. Even for countries. Because it's very hard to control the flow of information between countries. You had borders, you had people who stand there and say, you cannot take this clicker from Denmark to Norway. Now you don't have anybody. You can just ship it on the internet and nobody knows actually how it got from one place to the other. So the notion of barriers, the notion of boundaries is going away. So we are going to live in sort of a global cloud. If you think about it, there is one new country which has been born. Which is called the internet. Because the world's GDP is connected on the internet. And new companies are being formed so quickly because there are two billion people who they can access right away. Imagine trying to start a traditional company in Denmark or any other country. You had to figure out which city, which shop to lease, how many people to hire. Now you can launch a product and launch it to two million people tomorrow morning. You just have to figure out which marketing guys to use to try and get people to be aware of your product. But you can launch it tomorrow. So we are going to live in a connected world. That connected world will require a rewiring of the technological infrastructure of that world. Which means pretty much most software would be rewritten. Most of software which is associated with phones, with PCs, with tablets, it'll get rewritten. Our consumption behavior, our behavior as users will change because we will live in a connected world. And I think there's a more substantive impact, which I think Chuck alluded to. We will no longer live in a word of experts. There will be things you'll have for experts. I don't want to go have a collective view on how to treat cancer for me or how to get operated on. There will be experts. But notionally, a lot of things where we created experts will go away. You don't need a guide to be a restaurant reviewer. There used to be a profession. There still is a profession where people review restaurants. Do you need them? If you can go and find out 550 million people on Facebook or 2 billion people on the web, and you can find a way like that gentleman earlier said of intelligently passing that information and finding out where more people liked one versus the other, and most likely they're going to trust you and your word of mouth anyway more than an expert. So the notion of an expert is going to go away. There are a lot of businesses which are designed on the basis of having experts. If that happens, what happens to the rest of life? The way we interact with consumers, the way we create content, the way we create a lot of businesses, the way we distribute products, the way we do manufacturing. Now I can design a product, launch it tomorrow morning, and say, I deliver you the product in two weeks. I can find out how many people actually want that product before I go produce it. Conceptually. You say, how is that going to work? Think about how people are used to today. But this whole conference I thought was about getting rid of current thinking, getting rid of current views, and trying to live in a world if you were starting it from scratch. So if you can imagine, if you leave this conference, the good news of being the last speaker is that I can leave the lasting thought in your head. Nobody else is going to come and say something else afterwards to confuse you. So if you can leave this conference thinking the word is going to be connected, all our information will be in the cloud somewhere, and we will be able to access this from every device, as a consumer, what impact does that have on your business? And if you were creating that business today, would you create it the way it exists today? So I had this conversation-- I was in Munich with [UNINTELLIGIBLE] at the old media conference. Well, at the old media, they have a new media conference. And one very vocal individual sat on stage and said, if you are starting a new businesses today, would you start a newspaper? How many people in this room would start a newspaper today? I'm sure there's some people who work in the newspaper industry. There's some journalists in the room, aren't there? You are. Would you start a newspaper today? AUDIENCE: Maybe. NIKESH ARORA: You have to say maybe, otherwise your boss is going to keep listening to what you just said. AUDIENCE: [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE] NIKESH ARORA: An expert. That's based on an expert in the newspaper industry. Got it. I'm not trying to be [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. Thank you for answering my question. But there's a more bigger point here. The bigger point is, if you cannot imagine starting that business from scratch today, be careful assuming that that business is going to survive the technological revolution [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. That's the risk you have. And I'm sure a lot of things will survive for certain period of time. But the only caution is, be careful about how you think about that. You know what I'm going to do right now, and to respect your question, I'm going to ask my colleague who has spent some time getting some demos because they were supposed to go with my PowerPoint. And they will give you an insight into some of the products we're thinking about today. However, I will caution you, that is going to be nothing like products 10 years from now. Because anything that you can imagine today is most likely going to be changed 10 years from now. So my friend, Robert. Robert, are you going to give us some demos? ROBERT: Hi, everyone. Thanks, Nikesh. OK, just while I set up here. So first of all, just put up your hand if you've ever seen a science fiction movie. Most of you. Awesome. So I'm going to show you some things that probably a few years ago you would have thought of as science fiction. One of the interesting things about science fiction movies is you never see anyone use a mouse. It's always touch screen or its voice. People say, computer, make me a cup of tea. Probably one of the reason British science fiction movies are never that popular. It's always what we ask for. Now we believe that these devices are getting more powerful as Nikesh has said, and that very, very soon you're going to be able to do almost everything from your mobile device. I'll give you an example. Everyone forgets you can actually make calls on a mobile phone. Call Sanderson Hotel, London. So there we go. Now, that doesn't seem that clever, but the Sanderson Hotel is not in my address book. What happened then was that the phone recognized my speech, found what I wanted to call from the internet. I now have an infinite address book. I could call any business anywhere in the world in just a second or two. Very, very easy. Other things that I can do. For example, I could say, set alarm for 7:30 AM. Go to the gym. I need to. There we go. And my phone says that's going to go in 18 hours and 54 minutes. So plenty of time to eat before I go. After the gym, I'd like to relax. Of course, I grab my phone. Listen to Red Hot Chili Peppers. This is going to start Spotify, but it could be any music player on my phone. Just a second or two, the music will start to play. I like suspense. Come on, Spotify. OK, let's just do that one very quickly again and then we'll move on. Listen to Red Hot Chili Peppers. OK, Spotify's feeling kind of shy. Never mind, we'll move on. Now when one of my friends heard I was coming to Copenhagen, she said, oh, you really should check out the castle where Hamlet is set. And of course, I'm a man, I was only really half listening to what she was saying and I didn't write it down. But with my smartphone, I can just do something like this. Navigate to Shakespeare's Hamlet castle. Immediately it starts the navigation application on my phone and that was it, Kronborg Castle. I remember now. So I tap that and I get my driving directions very, very quickly. And you'll see in just a moment, OK, it's 50 kilometers and it's going to take me 50 minutes to drive out there. If I look at the route, I can see live traffic information. It's pretty clear, so that's good. And as Nikesh mentioned, of course we have street view. So for example, if I want to look at the turns, there it is on a map. I just tap and I can actually see it. So I can work out where my turns are. So it's going to be very, very easy for me to get there. And of course, this is all happening live over the internet on my phone. Another thing that often happens, you're running late and you need to send a text message to someone to let them know what's going on. We can even do that now. What I'm going to show you is how I think you'll all be sending your text messages in just a few years. Send text to Amanda Rosenberg. I'm running late, I'll meet you on the station platform. Just think of how long it would have taken to type that. Instead, there we go. I can just hit send. Really easy when I'm struggling with my shopping bags and I need to let Amanda know where I am. So that's using the microphone on this device as an input device, very natural way of communicating with computers. As we say, it's been in sci fi movies for ages. But the wonderful thing about these devices too, is not only do they have ears, the microphone, they have an eye. They have a camera. One of the features we added to Google Goggles, which is our visual search. Someone said, we're going to see the end of the one line text entry search engine. Well, I think we've already gone beyond that with things like goggles. I can just take a picture. Recently we added sudoku solving. so if you're a sudoku fan-- I'm actually very lazy. I haven't filled out any of the numbers. But I'm just going to take a picture with my phone, a picture of the puzzle. There we go. It's a little bit blurry. I'm just going to do that again. Excuse me. In fact, if I turn my light on things will be easier. So there we go. Just a normal sudoku puzzle. Take a picture with the camera. Goggles has recognized that-- let me flip my phone. There we go-- as being a sudoku puzzle. You can see that there. So I'm going to tap on that and hit solve. And in just a few seconds. [APPLAUSE] ROBERT: As Nikesh said, we aim to hire the best people in the world. How good am I? Beat that for timing. Now the final thing that I want to show you today is actually something we saw Ray Kurzweil show in a video earlier. So he showed machine translation. Someone said that language barriers are going to disappear. Like many right thinking individuals, I love Italy but I don't speak any Spanish. I'm from Britain. Sorry, I don't speak any Italian. I don't speak any foreign languages at all. I just speak slowly and loudly and it works. But to demonstrate this I'm going to invite a colleague from the Google Copenhagen team. Please welcome Anna. [APPLAUSE] ROBERT: Bongiorno. ANNA: Bongiorno. ROBERT: See, pretty good. OK, so we've got Google translate here. And imagine that I am at the railway station in Rome and I'm trying to get to Florence. So I don't speak any Italian. Anna is working behind the window at the railway station. I'm just going to use my phone to talk to her. So I want to get to Florence. Let's get started. What time is the last train to Florence? TRANSLATOR: [SPEAKING ITALIAN] ROBERT: Italiano. ANNA: [SPEAKING ITALIAN] TRANSLATOR: The last train was midnight. ROBERT: Let's push on through. I would like three single tickets please. TRANSLATOR: [SPEAKING ITALIAN] ANNA: [SPEAKING ITALIAN] TRANSLATOR: The total area 150 euros. ROBERT: It's a new products, we haven't finished it yet. Here is my credit card. TRANSLATOR: [SPEAKING ITALIAN] ANNA: [SPEAKING ITALIAN] TRANSLATOR: Thanks Florence 12. ROBERT: Hey, you may laugh, I'm going to Florence. I'm going to hand you back to Nikesh. Thanks Anna and thank you all. [APPLAUSE] NIKESH ARORA: Well, thank you, Robert. Thank you, Anna. So I think that answers your question a little bit. The bigger point again here is, if you see the way to think about products in the future is to consider the products of today as building blocks. Don't think about products of today as products themselves. They're the building blocks of products for tomorrow. This is why you are seeing the geniuses in the little high school kids or the people who are in college thinking about the next products. Because they don't think about improving today's products, they think about today's product as a building block. So Google would not have existed without the internet. You could not have created Google without the internet. Without a half a billion people or two billion people being connected to the web, you could not have thought of a Facebook. Without the idea of all of us having broadband connectivity, you cannot think of putting videos on the web and YouTube. Without having all the videos on the web, you cannot think about the next product. Without having all the restaurants being reviewed by people on Facebook, you can't think about the new Zagat's, the new Hardens, or the new Restaurant Review Guide, which is an online guide. So the key here you saw was we had a translate product, we have a mapping product, we have had voice technology for many years in the past. The interesting story about translate is, if you understand how is translation traditionally done? you. Look at a word and you translate the word. That's how it was done. You translated every word. Today, with the power of computers, what you can do is you can look at texts which have been translated before and see how the whole sentence has been translated before on 800 books. And that sentence is translated the same way in 755 of those books, then it's probably the right translation. So you can actually use computers and do pattern recognition and figure out how to translate things without trying to actually translate it. So the translate product you saw is in the cloud, which is looking at over 20 million texts which have been translated in the past, and using that information to come up with more accurate translation. So it is context sensitive translation as opposed to just blind translation using a dictionary. So it's just one of the few examples of products. I've been told my time is up, so I'm going to leave you with one last video, which is yet another product video of something you guys might have heard about. But it has been an absolute pleasure. Thank you very much for having me and thank you very much for using Google. I hope we can survive the next 10 years, perhaps in a different way, shape, or form. Thanks again. [APPLAUSE] TINA: Thank you. It's OK. NIKESH ARORA: There we go. [VIDEO PLAYBACK] NIKESH ARORA: This car has no driver.