Q: Was your corporate motto, "Don't be evil," a direct response to Microsoft?
A: No. It had nothing to do with Microsoft. Larry and Sergey, and certainly I when I joined the company, spent almost no time on Microsoft. This is a press-generated focus. We don't spend very much time talking about Microsoft.
Q: They're sure fascinated with you guys.
A: We do not spend our time talking about them. It's perfectly fine if everyone wants to obsess about what we're doing. We want to obsess about what we're doing and how can we do better.
We don't do things perfectly. We make mistakes. Our products don't work perfectly out of the box all the time. We have features that are missing. We don't bring in the talent as fast as we want. We don't have buildings for them. It's all of the problems of growth -- that's what we want to spend our time on.
Q: When I talk to start-ups and venture capitalists and others in Silicon Valley, I hear the same trepidation in their voice when they talk about Google that they used when they would talk about Microsoft in the past. Microsoft didn't set out to have that foreboding image, but it developed because it was so good at doing what it did at the time. How do you avoid becoming Microsoft south?
A: The fact of the matter is we're in a different business. It's not a zero-sum game. Our customers are one click away from moving to a different search engine. That is not true in operating systems and it's not true in PC applications. It never was true.
