Exclusive Interview With Google's Eric Schmidt

Bartiromo: Yeah, and the FCC was happy about that.

Mobile. A lot of people say mobility is where it's at. You've said,
actually, I've heard you on conference calls saying that this is one of the
big priorities for the company. How do you envision this? Tell me what
you're looking for.

Schmidt: First place, everyone I know, everyone you know carries a
mobile phone. And it's true in every country.

Bartiromo: And I'm not carrying my PC, by the way.

Schmidt: And most people in most developed countries have a roughly 100
percent coverage of mobile phones. So it really is a tremendous phenomenon.
Over the next three or four years, there'll be more than another billion or so
mobile phones added. Eventually our numbers indicate that there'll be five or
so billion mobile phones in a world of six billion or so. People, this is a
phenomenon. It's an unprecedented reach, even greater than, for example,
television, or even electricity in some cases. So that's a platform that we
can exploit. Our mobile phone, both search traffic as well as advertising is
growing very rapidly, and we think people will do more and more interesting
things in mobile phones. And, I mean, small phones, big phones, big screens,
things that don't look like a phone, things which are mobile.

Furthermore, the telecommunications industry is helping because they're
deploying billions of dollars of literally excess data capacity so these
things will have fast networks wherever I go. One of the greatest things for
me is whenever I fly somewhere, I open up and I open up my iPhone or my
BlackBerry, and, boom, there's everything in my world as I've landed in a
country I've never been in. It's a remarkable achievement.

Bartiromo: Yeah. What needs to happen before we actually get to that world
that you're talking about? In other words, do we need to see the providers
create different screens? I mean, do you need a larger screen to access some
of this data? How do we get there?

Schmidt: Well, one of the problems is we haven't figured out a way to
change finger sizes. We just haven't...

Bartiromo: Right.

Schmidt: There's no solution to that.

Bartiromo: Right.

Schmidt: We'd like to, but we haven't done it. And people don't like to
kind of go like this. So you need a certain size screen. But there's other
technology. For example, the processors in the phones have gotten faster.
The batteries have gotten longer last--longer lasting. The screens have
gotten brighter. The whole device has gotten lighter. So all of that has
been happening while people have been talking about this. We know that these
things are working now. We know because we measure it that there's been a
huge increase in maps, Google Maps, hugely successful. These phones have
GPSes in them. So when I want to go to the equivalent of a Starbucks, I just
type "Starbucks," it says it's over there. For me, that's just a huge--a huge
improvement. And that service is available almost everywhere in the world.

Bartiromo: That's amazing. Let's--that transitions right to the rest of the
world. Global has been really the hot spot for Google. Tell me how you keep
that going. Where are the biggest opportunities for Google right now outside
of the United States?

Dr. Schmidt: Well, first place, the Internet is growing faster outside the
United States than in the United States. Also advertising online growth rates
are higher outside the United States than they are in the United States.
You've got--and of course you have a weak dollar strategy--because the US has
a very weak dollar--so that also helps. For all of those reasons, revenue
outside of the United States should grow dramatically over the next while, and
that's great.

In our case, the biggest difference--and, in fact, perhaps the only
difference--between people in the US and other people is language. Other than
that, simple rule: Everybody wants the same thing. They want fashion, they
want information, they want products, they want e-commerce, they want it now,
they want to have fun, they want to use credit cards or debit cards. So we
work very hard to make that true globally. I think most of the large,
successful US corporations, the ones that you certainly cover all day, all are
going to see that kind of growth if they'll well positioned internationally.

Bartiromo: So when you look around the world, what's the most important, sort
of richest area for you right here?

Schmidt: Well, for us, of course, Europe has been our stronghold for a
long time. And Europe is just very, very strong for Google. They have
relatively higher market share, they're very sophisticated consumers, and a
very mature advertising rate. If you look at the global advertising market,
it's the United States, Japan, China, Britain, France and Europe--and Great
Britain. Those are the sort of the big five or six. Well, of course, we're
doing very well in Europe, we're doing well in Japan, and we've been in the
process of entering China for a while, and we're growing there nicely.

Bartiromo: What's happening there, though? You're number one in every market
except a handful in Asia. How do you break in, and really with a solid
foothold.

Schmidt: Well, in each case, they're different. In China, of course,
there's all the issues of regulation and censorship. We delayed our entry for
good reasons, and as a result we're not number one there. In some of the
other countries, it's because we didn't get the language right. It turns out
Asian languages often have what you and I would think of are nonsensical ways
in which words are put together. So, for example, all the words in Thai are
put into one very long sentence. They don't have word breaks. So developing
the technology to do that right and then search and index against it took us a
little while longer. We've now addressed that, so we think we should do well
now.

Bartiromo: Fascinating. So what's the biggest challenge that you're facing
today?

Schmidt: In Google's case, I think it's internal. It's the ability to
manage the creative process, deal with the complexity in what is a relatively
large company, in terms of people, who's doing what. We have 50 development
centers all around the world, people in different time zones, `Are you doing
that? Are you doing that? Do I work with you? How do I check in my code?'
Those sorts of things.

CONTINUED : Managing Employee Growth

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