Exclusive Interview With Google's Eric Schmidt

Bartiromo: As a steward of technology and innovation your entire career, what
would you say is the most innovative thing out there? What's the next big
thing, from your standpoint?

Schmidt: I've always thought that the scariest piece of innovation is
knowledge understanding and language translation. I don't understand how it
works, but to watch a computer--literally watch it--read something in English,
dissect what it's about, translate it into a language that I don't speak and
having that other person say, `Wow, that's incredible,' to me, that's magic.
And it isn't magic, it's just very good computer science, very good artificial
intelligence, very good physics. And that's where we are. So the things that
are most impressive to me are the things where the computer does something
that nobody could do, literally translate things 100 language in parallel,
summarize something for me, take me to something which I didn't know I was
interested in but knows that I cared about it. And we're right on the cusp of
that.

Bartiromo: Eric, your stock went from $750 to $450 in a very short period of
time. What do you think happened?

Schmidt: I don't know. We don't really focus on short-term movement of
the stock price. We said, since the company went public, that we're in this
for the long term, and we want shareholders to be with us. These short-term
fluctuations in outlook and so forth are not something that we focus on. We
don't talk about it. We're really focused on this huge opportunity before us,
which is automating the trillion-dollar industry that is advertising. We
won't get all of that, for sure, but we should be able to get a significant
part of that over the lifetime, certainly of my service to the company. And
our goal is to build this into an institution that lasts for many, many years
and is the greatest innovator in technology in this space.

Bartiromo: So the biggest priorities right now, continuing to access that
potential huge, huge advertising market. What else?

Schmidt: Well, our number one priority is end-user--end-user happiness.
Literally, are people happy with the results that they get using Google
search? So it's literally search, and every day we bring out new improvements
and indices that are--taxonomies that are understanding of language, more
content, bigger--all of the things that make Google such a great search
experience. That's our number-one priority, even more important, for example,
than advertising. The way we pay for it, of course, is by improving our
advertising solutions, as you described. That's what we do in the core.

Our next big play is in this applications phase, where we think people spend a
lot of time online with information, and we can help them, whether it's their
e-mail, which is an easy one to understand, but what about their personal
data? What about their spreadsheets and their calendar, keeping it all there?
And we can help them search. We can solve the problem of `how do I live in
this digital lifestyle?' If we do that right, they can do it on mobile phones
as well as at home, in their office and on a Mac and on a PC, and it all works
great.

Bartiromo: This is all fantastic for the consumer. It's free, they've got
access to all this stuff, they don't have to pay for it. What about...

Schmidt: It's a pretty good model.

Bartiromo: Yeah.

Schmidt: It works pretty well.

Bartiromo: What about the corporate customer? I understand that there are
tests going on right now. What are you hearing from that customer?

Schmidt: We're working with the corporate customers to do the same thing
inside their networks as we do with consumers. Now, corporate customers are
not the same thing as consumer customers. Corporate customers have a much
higher need for reliability, so we'll sign an agreement that guarantees a
certain level of service. But then we charge for it. So that's a case where
people are willing to pay for something which is free without the level of
reliability. They also have other needs. They need greater security, for all
the obvious reasons. And they also need better integration with all of the
other services that their companies have. This is a long process. It's not a
fast process. But it's very deeply valuable. And those customers we will
have for 20 or 30 or 40 years as they build into our model. We like that
model. It's an enterprise play. It's a business that I've been in for a long
time, and one which will ultimately be very, very lucrative through Google.

Bartiromo: Do you ever look back and think about what has happened to the
company? I mean, you, for a long time, have been really one of the most
admired companies out there, and then one of the sexy, sort of big growers out
there. And then as the company got bigger and bigger, people started to get
afraid of Google, they way they were afraid of Microsoft at one point as well.
Do you worry that that's the perception or that perception could take hold at
some point?

Schmidt: We do worry about perception because we want to make sure that
we are--that our perception is consistent with the way we way we behave.
Google runs on a set of principles, and every company has their own
principles. Ours are about doing no evil, it's about trying to serve the end
user. Larry Page, our--one of our founders, wrote a very thoughtful memo
about what it's like to be a big company. So, for example, he authored the
rule that we'll never trap people's data. So if you become dissatisfied with
us, we will make it easy for you to go to our competitor. Most companies
don't do that. So we're trying to find that balance between the structure of
a company and the need for predictability and so forth with our real mission,
which is to serve you as an end user. And if you're not happy with us,
keeping you trapped, that's a mistake. We want you to have another choice.

Bartiromo: Final question. Eric, let's face it. Microsoft wants Yahoo!.
How much of a disadvantage do you think Google is at if these two players get
together, what...(unintelligible)...two and third player in the market?

Schmidt: Well, a lot of people debate this. There's a big debate within
the company. People say, on the one hand, that we stay focused, which, of
course, we're very focused, while they're doing their maneuver. On the other
hand, people are concerned about the history, as I mentioned, and the
possibility of merger. So I don't think we really know yet. We debate it all
the time.

Bartiromo: Eric, would you like to add anything else?

Schmidt: No, I'm fine. Thank you very much.

Bartiromo: Thanks so much for joining us.

© 2008 CNBC.com

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