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tv   Book TV  CSPAN  June 6, 2011 6:30am-8:00am EDT

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the search engine is fantastic because it relies on this democracy of the web. what people think is important is what google identifies as important for a search and that was a huge break for red helped google. but has evolved would do with power from learning. it learns from the data. all be fixeds you do you choose a result or maybe say this
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doesn't work and the will put in another term. this is information google uses and learns about the world from that. let me look at behavior of other people. the google learns synonyms and by the same process learned languages from documents they use with translated text from one to another. it could learn by seeing algorithms how language works and that is out google translate works. you can see how artificial intelligence really is integral to what google does. there are other things you can say. google is a x company or a technology company or an internet company. it is an artificial intelligence company as well. >> i see more and more power it
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continues to get. but this is where they will increase and get in trouble, how much information they have about people and how they're using it and the conflict between what they are trying to do which is get what you want before you know what you want. they are trying hard. >> a zero query search like google. >> that is a little frightening. the culture of google had for a long time this very experimental and still had this, in the years you have been covering it my question is 24,000 people now, do you still feel that? do you still feel this is an experimental place where you can see a guy dressed as a cow?
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>> it is sort of taken for granted now. maybe april fools will start as you take it now. there is an april fool's infrastructure of google. people work for months at these things so you could see it is part of the culture but not so spontaneous. and a lot of things, these become institutionalized and people get used to them but it is still -- you don't see it outside the silicon valley line. individuals go inside and you see start ups like twitter. when you visit twitter in its early days they lifted a lot of amenities that google has with a full start up. people thinking it is a good idea to feed your employees.
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happier employees are most likely to be resentful employees. >> a lot of companies that think that way. i want to switch to culture innovation. they fought youtube because the video was going to be important. they saw that coming but at the start of the google video, it was outside the company. so couple things. do you think that would be a good acquisition? do you think it was a sign that the company was less innovative? >> definitely a sign that google as a bigger company cannot operate as nimbly and freely as it could when it was smaller. you can see that. naturally the youtube thing is a good example because as it turns
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out there is an amazing method by which you can compare the way google video, google products were developed and there was a big lawsuit that came -- viacom filed against google and you to where all the e-mails on both sides came out and you could see from the google side there were -- basically what managers of google videos and a lot of time doing was preparing to their bosses and talking to lawyers to make sure they weren't going to do something to get them in trouble. too much infringing content and on the other side these very few people on youtube and let's just put the stuff out. let's just go for it. youtube became much more successful and much better
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supported, certainly more resource heavy google product and google realized this to its credit and overpaid for youtube but at this point i actually think it looks like a pretty good purchase. youtube is the premiere video franchise of the web. google doesn't say whether it is profitable but clearly they have said it is making sizable revenue and employees make more ambitious plans for it, it could have a much bigger impact on our lives. >> when will it make a profit? there is more competition from things like hulu. there's a lot more competition. >> there are a lot of advantages like data centers. google is able to operate a
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video franchise at a much lower cost than its competitors. building those data centers google gets a huge savings so of a redesign the way data centers work. they a known fiber in the ground based on the biggest donor of fiber-optic cable in the world. it is important for google to do these things. a few years ago when analysts were saying they must spend $800 million a year on bandwidth, that was wrong. i don't know how much they did pay but it was clear that those estimates were way over the top. >> i want to get to a few things about where google is now. i want to talk about china which you brought up in the book. we haven't yet said don't be evil which is google's
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unofficial corporate motto that they came up with earlier in a little session. they had to come up with a motto. >> a google engineer in his meeting getting filled with meetings of value. they are writing these things. they help customers, the people and get it over with. it seems kind of negative. maybe we should get more positively. what is the right thing? for us here at google and world
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at large, they wanted google to be good for the world at large. they sacrifice profit to do the right thing for humanity. >> one of the early pr people, they you want to say that? difficult to uphold for any profitmaking enterprise but you run against those companies. >> if you are a communications person at google and you hear the statement don't be evil and you watch a secret handshake by the company's to something that gets out. review could see it will be used as a bludgeon against the company later on but i was surprise a lot of people at google even though it is the knee-jerk way of getting google, don't be eland do this or that,
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people use -- [talking over each other] >> the people i talked to insist it was a useful phrase and standard and way of thinking. >> it created fights within the company where surge a was not so with the regime was like as a child and was uncomfortable doing it in china. it sounds like from what you gathered, it was difficult. everything they did was a difficult decision. >> i spent a lot of time on the china issue. i was fascinated to see -- i was
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covering newsweek, the famous hearing in congress where the only holocausts survivor to serve in congress made elliott shred represent google and other companies, are you ashamed because you're going in and censoring? they did a very careful analysis and it is tough to say how much they were aware of the implications when they made a decision. it was a moral spreadsheet and in the spreadsheet, all these numbers and some of them were in the red. other numbers were in the black. we get more information into china and open china up. in the long run this compromise we make will be overwhelmed by the good that we bring and on balance you crank up all the
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cells in the spreadsheet and we are in the black. we are doing more good than harm. >> i was in china interviewing somebody who's ended up, a dissident who ended up in prison and he was happy the american companies were there. it definitely is the issue whether to be in china or not is complex. ultimately they have pulled back. i gather there was a big breached. what was about this security breach that occurred that made them finally say forget it? we are not playing that anymore. >> what happened with the security breach, you have to look back at all the things that happened before. the experience of google and china had been sufficiently troublesome that a lot of people who signed on to that spreadsheet idea, the idea that google did more good than harm
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had come to the conclusion that it isn't working and we should think about changing our minds on this and there was a significant number of people in the executive suites of google, executive cubicles or whatever you want to call them, who were in a low-key way arguing that we should rethink this. some other key people, things weren't working and their resigns from the china side that people were very unhappy with what they felt they were getting. the biggest issue in china, i spent a week interviewing people in beijing, the biggest problem among the chinese engineers had nothing to do with censorship. it was that they were not allowed access to google to work on the products and improve them like the engineers in the united
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states and every other international office where. they couldn't get access. they felt google didn't trust them. i talked to one executive who said that is the case. we don't want to put them in a position where families might be at risk, there could be -- we don't know. that is the way we are going to play it. and ironically it turned out a security violation was what many described as the straw that broke the camel's back. >> what was it about that that took some over the edge? there are still people who were saying stay. you are doing more good by bringing that here and some people worked with them felt that way. they felt abandoned.
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within china itself a public was saying you were not doing that well. you have 25% of the chinese search market. >> and they did that, overcoming a lot of obstacles. what happened was much worse than the very serious threat of some of google's best intellectual property and i don't know whether that is -- we know it was pretty important, the idea that whoever broke in, when you have to think it was the chinese government, whoever broke and was targeting the e-mails of dissidents, chinese dissidents who were using themail who were organizing protests or their personal
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business. that by all accounts infuriated sergei. he took it very personally. he said that. that was a terrible thing for him and for google. there was one person whose account was compromised who was at stanford. google wanted to get a laptop right away to see how this worked. they have a security over stanford, but the break-in was so sophisticated that it evaporated. mission impossible. self-destruct. it was gone by the time they got the laptop. >> there's a lot of cynicism about google's pull out of china among some of the press. i had discussions with people who felt it was an economic decision which is why they pull out and were looking for an excuse.
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>> i think google was making incursions' economically. there were people at google who came to believe there was a ceiling but as you said, a 30% market is pretty good. the real loss economically for google is there android phone system tea personal the system works very swell with google product and google surge systems. if you are using an android phone in china, it is good to google. >> the other thing unnoticed, i am inclined to believe sergei had strong feelings in the company but i saw an article about facebook doing exploration
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in talking to the chinese. i had a feeling it would happen. someone from google saying we were out of china. >> they're very emphatic saying they are not out of china. some of their products are still doing okay. to me the surge is the heart of google.earch is the heart of google. they have huge obstacles. >> as we move forward the company is facing increasing competition from facebook. the beauty of google has been this extraordinary engineering and intelligence and facebook comes along which is about engineering and intelligence but much more social and much more geared towards things that i
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wonder are sergei and larry going to be good at this? they had the opportunity early on to get into the social space. they didn't take it. is that something going forward about a real trouble area for the company moving forward? will larry take charge? is he really a grown-up? can he move them through this period and compete with facebook? >> people talk about this as the votes of people in facebook art touchy feely people. there engineers too. >> i sort of -- [talking over each other] >> might be a generational thing. mark zuckerberg and the internet is a full generation younker than larry and sergei. there inger than larry and sergei. there in there yeadon 30s.
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they are ceo page. can they successfully integrate those products? now they understand how important it is -- in their previous efforts they didn't treat that with the same priorities as they are treating it now. you saw as facebook became more successful facebook is the giant. now google is the attention focused, very keenly on this area and google has assets to bring to bear. they know a lot about people who use it. they know a lot about their contacts. going to try to figure out when
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you search for something you will see one of the folks in your social circle likes the results that came up on your search page. google is committed and larry is committed to this product. >> the other company is apple which is probably of any company the smartest about how users use things. i went to a party one time trying and iphone and someone looked at me and said it is like bringing someone from google and someone from apple to a party. the iphone is better at parties. it is much more user-friendly so android is doing incredibly well. will that change? how well do you think they are equipped to move forward and be
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a little more savvy about how to deal with the public? they have never been good -- when they rolled out the nexus, nobody could call up and say my phone isn't working and larry was a like let them eat cake. >> there view of customer support has always been people can figure it out on their own. at one point i told a story where someone was figuring out how many people in customer support they should ask larry for. they figured out people could help each other almost like leaving a desert island and figure out how to make your own house and the manual is somewhere on the mainland. in consumer products that doesn't work so well. social stuff is the internet. google bose the internet. facebook does so well and they
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are so entrenched, they are not going away. they're not going to do a myspace and ignore what google does the way myspace was oblivious to how well facebook is doing. at best where google will succeed is if facebook says what google is doing is so important that we have to sit down with them and share some information. what really drives google crazy on facebook is hundreds of millions of people, some it will be a billion people creating information that is important to them that google can't put in its index when they say find me something. >> facebook is bringing back advertising with so much information about you that they can target a display ad. >> facebook doesn't have that
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magic quote combination that was up earlier in their advertising. people would be happier if there were no ads on facebook. i went to that famous session about how to advertise. we are going to give you as a chance to put yourself in the conversation between our users, between friends. i don't want pepsi-cola in the conversation. >> i think you are right. it will be interesting to see how this plays out. there is one thing before i get to questions from the audience about wary as he takes the helm. he can be a loyal arrogant. simon and schuster call that the google both sell, instant arrogance. larry says i am trying to do good, digitize the world's books
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which is good and yet i wonder if that is going to get him into trouble too, without realizing you are going to hit up against industries. people write books and those books are valuable and sergei doesn't get it that people work hard on books. your book for example. did you sense that about him? it came across in the book. >> when you talk about larry page or steve jobs, there is the good steve and the bad steve. there is only one steve. you can't teach everything out. the aspect of his personality, some of the reasons why he is the greatest of the ceo.
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the less arrogant blinders to the effects of what he does, he knows it is a valued to the world to have this information anyone can search and that is important. he is focused on that. may be he can get the concerns of authors but when he sees them going up there and complaining, that is the way he sees it. he doesn't know how much patience works. people talk about privacy. google is concerned about privacy but a lot of people at google don't think much of privacy. they think those people are playing some angle or something like that. in a way, that enables google to charge forward and get things done but it won't help too much when they are fighting antitrust charges or justifying what they
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do in regulatory or legal sense. >> as we move forward there will be more of that. let's take some questions. the first one, certainly a good question. how will google change after eric schmidt believes? basically this week. >> larry started as ceo on april 4th which is january 20th which was the day it was announced. immediately after that, larry jumped in and started rethinking the way google is managed and stepped things up in certain areas. so thinking how google can reclaim its nimbleness. in another sense things won't change so much in that larry's values were always those values
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that drove google. people challenge his love of speed and scale and artificial intelligence. in that sense maybe google would be more of what it is. >> this memo that he sent out, when people are needing they should be typing at their computers and reminded me that the same story about buried dillard seeing larry page and the entire time he was on his blackberry. >> that was interesting. that was one of the glories of google, the idea that people could do their work and attend a meeting and focus in on the right time and zone out and answer the voluminous e-mails google has to deal with. >> eric schmidt's position on apple in conflict with android
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development. >> i was talking to him, interviewing him around that period. at the time google was developing android eric would have to leave the room in the middle of a board meeting. i explored the google/apple relationship to some degree because something went terribly wrong. steve jobs came to feel he had been betrayed. his android was not what he thought was going to be. what he envisioned as a great pair marching off to to rule the digital world, they were entirely complimentary and he even said to his employees at one point, why are they doing a
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phone? eric will always tell me we have it all figured out. i leave the room and we are competitors in some ways, happens all the time but clearly there was more going on beneath the surface to the point where the relationship of fractured. >> steve jobs was kind of mentoring when they were younger and they wanted him as ceo. >> he walks with sergei and steve jobs was respected superhighly at google. merce --marissa takes her people to learn how is done.
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despite all this you will find -- you won't find anyone at google who doesn't admire steve jobs. a lot of people wish that some of that could find its way to google. >> what shocked you the most about google? if any thing. did anything shock you? >> we talk about the free management style. i was not shocked but surprise at a number of internal systems that they have whereby people have to report their goal on a quarterly basis and there is a big fear of new product. so for a company which cherishedes the bottom of style there is a lot of paperwork. ..
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>> what percentage you did, what number. out of 10, if you do 10, that's not too great always because that shows you are not ambitious enough, you were sandbagging it. like a six or seven is an okay number at google. it's one of those terms where you use it, they have these whole series of acronyms. that's another way that people
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talk freely like master that vernacular and you say your gps and okay. >> speaking in a whole other -- >> he's one of us. >> every company has its flaws. what is google's? and can it be fixed? >> well, we touched on a couple of them. i think in terms of their effect on the world of there is definitely something that doesn't served google well. i think just its size. google likes to think of itself as david but there's a lot of goliaths in the company. >> the rumor is there might be a justice department investigation into it, to which i should add come and you mentioned this in the book, that the ceo of
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microsoft hates google msn everything in his power to sort of put out there that it is a monopoly. >> i find it so ironic -- [laughter] [applause] >> i covered microsoft and bill gates. i mentioned during that time, and i had some amazing conversations with bill gates. and i would say then, at that point i would've said this is something that bill gates would not wish on his worst enemy. i take that back. [laughter] >> i think it's steve who is the one who really don't give a couple of reported scenes in the. >> we can't repeat what happened. >> on tv, but i do know that when i was about microsoft server years ago and i saw steve palmer, this was we were google have gotten really big and he said, google is a nice little company. unlike what you think what he said we used to be a nice little
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company and then suddenly we were a monopoly. this is what he said to me so clearly. i remember that because i watched them move forward. how to see google google's recent multimillion dollar has to retain employees effective morale. >> that's a great question. there's been reports to keep some of its key talent. google is getting remarkably huge sums of money. and certainly there is a huge competition now for the most talented people in the valley. google hires very talented people and they tried to get good employees of other companies. i think it could be a big problem there. people come in to google, especially the past few years, they don't get the financial gains that the early buglers had.
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you were at google, a couple of years before that, you in a different financial bubble than even someone who got a very nice package coming in a couple years ago. and google is doing its best to try to retain people. the big difficulty really is and how much money you give to someone there. google selects people who are likely to get fed up with the bureaucracy, so the people, the exact kind of people they look for are the kinds of people who, when a company gets too big, or a great opportunity to start a new company comes up, says i'm out of here. i can't say how many people believe google who say, it's a great company, it's been a great experience, i love the company, see you later. >> in the book you talk about people who left who went on to found for a couple foursquare
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because they couldn't get things done within the bureaucracy of google. and that being a problem. but did affect how people are feeling they are? do people feel like hey, i'm a google? >> i think people really, the employees, really like being there. there are some, a lot of people i talked to our people came in a couple years ago, a young engineer come in and he will find himself or herself working at some and product that may not be the most innovative thing they're doing. google has to do this. whether top executives in engineering, and he says this is a very difficult thing for us. we have 12 people man these portals. these people have to do these things to keep the core of google going, and i have to sometimes tell people you're doing this when you would rather be, you know, programming self driving cars, something like that. >> self driving car, i was
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hoping as i said earlier i was on, which i was on the road of self driving cars not because traffic was so terrible getting here. but that is, as they move forward as the interest, to really do this self driving car, and probably a place where the innovation does continue with projects like that. >> i thought very encouraging projects like that, a lot of people say don't drive a car. do a search. they think of an example of google going far left field. i actually think that the autonomous car is well in keeping with what google is. it's an information processing device. it gathers information about the world around it. it draws information from google's index on what's around the corner because google maps all these things, right? and its artificial intelligence and it's very much in keeping with a lot of google there. so i think, more and more google
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interprets its mission very, very broadly, but those core elements are very much in keeping. >> what is google's biggest threat? >> well, in the short term i would say it's a social thing and facebook. in the long-term really, it's how much its great success in this area search and ads stops it from dominating the next, the innovator level. you could say they had a mini league to overcome that in the mobile world. that could've been a huge, huge problem for google. at a certain point in the not terribly distant future that there will be more searches made on mobile devices than you will be on laptops and desktops.
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if google was in place very well in the mobile world that would have been a giant problem. they manage over that little shift there. a pretty big shift, but not as big as other shifts that are yet to come. it's very difficult for a company that is a very, very successful, in one area to dominate in the next revolution. in essence that's what's happening with facebook but i think down the road there will be bigger revolutions that google be even more challenged to succeed in. >> as we watch what's happening with microsoft, they've had a harder time and the world is changing. in the book i think you set one point that they didn't cease the value of search and a lot of cloud. you really missed it spent i tell a story, at one point not long after gmail came out, bill gates visited by "newsweek" office -- >> a great story. >> his subject, the thing you want to talk about in 2004
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without spam will be gone in a year. is not exactly nostra thomas. [laughter] >> but we finish our conversation. we were sitting in my at his office and we're just talking about the products we used and he saw, he had gmail. he asked me about you and i mentioned i'm about two-thirds felt like quota of gmail, a gigabyte or whatever his. and he was done. he said how can that happen. they must be doing something wrong and how to calculate it. what is your enough, the movie? and again, he was very upset at this. because the way google is doing and things like that. and i think maybe you just focus on the technical issue at e-mails were stored. but in the larger sense the way he thought e-mail was basically there's a limited amount of storage. i'm sure bill gates intellectually understand how it
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the price of storage has gone down but he hasn't internalized it in a way we totally understood down to his bones that storage is free now. and you could do something like gmail and it's not a great cost to your company. >> i mean, there could be that moment in the future for google where they just, they don't see it. has anyone objectively compare the quality of google search today versus a few years ago? >> google. [laughter] >> and they tell me it's better. [laughter] >> they must know what they are talking about. this is actually a great question. please comment on the role of speed and latency in google's success. spent as a medevac i thought you going to ask me to read something in the and because i think that's what i was going to choose to do. and i think, i will say that one
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for later, but let me say it's very, very important for google's speed as a feature and a very important one. >> this is a curious question because i just figured it was all a secret. to what extent is googles formula for success still a secret? >> well, when you say it's one of for success, they are not sharing the algorithms, but -- >> harder to get. >> the formula, you could read this book, but -- [laughter] >> it's discoverable. what it is. google is to some degree opening to the outside. i compared to a lobster tenderly everyone shares everything but there's a hard shell. in other respects they're pretty open. i think in the last couple of years they have been more open, instead use go black boxes they made an effort to more communicative about and make little videos and talk about how
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the app system works, if you go to the papers you can understand things about how the search engine works and there's even some papers and things about, a couple things on the data center. so i think that if you reverse engineering google you could learn a lot. as i did really about how they have achieved success. duplicating this is another matter. >> this person gave me a tripleheader because the next and what is it about the formula? to other companies just can't innovate. >> some of the other things they can in some they can. you can't build a data, infrastructure data center from scratch. it takes billions of dollars and it's a lot of innovations but they're not sharing with us. and they have -- there's an infrastructure you can easily match if you wanted to be the next google. >> the third question i really like him and you're going to like this one, too, he would you pick to be larry in a social network type film about google?
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[laughter] >> no, i'm going to have to rely on my not encyclopedia -- jakey gelineau comes to mind. maybe would be good. >> i think jake gelineau. i'm that kind of think like who else really, jake would be good as larry. i don't know. >> michael sarah. >> what was the purpose of firing served from mci. he hasn't done much politically? is that an internet figurehead will come or what is the intro thinking there speak as i can never chance to wider internet company can have a chance to hire the founder of the net you take it. and actually it is, i think people rely on him for his
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wisdom and i think he's a powerful force, he's based in the d.c. area, to talk to policymakers and people who watch google come in that sense. people listen to them. so i think it was a good higher. >> unit, actually we didn't talk about the whole verizon situation. and that's the more sudden did in him because he had been previously a huge net neutrality advocate, and i think that's what these places where i think a lot of people who serve believe in the evil so they got turned around to surrounding network neutrality that one website shouldn't be favored over another. >> right. >> and all of a sudden google has this turned around. >> i remember, finally did weigh in on the side of this employer, people were wondering, and this was the question from net neutrality that basically google and verizon together reached the
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idea that they'll have met a guy, maybe not so quickly in the mobile sense, we won't enforce it so strongly in mobile which became what the fcc eventually adopted in december when they adopted rules about net neutrality, which are currently being litigated by verizon. and that troubled a lot of people, and you have to say some degree it's a business decision. verizon is a very powerful partner. >> going back to this, they continue to grow and really, not to be evil, a lot of people felt that this was, in fact, exactly that, it was a business decision. it wasn't a decision that any end that many consumer advocates felt was going to benefit the consumer. it was a good decision for
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google. >> they are taking the position now that google is in setting the standard so high, people criticize it for making this business decision. right? business that might be good for google but now people expect it to sacrifice profits for humanity. i don't know. >> no, i think it's complex as you get bigger. it's a company now that issued you. google's original mission is to organize the world information in useful and accessible ways. how strong is that mission inside the company today? >> i think it's pretty strong. a lot of people invoke it. and they say, they are explaining this product or that product and say since our mission is to organize or gather and organize the world information and make it accessible, this is what this product makes sense.
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so i feel that's pretty much it that google. it's a useful mission. a useful focus for them, and one which i think it's employees are happy to embrace. >> you know, accessing information and it's a good mission. it is a useful mission. served them well. now, here's a question, you know, you got from writing about what kind of rock star to another kind of rock star. how did writing for rolling stone affect your work on this book? we're just talking are about he interviewed bruce springsteen as one of his -- how did you go from bruce to larry? >> one of the greatest interviews i did, the grace quote i forgot was when jerry garcia tobe technology is the new drugs. [laughter] >> and i think that the
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excitement, when i was a teenager, the music i listen to was this great music of the late '60s, and it was inspiring in lots of ways. and i think technology now, this is what i feel so lucky to be writing about, have been writing about it during these past couple of decades. it has the same kind of excitement. it's transformative, can do a lot of good. it's got its dark side as the music did, but it's an amazingly reach deal -- reach deal to look at. and people are the rock stars. >> but some of them. sometimes they're not so good. >> actually i love talking to the engineers. a lot of times i will go into a meeting with an engineer and someone will say, he's pretty much an engineer, you know?
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but i like talking to those people. and i think i've had success in learning from them. >> i want to let you take a moment to read a little section of your book. this had to do with the question about -- >> right. so, it's about speed. speed of been an obsession at google. it was almost -- is always measuring everything at his core he cares about latency. more accuracy or accurately, he's always trying to remove it, like lady "macbeth" washing deal from her hand. was he was washing down the street and he suddenly dragged her into a random in a café with maybe three machines. immediately he began time how long it took webpages to though to a browser. whether due to pathological inpatients or dead on convictions, steve is estimated
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as a factor in successful products. page of an existing faster delivery from the beginning. the minimalism of google's homepage allowing for lightning quick loading as a classic example. but early google also in the by storing cache burdens of webpages on its own servers. engineers worked for page learn quickly enough of his party. quote when people do demos and us love i know they cannot sometimes, 11,000, 22000. that tends to get peoples attention. actually if your product can be measured in seconds you already failed. one time and he was doing and early gmail demo. page made a face and told him it was way too slow. what kind of objective? charging the reload took at least 600 milliseconds. but i thought you can't know that. we got back to his own office he check the server logs. 600 milliseconds. [laughter] e-mailed it so i started testing
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myself. without too much effort i could estimate times to that position. i could tell if it was 300 or 700 or whatever. that happened throughout the company. >> well, steven levy, there's probably a million more questions i have from the audience and that i have, but i guess those people with those questions will have to read the book. which was a great read. >> thank you, it was great. [applause] >> for more on steven levy and his work, visit stevenlevy.com. spent we ask what are you reading this summer? here's what you have to say.
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>> tom allen is president and the american association of publishers, former congressman, democrat from maine. congressman allen, described if you would the state of the book industry as you see it today. >> well, exciting would be one where. i mean, it's a time of enormous
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transformation in this industry. primarily because of new technology and the movement of content from being ink on paper to digital. and so what's happening is that people have been able to take in, to read our material in a lot of different ways on a lot of different devices whatever they may be. and it's very exciting time because the industry is changing so fast. lots of opportunities and significant risks. >> are people reading less than it used to? >> i don't think so. i think in some ways that proliferation of the reader is leading them to read more. certainly people can be impulse buyers 24/7, or at least those hours when they are away. and we see a very dramatic rise in the number of e-books, revenues from e-books. and i think the reading, reading is picking up. he fed the example of some young adult books, the harry -- harry
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potter series, have gotten him into reading law books. and i think that is a healthy thing. >> tom allen, the advent of e-books, has it hurt the publishers to? >> no. the publishers are really -- they are neutral about how people take their material. and what you see is some decline probably because of the recession, less so probably because of the e-book, the increase in e-books. some decline in hardback, but you do see a significant rise in e-books. e-book revenues and the number of units sold. so i think the publishers are feeling as long as they can get the business model right, they're going to be okay. and i would say also they would say as long as piracy does not come, become the kind of government was to the music industry. >> tom allen, as a former
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congressman what kind of involvement are you still have with the hill, particularly now as president of the association of american publishers? >> well, i'm involved in, you know, making the case occasionally to members of congress or to the executive branch about what the needs of the industry are. to give you one example, digital piracy is a significant problem for the industry. it could be worse in the future than it is today. and so we really need from congress -- legislation from congress that would allow the u.s. attorney general to go after some of these rogue websites. what i mean by that are websites that basically make a living by uploading copyrighted material, and then allowing others to take it down for free. and i'll give you another issue. we are very worried about one part of the consumer product, safety improvement act, which affects children's books. we're trying to make sure that
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there's a reasonable testing program for children's books that won't sort of early disrupt the market and still make sure that our kids are safe, which they are, because, frankly, books are not a threat. >> what's the issue? >> the issue has to do -- welcome you in a few years ago when there was that big scare about lead in children's toys from china? it doesn't say children's toys, it says children's products. and that's so wide that it brings in clothing and books and a whole host of other products that are really, don't contain lead. and children's books is one example of a product that has no risk to children, but you can't say it never contains the tiniest amount of lead. so you have to figure out how to work with that legislation in a practical way. >> tom allen, what's your view on the on settlement of the google books am? >> well, there's not much i can say about that except the judge
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asked us to consider another way of resolving the amount of the ongoing conversation. that's about all i can say. that's about it. >> how long do you see the publishing industry being in the transition it's been in for the last several years? >> a while, because books as you and i know them, whether they are educational books or the kind of books would buy in the bookstore, are not going away. we're going to printed books for as long as we are around. on the other hand, the transformation, the movement to digital is providing customers with ways to read novels or study educational materials, and all those different ways. and that's going to continue. i think that one of the most interesting and most fundamental differences is that 10 years from now, the way our students
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are first in higher at and then in the k-12 sector will be dramatically different. much of it will be with the computer on an interactive program so students can learn at their own pace, get feedback from the program itself, with the instructor getting all sorts of help from the publishers, materials, all of them. that i think is going to transform and improve american education. and so for that kind of transition it's going to go on for quite a while, and in the consumer sector where people are reading fiction and nonfiction, these readers are continuing to get better, more varied, and i think you will see at some point different content, more of a multimedia experience sometimes coming in what was traditionally thought of as a book. >> former congressman tom allen, now president of the american association of publishers. this is book tv on c-span2. ..

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