Entrepreneur Watch

Justice Dept. about to take on Google/Yahoo deal? Google's Craig Silverstein argues back.

The Wall Street Journal reports today that DOJ is  showing "signs the government may be preparing to recommend an antitrust challenge to the deal."

You have to be a subscriber to read the full article, but the top is here.

PC World adds: "10 members of the House of Representatives Judiciary Antitrust Task Force wrote their own letter to the DOJ, urging the agency to "closely review" the ad deal."

This is a tough issue. Google dominates online advertising, so there is natural resistance to such a deal. But it's designed to help save Yahoo. Yahoo will still run its own ads, but Google's will be added to the mix, and are likely to be more profitable. Quite simply, Google ads are better at relevancy.

Google and Yahoo do not at this point need DOJ permission. they voluntarily submitted the deal to DOJ to try and head off problems. But DOJ could try to stop it by filing a suit.

Google has created a Web site making its arguments. The summary argument:

This is a non-exclusive deal that will strengthen Yahoo!.

Ad prices will continue to be set by competitive auction.

The deal is win-win for consumers, advertisers and publishers: more and better ads.

Some of the details, according to the site:

The deal will let Yahoo! show more ads on pages where it previously showed no ads or only a few ads

Yahoo won't be able to just pick the ads with the highest bids:

Under the terms of our agreement Yahoo! won't be able to see the current auction prices for Google ads, and Google won't be able to see Yahoo!'s prices.

And it takes to task -- really, seems to imply that the methodology was either naive or rigged -- the study that newspapers and other organization point to saying ad prices will rise. It fails to consider the fact that ad prices are set by auction, that it mistakenly claims Yahoo will be able to see which ads are priced higher, and that it "mistakenly assumes that Yahoo! will serve Google ads for as many of its search queries as possible, contradicting Yahoo!'s own statements to the contrary.

There are plenty of advocates againt it. The PC World article reports on one:

The Center for Digital Democracy (CDD), a privacy and consumer advocacy group, on Thursday sent a letter to Senator Herb Kohl, a Wisconsin Democrat and chairman of the Senate Antitrust Subcommittee, asking the lawmaker to call on the DOJ to either oppose the deal or put significant conditions on the Google and Yahoo partnership.

Regulation-happy Europeans are especially wary of the deal, including the International Advertising Association, the EU, and the World Association of Newspapers. Although IAA admits it doesn't know the specifics of the deal, its main argument seems to be: "In principle and in practice, monopolistic media control and pricing has not been good for the industry." 

Now, come on. Shouldn't you at least get the details before you start filing complaints? This is absurd.

Wired has a brief article on the IAA complaint, plus links to other articles about complainers. Ironically, I had to close a pop-up ad for MSN in order to see the article. And people wonder why Google ads are so much more effective?

Much of the criticism is disingenuous. Back when I was covering Microsoft and its own problems with DOJ, Microsoft was arguing that a monopoly is not illegal in the U.S., only abuse of monopoly power is illegal. Now that Microsoft argues Google should be stopped from expanding its legally-obtained monopoly, it should show us where the illegal part comes in.

I recently had the opportunity to ask Google's Craig Silverstein, who has been with the company from the beginning, what he thought of the issue of ad prices going up if Google dominates too much. The theory is that if there's only one significant auction, people will bid higher, because everyone goes to that auction. 

Silverstein doesn't buy that argument:

"That argument makes no sense to me at all. I wonder how they justify it. The way auction systems work is supply and demand. [Having more auctions] doesn't increase the supply [of places to advertise.] This is, like,  very basic economics."

He notes that the argument seems to be saying competition will be lower on the less popular ad system. But that's because, he argues,  the less effective one doesn't give you the retun on your money to justify higher prices. People only bid higher on Google ads because they get their money's worth. "Even when ads are more expensive, they more than pay for themselves."

Essentially he's saying: If you want to compete in online advertising, make your ads more relevant and worth more money! Are Microsoft and Yahoo listening?

The most interesting point to me is that if this deal is blocked, it won't hurt Google at all. It will hurt an already-suffering Yahoo. Maybe the deal would even teach Yahoo a thing or two about how to run an effective advertising system.

In the meantime, Yahoo has released details of its new display advertising platform, called APT, to simplify the process of buying display ads. NYT has an article. It's skeptical of the benefit.

Stats and reviews of the Google (Android) phone from around the world

UPDATE:

Some stats and reviews:

You can get the list of features from T-Mobile here.

CNET does a comparison to the iPhone and talks about what's different.

Some highlights:

"It turns out that the G1 does not have a 3.5-mm headset jack, which is a big downside considering it does have a music player with access to the Amazon MP3 store. And because it doesn't have stereo Bluetooth either, you might have to cough out some extra cash for a headphone adapter."

"the G1 has something called one-click contextual search, which lets you search your contacts as well as the Web just by typing in a few letters and hitting Enter."

"Another important factor: The G1 has copy and paste."

"G1 has e-mail and instant messaging with special preference given to Gmail and Google Talk (To answer one of the comments, the G1 will also offer IM for AIM, Yahoo, and MSN)"

"if you're a Gmail fan, you'll love the push Gmail on the G1. Also unlike the iPhone, the G1 does have multimedia messaging, plus you can multitask applications while chatting. "

"Here's where the G1 really makes a difference. It comes with Google Maps Street View built-in, providing you with a street view of any location covered with Google Maps. It also comes with compass mode with the scene on the screen moving as you do."

"One of the big news of the day is that the G1 is the first phone to offer a mobile version of Amazon's MP3 store, providing a viable alternative to the iTunes store on the iPhone."

"The G1 comes with 1GB of internal memory, which is pretty small for a smart phone, but it does come with an expansion slot. "

"G1 does have voice dialing capabilities."

First impressions from Walt Mossberg:

"the first real competitor to the iPhone."

"the G1 complements its touch screen with a physical keyboard, the lack of which has made the iPhone a non-starter for some users. ... The keys are a bit flat, and you have to reach your right thumb around a bulging portion of the phone’s body to type, but it’s a real keyboard. "

"I found typing on this keyboard to be OK, but not great."

"it is tightly tied to Google’s web-based email, contacts and calendar programs. In fact, you must have a Google (GOOG) account to use the phone, and can only synchronize the phone’s calendar and address book with Google online services. "

"Unlike the iPhone, it doesn’t work with Microsoft Exchange, and it can’t physically be synced with a PC-based calendar or contacts program, like Microsoft Outlook."

"It’s stubby and chunky, nearly 30% thicker and almost 20% heavier than the iPhone."

"Programs appear in a virtual drawer you slide open via a tab at the bottom of the screen, and notifications of new messages and the like can be read by sliding the top bar of the screen down."

"You can view a portion of a page, and use a zoom control and finger-dragging to see the rest, or you can view the whole page in miniature, as on the iPhone. In the latter mode, however, you can’t simply use Apple’s technique of tapping or “pinching” to zoom in on a portion of a page. You must move around a virtual lens to pick out a part of the page on which to focus."

"The G1 has a couple of other things the iPhone omits: copy and paste functionality and a so-called MMS program, which sends photos to other phones without using email."

"It also gives you far more flexibility in organizing your desktop, or home screen, than the iPhone, or almost any phone I’ve seen. In addition to placing icons for programs there, you can place everything from individual contacts, music playlists, folders, web pages, and more."

"G1 lacks a built-in video player — you have to download one from the third-party software store."

"it lacks the iPhone’s ability to change the orientation of a web page or photo by just turning the phone. You also can’t move through groups of photos by just “flicking,” as on the iPhone."

"unlike Apple’s product, the G1 has a removable battery."

From the Telegraph in the UK:

"The G1’s user interface is slick and simple, and provides one-touch access to Google’s search engine. And, unlike Apple’s iPhone, it’s able to run applications simultaneously"

"The built-in compass means users will quickly and easy be able to orient themselves when in an unfamiliar area"

"Sergey Brin and Larry Page, said that they hoped future versions of the operating system would offer really clever location-specific information and services, and new applications that expand the mobile internet experience."

"Some of the applications that have already been built for the Android platform, [include] a carbon-footprint tracker and song lyrics generator"

Telegraph also does some side-by-side comparisons with iPhone. (158 grams vs. 133 grams for the iphone, screen 3.2 in. vs. 3,5 in...)

From phones review:

"The downside of the G1 Android phone is that it doesn’t have stereo Bluetooth and it won’t do video capture, you will require a Gmail account and the weirdest thing is that they are saying that the G1 Android phone will not be sold at stores outside of a 2.5 mile radius of T-Mobiles 3G coverage area."

From Mobile Burn:

"Since the display makes use of capacitive touchscreen^(INFO) technology, it can be activated by very light touches, something that all of HTC's Windows Mobile smartphones have been, thus far, unable to claim. When the device is held horizontally and the display is slid up, the G1's full QWERTY keyboard is revealed in a way that many T-Mobile Sidekick users will appreciate."

"The keyboard on the T-Mobile G1 is very spacious, offering 5 full rows of keys in a very traditional layout that most everybody should be familiar with. Another Sidekick like touch is the G1's trackball, which eases one-handed navigation chores."

From Times Online in the UK:

"The T-Mobile G1 is great. The iPhone is better."

" Its main plus points are that the G1 happily steals the best features of the iPhone and Blackberry ... It has the easy-to-navigate and intuitive touchscreen, like the iPhone. But like the Blackberry it also has a qwerty keyboard, which slides out, and a “trackball” which helps you navigate around the screen."

"at first glance, you feel that more could have been done to make this a beautiful looking gadget. It feels and looks plastic and clunky. Choosing the G1 over the iPhone is the equivalent of choosing comfortable slippers over designer shoes."

A Quick Review from Pocket Lint:

"The good:	Open platform OS, HSDPA
The bad:	Handset isn't the sexiest you'll have seen, no cut and paste, no Flash video support, no flash for the camera, no dedicated headphone jack"

Why the Google/HTC/T-Mobile phone makes a difference.

The G1 phone is here, and I expect a lot of people will soon be singing its shortcomings. Neither Google nor HTC are insanely great designers that wow you with their imagination like Steve Jobs does. 

As I've said before, the real importance of this phone is to offer an open design, to let people create new applications and let users decide what apps to install, rather than letting Apple or Verizon or whoever dictate what we can and cannot have.

I was trying to find the location of a theater in San Francisco the other night and it took so long for my Verizon phone to launch VZ Navigator that I stumbled upon the theater before I got it working. And the phone dupports every online email service except Gmail.

Just having a phone with my Google services almost makes it worth signing up for T-Mobile.

Quite simply, this phone will be as popular among heavy Google users as an oasis in the desert. It will grow from there.

I'll dig up some highlights from the reviewers shortly, after an appointment I have to run to.

Cisco buys Jabber, attacks the Tower of Internet Babel

This was a smart move by Cisco. Jabber IM users can exchange messages with all the major IM players, including Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Apple. The article doesn't say if it's compatible with AOL's IM. The growth in IM will be in services that allow cross-communication, moving the world toward a single standard.

Or all the systems will work out cross-communications capabilities. I don't IM (I know, I'm backwards) so I don't know where the standards are right now.

Cisco already owns PostPath, an online collaboration software company. We need standards there, too -- among calendaring systems, for example. I like that when someone with Google calendar sends me an invite (via email) to an event, it appears on both our calendars as soon as I accept. That should happen with all calendars and email.

Time for the Tower of Internet Babel to fall!

Do not fear the Google

Randall Stross at the New york Times has a really good article on all the paranoia about the Google-Yahoo deal.

Everyone from Microsoft to newspaper publishers to ad agencies keep complaining that it will concentrate more power in Google's hands and either raise ad prices or knock out all profitability in advertising.

Says Stross:

 Google’s critics — led by Microsoft, the major search-engine rival that was left out — seem to sense that this pact is a chance to depict Google as a price-controlling monster.

I feel for newspapers and their loss of revenues. But Google is not at fault. They need to start figuring out how to make money from online advertising to replace their declining revenues from print advertising.

Newspapers are probably more devastated by Craig's List than by Google. Should we crack down on Craig Newmark?

As Stross points out, Google's ads are set by auction. This deal was created to help save Yahoo. Google will supply Yahoo with ads it would not have gotten otherwise, and the ads will be more relevant and generate higher revenues to Yahoo.

It's interesting to note that the only search company that has gained market share since Google started is Ask.com, which has an advertising deal with Google.

I've heard the argument that fewer auctions mean higher bids, but I don't buy it. Sure, you can get a cheaper ad placed in an auction that doesn't work as well as Google's, but it won't give you the same returns. Buyers can decide where they get the best value for their money.

If Microsoft (or Yahoo, for that matter) can figure out how to make their ads more effective, it will have nothing to worry about.

Our scary economy

This article in the New York Times is one of the scariest stories about the state of the U.S. economy around. 

Fed chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, laid out the potentially devastating ramifications of the financial crisis before congressional leaders on Thursday night:

As Senator Christopher J. Dodd, ... chairman of the Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, put it ... the congressional leaders were told “that we’re literally maybe days away from a complete meltdown of our financial system, with all the implications here at home and globally.”

This is beginning to sound like the start of a new Great Depression.

On the same day, columnist Thomas L. Friedman reminds us of one of Ronald Reagan's "funny" jokes.

“The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’ ”

All I can say is: Help!

Predictably, there are plenty of conservative columnists, including David Brooks, who assure us that lack of regulation did NOT lead to the current crisis.

In the first place, the idea that our problems stem from light regulation and could be solved by more regulation doesn’t fit all the facts. The current financial crisis is centered around highly regulated investment banks, while lightly regulated hedge funds are not doing so badly. Two of the biggest miscreants were Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which, in theory, “were probably the world’s most heavily supervised financial institutions,” according to Jonathan Kay of The Financial Times.

Sure, but the the problem started with the mortgage lending industry, with no controls over whom it lent money to, and now taxpayers have to pay billions -- or trillions -- of dollars to bail out these free enterprises. 

AIG unwisely got into a new type of "insurance" in which it had no expertise, the credit default swap market. As a former money manager from Drexel wrote: Nobody knows this market’s real size, or who owes what to whom, because there is no central clearinghouse or regulator for it.

And we get to bail out AIG, too.

After years of resisting proposed government regulations to improve gas mileage, auto makers are now suffering because they don't have enough high-mileage and hybrid vehicles on the market. The regulations were justified on environmental and oil dependency grounds, and contrary to the auto industry's insistence, would NOT have hurt them in the long run, but would have given them a head start in the right direction.

I know Silicon Valley loves to be libertarian, but I like to remind people that if they'd like to see truly unregulated business, they should read Charles Dickens. Child labor, debtor's prisons, abuse of workers and corporate finance, no environmental controls.

I was at a political conference a year ago, in which Tony Perkins of "Always On" professed the dogma of government-can't-do-anything right. "I know the folks at Google, and believe me, they didn't get where they are with government help."

Oh, no? I was compelled to stand up and remind him that the research for Google was started under the National Science Foundation-funded "Digital Libraries" program at Stanford.

The U.S. government created the Internet, DOD funding kick-started Silicon Valley, and new regulations bailed us out of the Great Depression. Government funding is now kick-starting sustainable energy programs, and wihtout environmental laws, we'd look more like China.

I remember an article I did for Business Week decades ago about J.R. Simplot, the Idaho potato king who made a fortune selling frozen fries to McDonald's. A shareholder once asked him when he was going to stop polluting the Snake River, and he replied, "When the government makes me stop."

Yes, there are many things governments shouldn't do, and there are a lot of programs we should get rid of, including subsidies and tax breaks to oil producers and corn farmers.

We need smart government regulations with smart politicians to enforce them. The problem isn't government regulation, it's the system that regulates. We need reform, an end to earmarks and the ability to end old programs that no longer work.

Wouldn't now be a good time to start thinking about how that might be done?

Jeb Bartlet on Barack Obama

One of the most interesting columns Maureen Dowd didn't write was on Sunday, when she asked Aaron Sorkin to conjure up a conversation between West Wing's Jeb Bartlet and Barack Obama. 

He brilliantly articulates what most Obama supporters are feeling right now:

OBAMA What would you do?

BARTLET GET ANGRIER! Call them liars, because that’s what they are. Sarah Palin didn’t say “thanks but no thanks” to the Bridge to Nowhere. She just said “Thanks.” You were raised by a single mother on food stamps — where does a guy with eight houses who was legacied into Annapolis get off calling you an elitist? And by the way, if you do nothing else, take that word back. Elite is a good word, it means well above average. I’d ask them what their problem is with excellence. While you’re at it, I want the word “patriot” back. McCain can say that the transcendent issue of our time is the spread of Islamic fanaticism or he can choose a running mate who doesn’t know the Bush doctrine from the Monroe Doctrine, but he can’t do both at the same time and call it patriotic. They have to lie — the truth isn’t their friend right now. Get angry. Mock them mercilessly; they’ve earned it. McCain decried agents of intolerance, then chose a running mate who had to ask if she was allowed to ban books from a public library. It’s not bad enough she thinks the planet Earth was created in six days 6,000 years ago complete with a man, a woman and a talking snake, she wants schools to teach the rest of our kids to deny geology, anthropology, archaeology and common sense too? It’s not bad enough she’s forcing her own daughter into a loveless marriage to a teenage hood, she wants the rest of us to guide our daughters in that direction too? It’s not enough that a woman shouldn’t have the right to choose, it should be the law of the land that she has to carry and deliver her rapist’s baby too? I don’t know whether or not Governor Palin has the tenacity of a pit bull, but I know for sure she’s got the qualifications of one. And you’re worried about seeming angry? You could eat their lunch, make them cry and tell their mamas about it and God himself would call it restrained. There are times when you are simply required to be impolite. There are times when condescension is called for!

It makes one think that the Obama campaign should hire Sorkin as a speech writer.

Google phone at $199 and what it really needs to be a success

UPDATE: The phone has now been announced, and it costs $179, not $199. More info here. 

The Wall Street Journal online has cited sources saying the Google phone will retail for $199, will be introduced September 23.

The data plan will be "aggresively priced," fitting in with Google's goal of getting more people online as cheaply as possible.

Also, according to the Journal, "Google is indirectly helping to reduce T-Mobile's costs by contributing resources toward development of the phone, the people said."

I like that part. Google has deep pockets and is willing to sacrifice profits to get an open systems phone on the market. 

Telegraph in the UK also says it will contain a GPS chip. 

The Independent has a video of the phone being demonstrated at a London conference.

WashingtonPost.com runs a skeptical article from mocoNews saying that it will disappoint when compared to the iPhone. The evidence is screwy, though. They cite an analyst saying people don't buy operating systems, they buy products. Duh. It's the OS that makes the product.

They also say that Google is the one with the brand name, and quote a wireless executive as saying "We can't say it's a Google phone," making marketing a problem. That's silly, since all the reports say the phone will include Google's name on it. That will add cachet.

Another analyst says he was not sure the phone was "significantly better" than the iPhone, which is an absurd argument. Windows is significantly inferior to the Mac OS, but seems to sell OK.

Still, it's good to set expectations low. As in politics, the winner is the one that beats expectations.

But here's the real competition: Whichever phone appears first on Verizon's network will win. 

The iPhone is only available on AT&T's network, Google is only available on T-Mobile right now. That gives the iPhone the advantage.

If Verizon adopts Android, it will have a chance to get established among non AT&T users. If Verizon goes with the iPhone first, it will be harder for Android phones to gain traction.

When it first came out, "sources" said that AT&T had the exclusive rights for five years, implying that would last until 2012. But an article in USAToday said that because of some subsidies AT&T paid to Apple, "AT&T got a year extension, into 2010, on its exclusive distribution deal with Apple, people familiar with the matter say. Sources asked to not be named because the terms are confidential." 

The real battle will be between Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt, trying to get Verizon and other carriers to buy in. Verizon will probably wait until it sees how well Android does. If sales are decent, it might want to grab Android before AT&T's exclusivity ends.

I wonder: When in 2010?

Demo of the Google phone

A Google executive apparently gave a sneak preview of the google phone from HTC at a developer's conference in London yesterday.

The Independent has a video of the demonstration. 

It appears to have touch-screen features modeled after the iPhone. the chances of it being as sleek and cool as the iPhone are on a par with those of Sarah Palin turning out to be a brilliant strategist in foreign policy.

But the importance of the iPhone is not in how sleek it is, or whether HTC sells a lot of them. The importance is its open system approach. Google is trying to open up the cellular industry, to break the control mobile carriers have on what we buy, on what applications we get, and on locking us into contracts when we get a new phone.

On that front, I believe the Google Phone will be groundbreaking. I certainly hope so.

Another item that caught my attention is an article from IDG published in the New York Times online about Google linking up with satellite company O3b network "to bring cheaper, high-speed wireless Internet access to areas unlikely to see investments in fiber infrastructure." O3b stands for "other 3 billion," a reference to the world's population that still can't access the Internet.

It all falls under the pledge to organize and make available all the world's information. Sure, it's legitimate to say that these ventures are also intended to bring Google more revenues. Google isn't a philanthropy; it has Google.org for that work. But I believe the company when it says that it wants to advance the Internet and make it available to as many people as possible. Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin really believe in that quest.

In my interviews for a book about Google (coming out next year), I recently talked to Chris Sacca, a former Google manager who had left the company several months earlier to do his own thing. Sacca had helped buy up dark fiber to improve the speed of transmission to Google users, helped install free wi-fi  in Mountain View, and tried to do the same in San Francisco, but ran into political opposition from City supervisors who hate the mayor and saw this as one of his pet initiatives.

Sacca was also giving talks, and was teaching at Oxford. During one lecture, someone asked him why some wireless carriers blocked customers from using Google Groups on their cell phone. Sacca, who had grown weary of all the resistance to change put up by the telecumminications companies, complained that Google had even gotten letter from telcos asking the company to stop people from using the free Google apps on their cell phones.

Word spread (as the media picked up on his complaint) and soon enough reached a different group at Google, which was deleoping software for mobile phones and did not want to alienate their potential partners. “The Google Mobile business got incredibly mad at me. They even wrote a letter to get me fired,” he says. “We'd been bullied into not saying anything.”

Fortunately, Larry Page had other ideas about the uproar. Recalls Sacca: “Larry's attitude was, 'Look, what we're saying here is entirely true. The wireless carriers are trying to get between us and our users. If we try to appease them, we'll lose our identity in the process. Or we can stand up and try to evolve this space into what it should be.'”

It was at that point that Sacca got serious about the wireless spectrum auction. “Larry gave me a push, to figure out how to be more of a catalyst, to help shape the wireless space.”

Google is a catalyst for change. Google management sees a picture out of whack, like a framed photograph broken in an earthquake. On one side was the wonderful opportunity for the Internet to change wireless telecommunications, to get people online cheaply, to offer them free applications to work with their computers and cell phones, to open up the closed standards in which all the carriers shrouded their phones as protection against letting in ousiders. But on the other side are the telcos, cable companies and Internet Service Providers, sitting on the opposite side of the crack, unwilling to reach across the chasm and embrace the Internet and the changes it offered.

Google sees that broken picture, and has decided to fix it. So management authorized Sacca to bid up to $5 billion to buy rights to the 700 MHz wireless spectrum, which the U.S. Government was putting out to auction.

Google's Android cell phone operating system operates under the same principles. It's uncertain whether Android, or Google's other recent initiatives will be a success. But they are setting the agenda: Open systems, open standards and opportunities for other software developers.

It's hard to change the telecommunications industry. But Google is working at it, and seems to be succeeding. Google is a catalyst, dragging telecommunications in to the Internet age.

It's the right thing to do.

Sergey and Larry, 10 years ago

One of the most interesting 10-year anniversary stories about Google I've seen is a reprint of a 10-year-old interview with Sergey and Larry. 

Ubergizmo has excerpts from the interview, conducted in January 1999 for an article about Silicon Valley in the German magazine Stern. At the time, they were working out of Susan Wojcicki's house in Menlo Park.

Some quotes:

Sergey: "We worked on a business plan for a little bit, but we were basically never even asked for it. Recently we got an e-mail from one of our investors saying, “Oh, do you guys have a business plan? I don’t think I ever saw one.”"

Larry: "People make decisions based on information they find on the Web. So companies that are in-between people and their information are in a very powerful position."

Sergey: "There are a lot of benefits for us, aside from potential financial success. The experience, for example. If we want to start another company at some point, that would be fairly easy because we have all the contacts in the industry."

Larry: "For both of us, ... a strong reason why we started the company, is to say: We think we can do a better job doing this, and that’s an important thing to do for the world."

Sergey: "Starting Monday, we’ll have 6 full-time employees. This week we have 5, last week we had 4. I think it’s going to keep growing at that pace for a while."

Sergey: "You caught us at an interesting time. Right now, we’re thinking about generating some revenue. We have a number of ways to doing that. One thing is we can put up some advertising. The key there is to put up advertising that will be really useful to our users and not slow down our site. That way we won’t push people away from our site, but we’ll still take in some revenue."

Sergey: "We want to be on par with Yahoo, or Amazon, AOL...There’s no question, we want to be number one in market share in terms of search. And I think we can do that in not so long. Past that, it’s really hard to predict. 

There’s really no reason to set our sights low."

If you know of any other old interviews floating around, let me know.