We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served - as shareholders and in all other ways - by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains. This is an important aspect of our culture and is broadly shared within the company.

How exciting is it to come to work if the best you can do is trounce some other company that does roughly the same thing?

You have to combine both things: invention and innovation focus, plus the company that can commercialize things and get them to people.

My grandfather was an autoworker, and I have a weapon he manufactured to protect himself from the company that he would carry to work. It's a big iron pipe with a hunk of lead on the head. I think about how far we've come as companies from those days, where workers had to protect themselves from the company.

We don't have as many managers as we should, but we would rather have too few than too many.

We are excited about Internet access in general. With better access to the Internet, people do more searches.

We have always tried to concentrate on the long term, and to place bets on technology we believe will have a significant impact over time. It's hard to imagine now, but when we started Google most people thought search was a solved problem and that there was no money to be made apart from some banner advertising. We felt the exact opposite: that search quality was very poor, and that awesome user experiences would clearly make money.