October 7, 2009: Eric Schmidt, responding to a question about why Google would not go the same way as Microsoft now that it is so large and powerful.
“There are many, many reasons why we are not going to be like Microsoft. The first has to do with the culture of the founders, the culture of the company, the value systems. The second has to do with the majority of the users, and usage is one click away from moving to a competitor, which is not true of more embedded platforms in high tech. It is very difficult to move out your database system, it is very difficult to move out of Windows, for technological reasons whereas it is quite easy to move out of these online services.
“The third is that, having taken such a strong position as a company, if somehow we went into a room with the evil light, and somehow evil came all over us and we exited that room and we announced an evil strategy, we would be destroyed. We would be destroyed in reputation, we would be destroyed in consumer behaviour, consumers would mass against us, and so forth. There is a fundamental trust relationship between Google and its users.
“And the fourth is that none of us would ever want to go through the kind of legal proceedings that would then follow in enough countries to make it painful. So there are positive reasons and there are good negative reasons, plus I do not think any of us are going anywhere and we have not yet found the evil room on our campus.”
For those keeping score on the timeline, this quote is two years after the incident mentioned in the pando.com article.
“There are many, many reasons why we are not going to be like Microsoft. The first has to do with the culture of the founders, the culture of the company, the value systems. The second has to do with the majority of the users, and usage is one click away from moving to a competitor, which is not true of more embedded platforms in high tech. It is very difficult to move out your database system, it is very difficult to move out of Windows, for technological reasons whereas it is quite easy to move out of these online services.
“The third is that, having taken such a strong position as a company, if somehow we went into a room with the evil light, and somehow evil came all over us and we exited that room and we announced an evil strategy, we would be destroyed. We would be destroyed in reputation, we would be destroyed in consumer behaviour, consumers would mass against us, and so forth. There is a fundamental trust relationship between Google and its users.
“And the fourth is that none of us would ever want to go through the kind of legal proceedings that would then follow in enough countries to make it painful. So there are positive reasons and there are good negative reasons, plus I do not think any of us are going anywhere and we have not yet found the evil room on our campus.”
For those keeping score on the timeline, this quote is two years after the incident mentioned in the pando.com article.
Reference: http://blogs.ft.com/businessblog/2009/10/eric-schmidt-thinks...