Annals of Communications: The Search Party: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker

Perhaps prophetic words from Eric Schmidt at the conclusion of an excellent and lengthy New Yorker piece on Google

Eric Schmidt, not surprisingly, has another view. “In our society, bigness is often associated with bad,” he says. “There is no question that a company with the ambitions of Google will generate controversy, will have people upset with us. The question is: Where does it come from? Is it coming from a competitor? Is it coming from a business whose business model is being endangered by the Internet? Or is it because we’re behaving badly?” He believes that it often comes from companies threatened by change. “When you have a technology that is as engrossing as the Internet, you’re going to have winners and losers. I’m not trying to sound arrogant. I’m trying to sound rational about it. The Internet allows people to consume media in a different way.” He believes that because Google is “run by three computer scientists we’re going to make all the mistakes computer scientists running a company would make. But one of the mistakes we’re not going to make is the mistake that non-scientists make. We’re going to make mistakes based on facts and data and analysis.” He paused. Then he said, “What kills a company is not competition but arrogance. We control our fate.”

Annals of Communications: The Search Party: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker