It's been so great to be back in England or,
as I've called it since the events of November
8th in the U.S., home, having been born in
Sale, actually, just outside of Manchester.
But today, as Matt said, I am going to talk
about two topics.
First, I'm going to tell you a little bit
about our business today, where we've been
and where we're heading; and then I will talk
a bit about Alphabet, what we did, why we
did it, and where we keep pushing ourselves
to explore and excel.
So the biggest surprise for me when I joined
Google -- now Alphabet -- besides the dress
code, continues to be how very early-stage
we are in so many areas.
And we do believe we're on an extraordinary
journey where we continue to embrace what
Larry's called "a healthy disregard for the
impossible."
And that ethos very much reflects the way
I was actually brought up, with parents who
taught me the importance of intellectual curiosity
and persistence and the notion of daring to
dream big.
And one thing that I think about is: Where
will Google be in 10 years?
And it's actually not just a rhetorical question.
It's actually a question that my dad, who's
now 94, asked as he sat in the crowd in Mountain
View at one of our wonderful traditions, "Bring
Your Parents to Work Day."
Most people do "Bring Your Kids," but we,
of course, do "Bring Your Parents."
And as he was there, he was looking at all
the demos and the presenters, and he looked
around and asked that question: Where will
we be in 10 years?
And it wasn't relevant just because it came
from my dad but because he's a physicist who
followed his dream and then spent the majority
of his career they Stanford Linear Accelerator
Center, the team that built the instrumentation
for the first atom smasher.
And he was a visionary in his area, and for
me, that was most remarkable because he never
actually graduated from high school or college.
He was a refugee.
We've heard so many moving stories yesterday
about refugees.
He, too, was a refugee from the war.
He enlisted in the British Army and he taught
himself physics while fighting because he
concluded that education would be his passport
to freedom, once the war ended.
And while fighting in the north of Africa,
and in the Battle of El Alamein, his fellow
soldiers would tease him that he would die
before he ever got to benefit from that education.
And his answer, as we were always told when
I was growing up, is he preferred to die an
educated man.
And his vision was right because that bunker
education eventuality led him to a Ph.D. in
physics, a passport to the United States,
the opportunity to join Stanford.
And having spent the bulk of his career in
Silicon Valley, he has seen generations of
technology companies, so it really struck
me when he asked that question, a man who
has lived more change than most, "Where will
we be and what will we have achieved?"
And even today, we remain mindful of our founders'
goal at the time of the IPO, which was to
develop services that significantly improve
the lives of as many people as possible.
And that very simple, yet powerful, objective,
plus their spirit of curiosity and scrappiness
and creativity, has motivated us for more
than the 18 years of this company's existence
when they were Stanford students and used
off-the-shelf hardware and a Lego server track
to string together what eventually became
Google.
So running through some of our products, we've
always tried to delight users by giving them
the information they want when they need it
-- obviously, Search -- by giving them a better
way to organize their lives and connect with
the people who matter most -- Gmail -- getting
them from Point A to Point B -- Maps -- to
surf the Web with speed and security -- Chrome
-- to join a global community of sharing and
creating and watching videos that the whole
world can see -- YouTube -- and to carry all
of that power around in your pocket -- Android.
And we are so grateful to the many partners
around the globe who enable us collectively
to deliver the most useful information, the
best experience and services, whether for
someone sitting here outside of London or
sitting in a refugee camp in Jordan.
It's no doubt the publishers who keep us all
informed, the creativity of the app developers
who bring the utility of phones to life, the
brilliant creators who keep YouTube as vibrant
as it is, as fun and edgy -- we heard about
some of the data yesterday, over a billion
hours of daily watch time, over a billion
users around the globe -- the more than 400
distinct devices on Android that allow us
to hold this supercomputer in the palms of
our hand, and the advertisers who give everyone
the opportunity to benefit from access to
free useful extraordinary information.
So thanks to all of you for all that we do
together.
And that brings me to the next phase of our
journey, Alphabet.
So we chose to do something that nobody does.
We had this thing that was working well and
said, "Let's try something new."
And the question we're often asked is: Why?
Why did we go move away from Google to Alphabet?
And we often think about when our founders
told their Ph.D. advisors that they wanted
to download and index the entire Web, it seemed
pretty crazy, and they've done a bunch of
things since then that people similarly said
seemed a bit odd.
But Alphabet, in our view, it just really
was a natural extension flowing from all that
they've created with Google.
And the Alphabet structure, what we like the
most about it, is it really gives us flexibility
and the ability to push the frontier in as
many directions as we think make sense, and
to do it at one time.
It gives us the ability to focus deep within
Google, while similarly having a structure
and governance around these new opportunities,
and going deep within them as well.
It enables us to be more ambitious by not
putting a fence around that which fits within
Google but saying, "What else can improve
the lives for billions?"
And two years on, as some of you may have
seen, Larry just wrote our annual Founders'
Letter and his comment was that this is allowing
us to push the frontier, it's working as intended,
and what we're able to do is make some of
our biggest bets within Google -- we're going
to talk more about that -- but also, helping
entrepreneurs really build new businesses
under this umbrella of Alphabet and run them
with the autonomy and speed that they need.
So switching to the future, what we often
discuss at the Googleplex, as I said, is that
some of our biggest bets are within Google,
so I'm going to quickly run through a couple
of those, and you've heard about them yesterday.
You know, we're excited about -- bless you
-- what Sundar calls "an AI-first world,"
where the very concept of a device will fade
away and an intelligent assistant will be
there for us at all times.
And you heard a bit about that and saw that
from David yesterday with the demo.
The whole idea is to give people answers that
they need when they need them, even sometimes
before knowing that we want to ask them.
And our assistant is using machine learning
to solve problems before we know we have them.
Our cloud products, led by our extraordinary
Diane Greene, who I believe is still here
with us, are helping companies achieve greater
effectiveness and efficiency by leveraging
not only the investments that we've made over
many years in our infrastructure, in security,
in data analytics, but layering on as well
machine learning so that we can work with
our enterprise customers to help them be even
more efficient and effective.
Our Made by Google hardware family enables
us to bring the best of Google hardware and
software to users, and we're just beginning
to expand geographically.
And, again, there, the miracle of machine
learning is particularly evident, through
things like language translation or what we
can do with photos.
Even I can take an extraordinary panoramic
view at this point.
And all told, just this past year, we had
more than 350 launches in Search, Maps, Messaging,
Google Play, Google Assistant, Photos, truly
every corner of the company that uses machine
learning to build better technology to bring
more information to more people in more ways.
And the opportunity doesn't stop there.
With Waymo, our self-driving car business,
our engineers will soon make self-driving
cars commercially available.
Meaning we're closer to the time when roads
are safer, saving time and lives, and -- very
exciting, I think -- the ability to transform
cities, preserving resources in cities.
In Palo Alto, you can see the cars driving
around, and it's truly, I think, one of these
magical moments.
Our goal is to give people new ways to think
of mobility and the freedom that comes with
it, and one particularly, I think, moving
moment was one of our first riders was a gentleman
in Austin, Texas, Steve Mahan, who is legally
blind, and these cars allow people like Steve
to have mobility that they never would have
had previously, let alone for the rest of
us and what we're doing with cities.
At Verily and Google Brain, we've brought
the same machine learning technology that
we use in Google Photos to help detect diabetic
retinopathy, which is a disease that poses
a risk to 415 million people with diabetes.
And what we're doing in life sciences and
healthcare, similarly, has really inspired
people within Google, the opportunity to continue
to address so many of the needs, whether it's
in drug discovery or in disease management.
At DeepMind here in London, they're becoming
famous for being the first program to be a
professional at Go, the most complex game
humans have created, but they didn't set out
just to create an extraordinary game, they
set out to solve much bigger problems which
you're going to hear about next from Mustafa
Suleyman.
We've been truly fortunate that over the years
we've been able to bring the same experience
of the Web to billions of people, no matter
where they are or who they are, and to us,
technology is not just about devices, it's
about giving people the tools they need to
live a better, fuller life, to have access
to information, to be able to benefit from
the types of education that opens up so much
of the world for so many of us.
And we do live and get motivated by this notion
that through technology we can help open doors
for many people, solve problems for many people,
and that's the way we approach the types of
issues that we want to take on.
We do know that we don't always get it right,
and we are very humbled by that.
Throughout our life as a company, we've taken
and are taking now very seriously all that
we can do to protect the ecosystem of publishers,
of creators, of users, and when we have a
misstep, you have our commitment to work very
hard to address it.
We care deeply about getting it right and
we're grateful for all we do with you.
So in the end, you know, as we look everywhere
we look, there's someone building something
that has the potential to fundamentally change
the way we all work, and that brings me back
to my dad.
Another memory of my dad when I was living
here, when we were living here as a family
here in England, was we used to build these
crazy kits.
Built a transistor radio that unfortunately
played nothing other than opera.
He helped me learn how to build a binary adding
machine which was pretty simple but I was
the best solderer in my class.
And Google is about -- you know, it's about
trying to do new interesting fun things, which
is where it all started.
We looked around -- we look around, we see
a problem, we try hard to figure out how to
solve it, no matter how tough or how big,
and so ending with the question that started
all with this, "Where will we be in 10 years
as a company," my father's answer to that
when he looked around was, he said, "There
are no limits."
And I think that is our view.
Very simply put, anything is possible and
Alphabet and Google are very much driven by
that.
Thank you so much for being great partners.
We're excited about all that we can do together.
There are clearly so many problems and issues
to be addressed to make this world a better
place, and whether it's education, health,
the experiences we have every day, that's
what we get up and we're excited about doing.
