Ideas Come From Everywhere

Ideas come from everywhere. A lot of people will say, "Well, how do you get the idea for Google Maps or the Google Toolbar? Where did it come from? And the answer is, in an environment like Google, ever since the company was small, even till now when it’s really large, we expect everyone to have ideas. You know, our engineers come up with ideas, some things come top-down, and ideas come from our users. And it's interesting, because when you look at the myriad of different products Google has released, we actually have examples of almost all of the above. Google Maps, you know, the idea for that actually came from an acquisition. We found these engineers in Australia who were just amazingly good at building mapping interfaces and combined them with a bunch of Java Script experts at Google and said, "Okay, let's take their ideas on how you navigate maps, place them on the Web using Java Script, and ultimately build this really great application." So, you know, ideas really do come from all kinds of different inspirations. There's other things that we do that are very strategic and top-down. When we looked at say something like Google Desktop, we thought, "Now, for a lot of strategic reasons we need to have a deeper, more meaningful relationship with our users. What functionality could we provide them that they'll want to have on their computer and that will allow them to access Google really easily all the time?" So sometimes it comes from an overall strategy or a strategic concern, sometimes it comes from, you know, what acquisition that we're doing, and sometimes it just comes from someone wanting to solve a problem that they feel we could solve better. Google News is a great example of that. There was an engineer named Krishna Abarat, and he was a news junkie, and after September 11 he found himself really consumed with reading news, and he found he had the same pattern every day. He would go and visit his favorite 15 new sites, and he would try and find, you kn...