Google looks beyond search for growth

Google is in danger of hitting the invisible ceiling that limits growth at all big companies as it attacks giant new markets far beyond search, according to Larry Page, chief executive officer.

Speaking in an interview with the Financial Times, the co-founder of the world's biggest internet company suggested that the latest target for Google's innovation is its own corporate organisation as it tries to take on new fields from biotech to driverless cars.

"We're in uncharted territory, we're trying to figure it out," Mr Page said. "How do we use all these resources we have and have a much more positive impact on the world?" He added that Google is looking to take on "more things of significant impact to people" and that it would be "amazing if we can do that at a bigger scale than we're doing. But no one has yet demonstrated that."

Mr Page also said that a rethink of Google's famous mission statement - to "organise the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" - was probably in order as it moves beyond search

The Google CEO has freed himself up to focus more on the company's new growth initiatives through a management reorganisation in recent days, handing day-to-day management of much of the company's core internet business to one of his top lieutenants, Sundar Pichai.

In an internal memo to staff, he said the shake-up was partly to make sure Google could get its "next generation of big bets off the ground", and warned that the normal incremental pace of technological improvement at big tech companies "leads to irrelevance over time".

Mr Page's attempt to inject a new urgency into Google's organisation comes as it faces intensifying pressure over its growing power online, particularly in Europe. Earlier this week, Gunther Oettinger, the EU's incoming digital commissioner, suggested that the company pay a levy for carrying links to copyrighted material on its search engine.

In the interview at Google's headquarters in Silicon Valley, conducted before the comments, Mr Page said that governments needed to do more to invest in big technology projects that have the potential to benefit their citizens.

"Why can't we get more of these things going in Europe?" he said. "Like celebrating technology, having a friendly environment for it, having more investment in science and a basic understanding and entrepreneurialism and making money and moving quickly and kind of the things that are good about Silicon Valley."

Mr Page outlined a push to make Google more like a holding company providing "long-term, patient capital" and casting himself in a new role overseeing its big strategic bets.

"I'm a fan of Warren Buffett," said the 41 year old chief executive, referring to Mr Buffett's technique of investing in a wide array of businesses and giving managers considerable freedom. "I think a lot of what he's doing is good, he's also taking a similar long-term patient approach to capital, which I think we ought to emulate in some ways."

Mr Page described how Steve Jobs, the late Apple co-founder who was famous for narrowing his own company's focus to a very small number of new products at any one time, had warned him that he was trying to take on too much.

"At some point this is going to come up to the CEO level and it's going to be hard to manage," he said of the management bottleneck that causes problems as companies grow. "That's true, that's something that's limited a lot of companies and maybe why they get to a certain size and tend to not get much bigger."

Google has tried different ways of managing its big bets on new markets, including Google X, the "skunk works" for advanced projects that have included driverless cars and Google Glass. More recently, it has set up Calico, a healthcare company which is trying to cure diseases of ageing, and Nest, a maker of "smart home" equipment, as semi-independent operating units under their own managers.

"Fundamentally these are all addressing the Steve Jobs question of how do you do more things," Mr Page said.

Outlining why he was trying to shake Google up, he said: "When I've looked at other technology companies, they tend to fail over time because they've missed the next things."

© The Financial Times Limited 2014. All rights reserved.
FT and Financial Times are trademarks of the Financial Times Ltd.
Not to be redistributed, copied or modified in any way.
Euro2day.gr is solely responsible for providing this translation and the Financial Times Limited does not accept any liability for the accuracy or quality of the translation