Google Blog,
Larry Page, 22 January 2013
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| Larry Page |
Happy New
Year everyone and welcome to our earnings call.
Thank you for joining us this afternoon.
We ended
2012 with a strong quarter. Revenue was
up 36% year-on-year, and 8% quarter-on-quarter.
And we hit $50 billion in revenue for the first time last year – not a
bad achievement in just a decade and a half.
We’ve
talked a lot about excellence and velocity over the last year. While many claim it’s my nature never to be
satisfied, we’ve actually made real progress creating more beautiful and more
intuitive products.
Take
Search. The perfect search engine would
understand exactly what you mean, and give you exactly what you want. Our Knowledge Graph brings that much closer.
Search for
Nikola Tesla and you’ll get information about this great inventor that is
beautifully displayed right from the results page … his basic bio, books he
wrote, his photo - no extra work needed.
We’ll even recommend information about other inventors such as Edison
and Marconi that you can easily browse through … again right from the results
page.
And last
quarter we launched the Knowledge Graph in seven new languages – including
Spanish, Japanese and Russian. This is
hard work. It’s about way more than
translating the words on the page.
Google has to understand millions of different entities, as well as
their meaning and context.
I’m also
excited about the progress we’ve made with Voice Search. You’re in your car – sadly it’s still a car
you have to drive and it’s not electric – and you’re running out of gas. Just pick-up your phone and ask Google for
“directions to the nearest gas station” – and you’ll be on your way
immediately. It’s a great example of how
we can take the hassle right out of your life.
Our
long-term investments in Google Maps have really paid off. The team has worked tremendously hard to
create the most accurate and comprehensive maps in the world. Driving country-by-country may have seemed
crazy a few years back. Today, it’s totally obvious because location is core to
your search experience.
And with
Google Maps for iOS, we’ve reinvigorated our product. It’s more intuitive and beautiful, and users
love it. Google Maps for iOS was
downloaded over 10 million times in the first 48 hours!
In fact,
six Google apps were included in Apple’s App Store Best Free Apps of 2012: including YouTube, Chrome, Google Search and
Gmail.
I’ve always
believed that computers should do the hard work – so you can get on with the
things that matter in life … living, learning and loving.
So it’s
exciting to see our progress with Google Now.
Launched earlier in the year, it gives you information before you even
have to ask. We’ll now proactively
provide your flight times, OR your boarding pass, OR directions to your next
appointment. We will even suggest
interesting places to visit nearby.
As we
discussed on the last earnings call, we now live in a multi-screen world.
People
carry a supercomputer in their pocket all the time. In fact we feel naked without our
smartphone! And many users have more
than one device … a laptop, a phone, and a tablet.
We’re
living in uncharted territory. It’s a
new kind of computing environment.
Everyone is really excited about our technology and spending a lot of
money on devices, driving faster adoption than we have ever seen before.
It’s been a
long time in computing since we have had this rate of change -- it probably
hasn’t happened since the birth of personal computing.
It’s why
we’ve put so much focus on devices.
They’ve been one of our biggest bets in the last few years – along with
the software to go with the devices, Chrome and Android.
Our goal
here is to push the user experience forward – so you get the best of Google in
one, easy-to-use package.
The Samsung
Chromebook, which we launched in October for the amazing price of $249, was a
holiday highlight. I love mine. It’s super easy to use, and it almost
maintains itself. Open a Chrome tab on
your phone, and everything syncs on your laptop with no extra effort
required.
We also
launched two new Nexus devices to rave reviews - Nexus 4 and Nexus 10. And, six months after we first unveiled it,
Nexus 7 continues to define the 7 inch tablet category, making many “best of
2012” and holiday gift lists.
Clearly,
there’s work to be done managing our supply better, as well as building a great
customer experience. And that is a
priority for the teams.
But
considering all the excitement over the holidays for our devices, it is clear
there is a tremendous opportunity delivering great value with an amazing and
simple user experience.
Google Play
– another big bet – is on fire. The
growth is tremendous. This quarter we signed deals with Time as well as Warner
Music Group. So we now provide content
from all the top Hollywood film studios, music labels and magazine
publishers. We have not even reached
Google Play’s first anniversary!
Many of you
have questions about Motorola, and Patrick will go into details about how we’re
accounting for the business so you can get your models right.
I am
excited about the business. In today’s multi screen world, the opportunities
are endless. Think about your
device. Battery life is a huge issue. You shouldn't have to worry about constantly
recharging your phone. When you drop
your phone, it shouldn't go splat.
Everything should be a ton faster and easier. There’s real potential to invent new and
better experiences.
Our CEO at
Motorola, Dennis, has built a world-class team, and they’re working on these
opportunities. It’s still early days,
but I am excited about the innovative way they’re approaching product
development and the speed of their execution.
And they recently signed an agreement to sell Motorola’s Home division
for $2.35 billion.
2012 was an
amazing year for Google. And we are all
set for a great 2013!
I am
incredibly optimistic about the opportunities we have as a technology company
focused on user benefit. Every day I
come to work excited about more and bigger opportunities. And every day we work to have more and better
organized Googlers, those are our employees, improving their execution and
overall capability to build world changing products. I know it sounds funny, but with the
ambitious plans we have, we are only just getting started!
Our biggest
challenge in this area is focus. We face
so many opportunities it’s always important to thoughtfully invest in the right
areas where we can have the greatest impact.
We don’t want to spread ourselves too thin. But I’m quite optimistic that as we get
better and better at managing our product areas we will be able to continue to
grow our ambitions. That’s why I’m
here. And that’s one reason why Googlers
love working at Google.
Googlers
remain our greatest asset, and we’re working hard to recruit and retain the
best employees. We had a great start to
the year by being named FORTUNE Magazine’s the Best Company to Work For in the
US for the fourth time.
We’ve
worked hard to create a company where everyone is part of the family – and
where the work is challenging and rewarding.
So we’re really happy to get that recognition.
I want to
finish by thanking all the Googlers who’ve made all this possible. And now I’ll turn it over to Patrick. Thank you.
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