Marissa Mayer of Google speaks with Charlie Rose in March 2009 in San Francisco when she had been nearly ten years working at Google. Started working at Google in 1999, Marissa was one of Google first 20 employees and Google's first female engineer. Like Google's founders Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page (sometimes known as Larry), she was also from Stanford University.
She is now Vice President of Search Product and User Experience, which means new product ideas goes through her and she decides which products to present to the Sergey and Larry. Large features such as Gmail, Google Maps, Google News had gone through her. Although new ideas come from everywhere, most of them come from in-house -- Orkut and Google News for example.
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She says that she has one of the best jobs in the world because she "get to work with great people every day, and we're just working on really amazing ideas that touch millions of people’s lives". She "definitely think that what drives technology companies is the people." Plus it is very fulfilling.
Marissa says that that project management is a fusion between technology and business side. She is a fan of Steve Jobs because he has the vision to spot correctly consumer trends such as the mouse, ipod, and iphone. Plus he has deep technological knowledge besides his marketing savvy.
Google, although much larger now than initially, is still a technology-driven company and likes to have small teams so it can be have agility and empowerment.
Search is still considered in its infancy. Search engine being able to recognize voice and convert voice to text for example might happen in next 5 to 10 years, Marissa estimates. And search engine being able to recognize content of images (such as knowing that a photograph is a picture of a monkey) may occur in the next 10-year timeframe.
She thinks that the next big idea would applications involving GPS of cell phones so that users can know the geographical location of the their friends for example. In fact the prototype "Google Latitude" was of that type of application. Charlie Rose asked whether that was too much information on people? Marrissa says that there is a trade-off where "give up some of your privacy in order to gain some functionality." It is somewhat of a generational thing too, where younger generations are more willing to be transparent.
Although Larry and Sergey have a lot of similarities, when questioned as to some of their differences, Marissa said that Sergey is very math oriented and is interested in knowing the equations and has a great memory of numbers as in people's salaries or financial numbers in a business deal. Larry's area tend to revolve around technology of storage systems, data centers, and infra-strutures to make search faster, etc.
In regards to Yahoo, she implies that Google is cheering for Yahoo and does not want Microsoft to buy Yahoo. One can guess that it is because if Microsoft does buy Yahoo, it would present a bigger competition to Google. But her response was that a strong Yahoo would also be "better for consumers, because it means there will be more competition on some of these key services -- web mail, IM, search, a lot of things you use every day."
She says that "advertising-subsidized search" is a big core of Google's business model. Although social networks does get a lot of page view, advertising on social networks (such a Facebook) does not play the same role as advertising on search results. Because people on social networks are looking for friend and their focus is not as focused as in finding a products while using search. Speaking of Facebook, Charlie Rose brings up the question of who owns the data on Facebook. Marissa says that the users clearly owns the content that they type up.
Google has a social network called Orkut. It is not big in the United States. However, it is big in Brazil and India. So big there, that some people there think that Orkut owns Google.
The interview also touched on Android (Google's cell phone) and Chrome (Google's browser). Chrome was a project that Google really wanted to do. And Android was a project that they would do if they had all the necessary elements in place, and they did.
Google embraces the concept in software development known as "eating one's own dog food" or "dog-fooding" -- a concept started by Microsoft. This is where the employees of a company uses the products that the company makes and thereby improve quality of the product as a result.
Two personal characteristics that makes an good employee is "smart" and "get things done" and they determine that from the interview and references. After doing a regression analysis of their hiring process, they found that the best predictor (although not exclusively) is background and references. This makes sense since past performance is a good predictor of future performance.
Google News tend to helps people read more news and exposes them to different sources of news.
Marissa initially thought that she was going to be a doctor but found that it involves a lot of memorization. She then found computer science where she could develop her problem solving and critical thinking skills. Some people say that the United States are not graduating enough computer scientists in comparison to some other countries. She agrees and wished that more females goes into computer science.
Full transcript of the interview can be found on CharlieRose.com
