Here’s Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s commencement address at Carnegie Mellon’s 112th commencement ceremony, held yesterday. (Via @CarnegieMellon)
Schmidt’s talk to the audience, which he refers to as the ‘Facebook and Google generation’, is basically about the past, present and future of technology, how quickly and profoundly cultural habits change and how important it is to ‘live in the future’. Surprisingly, Schmidt seems to mention services like Twitter and Facebook more often than Google products.
Update: looks like Schmidt gave the exact same speech when he spoke to the 253rd graduating class at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia today, according to Domain Name Journal.
Key quotes:
“We got our news from newspapers, your generation gets it from blogs and tweets, and for those of you who don’t know, that’s not what you hear in zoos.”
“We thought ‘friend’ is a noun, you think it’s a verb.”
“You cannot plan innovation. You cannot plan invention. All you can do is try very hard to be at the right place and be ready.”
“How should you behave? Well, do things in a group. Don’t do things by yourself. Groups are stronger, groups are faster. None of us is as smart as all of us.”
“You’ll find today is the best chance you have to start being unreasonable, to demand excellence, to drive change, to make everything happen.”
Many have seen his announcement of his disease, but this is a great presentation..
Yeah, agreed with you..it’s a great presentation
As people have been using Google almost everywhere in their search, does he need to mention how powerful Google is?
Interesting…
smart stuff…
~ marvin
Hmmm… I like that last bit – I see so much of this message being passed around these days: “You’ll find today is the best chance you have to start being unreasonable, to demand excellence, to drive change, to make everything happen.”
Google:
Your flagship product, Adsense, has FAILED.
Adsense EPC is pennies on the dollar of what it needs to be.
Publishers like Murdoch are scrambling to find an alternative to your high-tech but nevertheless cheap-ass monetization.
Care to address this, Eric Schmidt?
Wow. That is one amazing comment. You sir should not have children.
“You sir should not have children.” That wasnt “sir,” that was “randy.”
Besides facebook and twitter,maybe he can also say something about the new search egine WOLFRAMALPAH–the so-call google killer.
By the way ,for convenience,Wolfram is going to use the tiny url
“wolpha.com”
“Wopha” is the combination of “wolfram”and”alpha”.
But it remains to be seen whether it can be the google killer.
http://wolpha.com ?
Yeah,i have to say that it is better than”wolframalpha.com”–the 12-letter long domain
Good or bad there isn’t going to be a Google killer. All this new technology is very exciting but the nature of a maturing market is nothing new. Market clout held by your legacy client/server vendors like Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and others will move to cloud vendors like Google, Salesforce, and Amazon. While the utilization of technology by businesses, organizations, and individuals will become increasingly diverse the vendors themselves will continue to consolidate power and market share. Good or bad MSFT owned the desktop. Good or bad Google owns the web. Google Apps is your new Office, Salesforce the new data centric platform, and Amazon hosts consumer apps – the future is clear.
@ randy
Wrong. Their flagship product is Adwords. It counts for the bulk of their revenues.
Eric Schmidt’s is great.Anyway Randy, could you please explain why did you say that? Google Adsense is a failure?
Im not sure that is a good description here because millions of people earn money out of it.As for marketers they got cheap and specified search for their PPC..or i just wrong about this?
"Schmidt seems to mention services like Twitter and Facebook more often than Google products": that’s a very positive thing for the company. But is Schmidt now thinking about Twitter as more than a "poor man’s email system"?
It will be interesting to see what the new search engine will do to cut into Google’s market share. I doubt it will be a “Google Killer” but who knows. We will have to wait and see.
Nick said…
I doubt it will be a “Google Killer” but who knows.
There is Google-killer algorithm and Google-killer brand. Which one do you refer to? Google-killer algorithm is something that is easy to do, just ask researchers from Microsoft Asia of how they developed an algorithm (a few years back) that was shown in test to have outperformed the Google PageRank algorithm. So, this algorithm definitely was a Google-killer, just check out the following Microsoft paper, which you can download a PDF copy :
Block-level Link Analysis
Microsoft killed Google algorithmically, but they didn’t kill them by brand-name. There is no doubt that Google has moved on and developed something that is more robust, since Microsoft published their PageRank killer, but it wouldn’t changed that fact that Microsoft was a PageRank killer but failed to be a Google brand killer.
Perhaps, TechCrunch editors should learn to differentiate between the 2, Google-algorithm-killer and Google-brand-killer, because the majority of readers here don’t know the difference.
Google is a spyware company and Shmidt is a suit that got lucky with a great job.
Why does Shmidt think he’s a visionary?
so true.
…because he’s been pushing cloud computing for decades while you’ve been singing Ballmer’s praises like a good little puppy.
Amen.
Surprisingly, TC mentions titter more often than all other innovations combined.
I agree, Probably techcrunch should rename to twittercrunch. TC is too obsessed with Twitter.
Actually, Eric, none of us is as dumb as all of us. http://www.codi...onal-poster.jpg
Great speech, and I particularly enjoyed the yawning student at min 10.58
I teared up for a bit… then there was the crescendo with the ‘power of groups’… it was opera!
I think he could have gone a bit longer than 10 minutes, though.
So inspirational! I never watch any speech from a Google CEO.
Yeah, the technology had changes our life. By the way, I’m still loyal to Adsense although they’re some alternative. Sometimes we can’t consider much about money. It’s about our life which needs to be improved from time to time.
Comparing with the classic Steve Jobs’ commencement at Stanford, I may say that this address is *poor*…
Just got back from my graduation at University of Pennsylvania and most of the speech after Facebook and Google generation is exactly the same.
Can’t complain because it was a great moment.
I disagree Sudhanshu, I just returned from the Penn graduation feeling great about Schmidt’s speech only to find this disappointing article on Techmeme.
The fact that he rehashed a speech given to another university only a day before cheapens the message that he was trying to convey to us earlier today. I agree that our ceremony was a special moment, Schmidt’s laziness indicates to me that he didn’t feel that way about it. He wrote the speech for Carnegie Mellon; he edited it for us.
Sean – he’s a CEO. What’d you expect? He really has neither time nor does he see the incentive to…his speech was probably written by someone else. His speech is rehashed not because he feels special about CMU.
Jason, I think you’re referring to Sergey Brin (with regards to his chances of developing Parkinson’s)