Eric Schmidt, Google (GOOG) CEO
ON TRAFFIC:
“When we talk about products, and Sergey talked for example about iGoogle, you can see something which goes from almost no users when it is introduced to many, many millions of users very, very quickly.”
ON WIRELESS:
“The most important thing is that there be an open network. We define that in the sense that people can go to a store or however they are going to get it and get a device, plug that device into a wireless network and be able to use the full capability of the Internet. … They’re also going to become very significant Google advertising users.”
Greg Reyes, CFO
ON REVENUE:
“International revenue increased to 48 percent of total revenue, or roughly $1.8 billion, driven primarily by strong growth in Europe.”
ON COSTS:
“One of the larger drivers of payroll expense was the company bonus plan. This was due in part to a revision of our bonus accrual methodology that will allow us to more proportionately recognize the related expenses each quarter. This all led to a higher bonus accrual in Q2, which includes a catch-up from Q1.”
“Going forward it should be a more normalized bonus accrual process. This was just sort of a one-time inflection.”
Sergey Brin, co-founder and president, technology
ON UNIVERSAL SEARCH:
“We had a big launch this past quarter in particular with universal search. This means now when you search on Google.com – and soon it will be available on our international domains – you’re going to get results from both the web as well as image, video, news, maps and books all together.
“This may seem simple, but it has taken a lot of infrastructure work just to be able to do all the computation.”
ON GLOBAL PRODUCTS:
“A big launch that maybe we don’t appreciate so much in the U.S. Is the cross-language information retrieval. What that means is that if you run your query in one language … when they do their query, we will actually run that query in other languages, including English, and get back the results and translate them back.”
ON ADVERTISING:
“The pay-per-action advertising is now available to all advertisers and on all publisher sites. We have been having lots of advertisers move to this model. It is such a no-brainer. Then you don’t have to figure out for yourself – well, I don’t know how much a click is worth to me.”
Larry Page, co-founder and president, products
ON APPS:
“We launched a tool in apps to enable easy migration of large numbers of e-mail accounts to Gmail. This does things like preserves the header information, threads all the conversations, makes your e-mail searchable. For example, one customer migrated 30,000 users with 3 million e-mails in just 24 hours.”