Google Analysts Meeting

SJM 2/10/05 Google details strategy for analysts, SEARCH ENGINE OPERATOR'S CEO DESCRIBES PLANS TO CONTINUE GROWTH
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/10865335.htm

``We try to identify when our technology can solve an existing problem at worldwide scale,'' he said. ``That's the way we think of the problem, when we talk about the strategy, when we manage the company, when we think about how it evolves.''

Schmidt is a fan of a concept, popularized in a Wired magazine article last year, called the ``long tail,'' which says that a large number of products with low sales volume can collectively make up a sizable market. For Google, the long tail includes the tens of thousands of businesses not being served by conventional means of advertising. Schmidt believes Google has an opportunity to appeal to those businesses by offering them the ability to create highly targeted ad campaigns.

``The engineers generally like to have beta on there when they are about to make major changes and improvements,'' Page said. ``If it's on there for five years because they are going to make major changes for five years, that's fine.''

WSJ 2/10/05 Google Expansion Is Being Held Back By Hiring Process
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB110799402790350674,00.html?mod=technology_main_whats_news

Google Inc. executives said they can't expand as rapidly as they would like because they can't find enough qualified employees or deploy new computers fast enough.
At the company's first analyst meeting since its August initial public offering, the executives said they are aggressively adding products and staff, but are limited by their own recruitment standards and ability to expand Google's technical infrastructure

"Can we hire the quality and quantity of people we want to? No," said co-founder Sergey Brin, speaking before several hundred analysts at Google's Mountain View, Calif., headquarters. "We're underinvesting in our business because of the limitations of hiring." Google said it has more than 3,000 employees, up from 2,292 in June. Mr. Brin said Google was "probably 10% to 20% below" where it wanted to be in terms of the level of its technical infrastructure.

Mr. Schmidt said Google was seeking to reach advertisers outside the midsize companies it currently serves best. "We still, as a company, do not have all of the products and services needed to serve all of the largest advertisers or the tiniest of advertisers," he said. Google in the fourth quarter had 227 advertisers that were on the Fortune 1000 list of the largest companies, compared with 156 a year earlier. Highlighting one potential change, co-founder Larry Page said Google over time will give advertisers "more choice over where and how they show their ads."

SiliconBeat 2/9/05 Google and the long tail
http://www.siliconbeat.com/entries/2005/02/09/google_and_the_long_tail.html

"The surprising thing about the long tail is how long the long part of the tail really is,'' he said a bit ago, ''and how many small businesses there are that have not been traditionally served by the traditional mass audience markets, particularly advertising. We're doing pretty well in the middle of this tail. We still do not, as a company, have all the products and services that, in our judgement, are needed to serve the largest advertisers or the very tiniest of advertisers.''