1) What do you think is the primary reason Google loves open source and contributes to it?

Well, first, it's the right thing to do. If you wanna generate and stimulate innovation. If you're trying to hide things and protect things as far as we're looking is wrong.

it's better if you share and people can just take your brains to actually create better stuff on top of other stuff rather than just reinvent the wheel every time.

And we do use a lot of open source actually so we take advantage of it. I think we feel ourselves as a part of the open source community, there's a bunch of Googlers actually who are, you know, pretty visible in the open source community and that probably wouldn't work if Google hadn't that culture as well. And, you know, we do things like Code Jams, we have some 500 users who have discovered open source thanks to this. I think we've released about 20 milion lines of code in the open source community, something like more than 80 000 patches to various open source projects and of course, are you familiar with project hosting?

So we are one of the largest hosters of the open source code out there.

-- Are you not afraid of the competition taking your code and using it against you in the end?

Well, there's actually terms, you know, but we do that all the time, and if you look at Chrome, this is a perfect example of where our goal there was to accelerate the progress of browsers and [...]. The more they can reuse and do better browsers the happier we are.

2) Which of Android's features do you appreciate the most and what do you think is still missing?

Umm, tons of things I love and I worked for 7 years at Palm, so I've been doing actually a lot for smartphones for a long time. Umm, I think what I like most is the fact that it's very well integrated with my Google environment so I get, you know, my mails from my various accounts, I get my chats, I get my pictures.. you know I take pictures and they just get into my Picasa albums

How many times have you tried to find something on the map, you found it and then you just had to retype it into the phone. Well, not any more, you just press the button and you get it on the phone. So I think the ultimate thing, everything's great, but what I really appreciate is the deep integration with the Google services.

-- And...

what do I miss? The one thing that comes to my mind right now is, the one phone I'm using right now is this one, it's getting old now, it's an Nexus One, and it's very sleek, it was very sleek, but I'm missing a physical keyboard, well, but there is a bunch of Android devices with keyboard.

By the way, another great thing about openness is that instead of the choice just between 2 or 3 you get some 95 different devices out there in the world that run Android, so if you wanna keyboard, you can get it. I just haven't done it, but I should have.

3) Google versus Oracle - do you think Google should not have chosen Java for Android?

What I think about it, first this is a litigation, so I need to be careful about what I say, but in general we're disappointed. Oracle and Sun were supporters of the open source community and the way they've turned around, they're basically attacking and they're not attacking Android, as far as we're concerned, they're attacking the open source Java community and that's how the community has reacted.
And they have pretty vague patent claims and we think that's the wrong way. Android and platforms like Android are fundamental to innovation, so we're just disappointed and we'll continue to support the community and push hard for peaceful open platforms.

-- Do you personally call it Java or do you say, ahh, it's just a programming language that looks like Java?

Oh, I'm not getting into that detail.

4) Software patents - do they in your opinion stiff or spur software development?

Certainly vague patents stiff all innovation, as far as we're concerned, in this world where things move really fast and patents were invented many, many, many tens of years ago, as far as we're concerned, it's competition and innovation rather than litigation that advance the world of technology.

- The Go programming language, I'm not sure if you know it...

Yeah, the product manager works in my team...

-- OK, great. Where do you see its use and what does Google use it for?

So the primary reason the team got together and decided to take a new approach to languages - and we like to take a new approach to things, that's how Chrome came about, it's because if you think about the world of languages, in the past five or ten years maybe, there hasn't been any really new significant language. And 10 years ago, the computers were very different, I mean right now they're much much faster and I think one of the big differences is they're multi-core. And developers confuse they ways to use multiple cores and threading. So Go is basically an attempt to say "Now that we know the state of computers today, which are much faster, multi-core, can we design a language that has multi-core as part of the fundamental capability, that does the garbage collection and that compiles really, really fast?" Now I guess it's really the foundation layers and reasons for Go to exist. It's still early days, it's not for everyone yet, we think some crazy developers will try it and we hope that there will be enough for us to think that there is some traction and we wanna continue investing in it. 

Well, Golang is the site of Go that's actually running a server that's written in Go. We use it in pieces of YouTube and there's like every day there's a few more things where Google relies on Go.

-- Will we be able to use Go on Android phones?

Oh, it's to early...

6) What well-known development tools do you use at Google?

I think the better question is which ones we do not use, I think we use just about everything, we use GCC, we use VI and Emacs, the classics, Python, Git. It's all the good tools you find in the Google community.

- And you personally, do you use Vim or Emacs?

I'm an Emacs fan.

- OK :-D

This is religious!

- So, wherever I look here I see Macs everywhere. Do you use Linux on desktops at Google?

Yeah, that's actually our probably most popular laptop/desktop operating system.

- Really? Because it doesn't look like that...

I'm talking engineers, this different, the purpose here is for presentation. We use a customized version of Ubuntu, which is customized for our networking needs, it's called Goobuntu actually. That is I think the most popular. But we use other operating systems as well.

8) Do you see any downsides of applications in the cloud?

I think the only downside is that you need an Internet connection and particularly when you go to conferences with that many people, sometimes the Internet is not as reliable as you'd like it to be. The good thing about that need is that, it's sort of like the there's to trends crossing each other in a positive way. First there is more and more and better connectivity to the Internet and if you look, it's true here, I come here and I can tell the mobile networks are faster, and it's true around the world. And there's countries that are really leading, if you go to Japan, you got like 100 Megabits at home

-- I wish I had that at home...

You know it's coming, we have this project in the US where we're trying to build fast internet access for people. You know, it's getting there. And the other good thing is that with the development of HTML5, there are things like AppCache, there is more and more ways to write web apps that don't actually depend on having a really good connectivity to the Internet. If you've tried Gmail offline or things like that, it's mind bugging for people, because for a lot of people there is a mind shift needed, you think that if there's a browser you need to be connected, but no, the HTML stack is a development stack and write apps that can deal with bad networks, so I think, we have apps that know more and more how to deal with band Internet connection or no Internet connection and the fact that there's more and more access to the Internet, including in planes now, I think these two trends make that problem go away very quickly.

9) -- Now to legal challenges again. Germany has ben especially sensitive about everything. Do you think Google will face any significant legal challenges when it comes to the use of clouds?

It's almost two separate questions, my sense is when you're a large company and you have a lot of cash in the bank, people get interested in suing you for all kinds of things and it's unfortunate, you know, Google has a very strong culture of doing the right thing of not being evil and that very much is vibrant in the company.

But when it comes to Germany, they're at the forefront of caring about privacy and I think that's great, because the world of the Internet facilitates the exchange of information and it's easy for users to forget about this and so I think Germany in general and some of the privacy agencies and groups just keep us on our toes. When I look at our principles around privacy, what we try to do is make sure that we're transparent, so we as much as possible tell people what we collect, we tell them why, we give them control, so we tell them what we can do and they can choose not to give information. You can use Google Search anonymously. There's a lot of products, there's always a compromise that you as a user make between giving more information to the service provider to get more value out of it.

The third thing I think that complements our approach to privacy is security, because when we get data from our users it is important that we protect it, and you've seen there is lots of measures to do that, there's a whole 15-page white paper that you can go read about how Google protects security and our data centers and development. If you look at how we made HTTPS, for instance, available for our products, that's another way of protecting our users. I wish every company on the Internet took privacy as seriously as we do, we get more in the news about it because we're bigger, but I actually think in terms of standards we're really make them high.

10) Do you prefer desktop applications or web applications?

I don't know that I've used many desktop applications, except the browser, but I guess that doesn't really count as an application. My family and I, we don't use many desktop apps any more. I'll tell you a story actually, when I worked at Palm and Handspring, we were using MS Outlook for our mails, and Word and Excel and PowerPoint and all these desktop apps and when I was arrived at Google, people told me for e-mail it's Gmail, for calendar it's Google Calendar and for documents it's Google Docs and this was for years ago. At that time I was surprised, I hadn't really realised that you could do all of these things in the browser, but even four years ago we were running the company purely in the web, I was pioneering and the thing is even four years ago it was doable, I don't know anybody who uses anything else but the browser. I mean, this is the future. The only downside is the need for connectivity which is as we said going away and there is so many upsides.

I used to be very worried about my hard disk crashing, now I don't care. The next minute I can take another computer and got  exactly the same thing. The collaboration is just intense. Do you use Google Docs or...

-- Sometimes I do, but I mostly use OpenOffice, sorry...

Oh, that's interesting, let's have that conversation. I klnow if you're trying to do something that looks nice when you print it etc., I can understand, but in my work most of the work we do is actually on spreadsheets or documents, it's actually a teamwork, we need people to collaborate on documentations, collaboration on a presentation is a perfect example. When you do a keynote like this, you have like ten speakers, so everyone has their slides and keeps updating it, and if you try to do this with a desktop based application, everyone sends their latest versions and then they send you the latest version of the whole deck and you never know which part they've changed. But in Google Docs it's just one version and it's the version and everyone adds what they want.

From my viewpoint, it is always a compromise, but at least for I do, I just love so much more the collaboration features than anything else, so...

I way prefer web apps and if you watched the keynote, it's most of the innovation since 2004.
I can't name any other desktop apps than the browser, maybe some games.

If there are still reasons to do something on the desktop, that's going away. It is goinf to be really exciting.

12) Did you notice any significant shifts in the keyword popularity as the credit crunch raged around the world?

There's always the privacy thing, but we look at aggregate data, we don't look at anything private. In terms of keywords search, yeah, you can see it on Google Trends, you can measure questions about unemployment, see these things go up and down. But what is interesting too on the ad side, which is our business, we've seen more advertisers targeting words like discount. And what's fabulous about the web and AdWords in particular is that because it's such a targeted, measurable marketing campaign, we've seen most of the advertisers have actually maybe reduced the spending in general, but they focused the spending on typically what's more measurable and that's been search-based advertising. Well, it wasn't a great time for the world, but it's been actually, we've been really pleasantly surprised the effect that had for us.

13) Google is still not the search engine no. 1 in our country. What's your message to users of other engines?

Try us! That's it, I mean it, because one of the things is people probably think that oooh, this only works for English stuff it doesn't understand the obscure Czech language. And you'd be surprised actually, there's a lot of teams focused on making sure search works great on local markets, and in particular on the Czech market, so give it a try.

-- No, abyste věděl, hodně uživatelů v Čechách jde na Seznam, napíšou Google a takhle se na něj dostanou

Yeah, this is what we call navigational queries, we get a lot of these too actually. We probably get some for Google on Google.

14) Is working for Google really so much fun as we hear every now and then? 

What do you hear?

-- That you do all the cool stuff, that you have your 20-percent projects

Yeah, it's exciting, it's rewarding, we get to work, I think what I like the most at Google is first we hire very very smart people and the ability we have to just work with great people, you can trust them and the things move forward... You know, most of people don't think of Google as a company full of people,  they mostly perceive it as that box that works when you need it, but we're just a company made of people and it's great people. So that's what I think I like. I like the vision and the mission of what we're trying to do.

And it'll probably take us 300 years to deliver, so we've got plenty of steps to do. We're lucky that at the scale that we operate we do things that really have an impact, which is exciting too. And of course, we're very well supported by the company, so it's lot of things and fun. And yes, of course, 20% and everything you mention is true and hopefully you'll see it as you walk around and talk to Googlers.

I remember an interview that was in Switzerland, when we opened the Swiss office, I don't know if you've ever heard of it, it's a really nice office, you can go on Google, I'm sure Seznam would work too, but if you search for Google Zurich office pictures

Well, we did the opening and we had numbers of journalists that came, most of the local Swiss press and we gave them a tour of the office and we talked about our culture and I remember I spent like an hour talking with a guy and he says "This isn't true, right?" He couldn't belive it!

I don't know if you know the Truman Show, where everything is fake.

So it's not a Truman Show, it is a reality and it's a great bunch of people and a great company, there's an amazing culture and I think being in computer science, if I retire in 20 years and talk to my grandchildren, I think if I had not worked at Google, I'd have been missing something, it is one of the best places to be if you work in the field.

Další otázky a odpovědi se týkaly HD technologií, a tak v nejbližších dnech vyjdou na HDmag.cz. Eric v nich mimo jiné odůvodňoval, proč se lidé bojí cloudu. Je to prý jako s řízením auta a létáním. Než si lidé zvykli, měli pocit, že je bezpečnější, když si sami řídí své auto a mají vše ve svých rukách, a přitom je to naopak.