“We do benefit from the fact that once we say we’re going to do it, people believe we can do it, because we have the resources.”
— Larry Page, Google CEO, on his company’s high aspirations, which include working on everything from health and disease to robots and artificial intelligence. Because the company has gone way beyond search, it may be time to think about changing its mission statement, which is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” But change it to what? Page told the Financial Times: “We’re in a bit of uncharted territory. We’re trying to figure it out. How do we use all these resources… and have a much more positive impact on the world?”
This question comes amid calls for tech companies to think big. For example, venture capitalist Peter Thiel said a couple of months ago: “I think the stakes in this are not just, ‘Are we going to have some new gadgets’?” Likewise, VC Mitch Kapor writes in USA Today: “Few industries have the ability to transform society like tech, yet too few companies are asking the questions or working on the problems that would create meaningful social change.”
Photo of Larry Page by Paul Sakuma/Associated Press archives