A Conversation with Sergey Brin

Sergey Brin is holding an audience this morning with a roomful of journalists in New York City. Below are my live notes.

Sergey Brin: We have had a number of interesting activities. A bunch of you saw the verizon announcement, android, software platform, more enhancements in terms of faster software, better software. A number of devices are coming out as a trickle, many more we expect. Google Books, a hearing today, but generally that is something I am very proud of, to make the world?s books accessible. Have written a little piece I hope comes out as an op-ed.

Eric Schmidt: It seems like Sergey has jumped the gun. We should focus mostly on search, and some of the ideas Sergey has. We are having our global sales meeting here, we brought senior sales executives. The mood was very, very positive. We told them that the worst is behind us and we are clearly seeing aspects pf recovery, what is notable is we are seeing aspects of recovery I not just US but in Europe. I thought it was going to be US first, Europe second, Asia we never saw a hit. We are increasing our hiring rate and investment rate in anticipation of a recovery.

Sergey: There are a bunch of things that have come out recently, you can now get more commercial results or less commercial results. There are other controls that are coming down the pike. I will highlight now, today you can restrict things by date, but that is based on dates mentioned in the text, cannot restrict based on the date the text was authored.

Steven Levy: You have more activity from your competitor in redmond, rolled out a branded search engine. Historically when one competitor steps up it opens up innovation. Do you feel this increased competition will ramp up your innovation, or is it just business usual?

Sergey: I think it is healthy for the industry to have many competitors. You?ve seen search engines such as Cuil and Powerset that MSFt acquired. MSFT has made its contributions. We are working as hard as we can, but I do think having all of those competitors out there generally helps the health of that industry.

Q: Do you think Bing is something different or a rebranding?

Sergey: I don?t want to speak about our competitors

Schmidt: Better for you to judge. We like to focus on our customers. We have been criticized

Ed Baig; where do you stand with Android?

Sergey Brin: At the outset, we started to focus on Android because phones basically lacked powerful browsers and phones also lacked the ability to easily run applications. I think Android has really addressed that really well, but it has also pushed the rest of the market. I am pretty excited for the future of mobile phones because they are increasingly getting quite capable. You can write an application across five phones, we plan to push the state of the art with Android. I might be overstating it a bit, but having the software platform has freed the hardware makers from software platforms, reinvigorating hardware design

Q: Enterprise market?