Our communication space is very fragmented today. We have a million different tools for different things with lots of different kinds of overlaps. The most natural way to try and solve that problem is to take all those different tools and try to make them smaller and fit into a single package and maybe integrate them across the boundaries.
I still run into people who loved Wave - who thought it was the best ever and can't believe that Google canceled it. And whenever that happens, it's like I'm looking at a mirror-image of myself: someone who is similar to myself in skill, experience, and profession. And that's just not a mass market.
When you look at my life, I spent a lot of time communicating and collaborating and co-ordinating.
Some people are less comfortable than others using their personal Facebook in the work context. With Facebook at Work, you get the option of completely separating the two.
We believe we can put out the best products if our engineering workforce has the same characteristics as our user.
When I did Google Wave, everyone had to be in Sydney, and a lot people actually traveled there to be part of it. There was a lot of isolation. There were a lot of things we kept secret from the company while working on Wave - just like you would at a startup.
Everyone loves to run with music in their ears, but when the music becomes adaptive, the music plays a more important role in the experience.
It feels to me that Facebook may be a sort of once-in-a-decade type of company.
We are all going to be using search many, many times a day, every day of our lives, forever.
You can get more stuff done with Facebook than any other tool that we know of, and we'd like to make that available to the whole world.
Why do we have to live with divides between different types of communication?
We have found that using Facebook as a work tool makes our work day more efficient.
Both search and social have these distribution angles to them. Before social, if you wanted any sort of traffic on the web, it had to come from search.
The problem we encountered with Wave at Google was that we became very isolated from the rest of the company. And in the time that it took us to build Wave, the rest of the company changed direction. I think that has a lot to do with why the product failed.
I get lost in my own house - and it's not even a big house.
In mapping, where I have no sense of direction, my needs are likely to coincide with the needs of lots of people.
If you look at my desk... it's profoundly disorganised - which is why I can work on search.
So, it was a tough decision to leave Facebook, but it was definitely the right decision. I haven't regretted it at all.
I do believe that you can achieve more if you're willing to take risks.
There's almost a total correlation between the amount of risk you're willing to take and then the amount of stuff you then potentially can get done.
