Google Thoughts Regarding Internet GrowthThe recession is over. Just ask Google.
Last year, the world's most popular search engine saw a shift in the queries it was receiving. The hunt for coupons and discounts gradually gave way to searching for products, cars and travel. And the trend is continuing.
"It gives you the sense that people are not holding back the way they were a year ago," said Patrick Pichette, chief financial officer of Google Inc.
Pichette made the remarks to reporters following a breakfast speech at the Economic Club of Canada Tuesday.
The affable Pichette, a former Bell Canada executive who attended university in Montreal, began his remarks with jokes about driving in the snow and praised the work of computer science engineers at the University of Waterloo, which he visited this week. Google has an engineering office at the university's research and technology park.
Pichette has about 20 years' experience in financial operations and management in the telecommunications sector. That includes a seven-year stint at Bell Canada, where he served as CFO from 2002 through 2003.
He has a business degree from Université du Québec à Montréal, and a master's degree in philosophy, politics and economics from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar.
Pichette lived up to one of Google's famous sayings: You don't have to wear a suit to be serious. He took to the podium wearing a blazer with dark jeans and a pair of well-worn New Balance running shoes.
The recovery, now arrived, seems to be picking up some momentum, Pichette said.
"Having said that, in the digital world, it's all guns blazing. There was no recession. There is no recession and there will be no recession."
There are about 1.7 billion Internet users in the world today, according to Google. In the top 16 countries for Internet use, about one-third of leisure time – that's about one in three minutes – is spent online.
By some estimates, he continued, about five exabytes (that's one billion billion) of digital information was produced in 2002. That's believed to be equal to all the words ever spoken by human beings up to 2002.
Today, about five exabytes of information goes online every 48 hours. "That's the world we live in," Pichette said. "We have to get used to this."
He also described "the Google beliefs," the tenets by which the company operates.
Everything that is offline will be online. Referring to books, Pichette said, "I buy books for the pleasure of buying paper now, but that's because I'm old."
Cloud computing, using the Internet to share software and computer resources, rather than an individual laptop or limited network, will be the norm, he said.
Innovation is cheap, Pichette added. "What used to be huge barriers to entry are gone. The only barriers are ideas and entrepreneurship."
Pichette's comments also touched on Google's mystique. In passing, he mentioned monthly meetings with Google's engineers.
"It's an incredible privilege to be in that room. They're crazy, they're wonderful," he said.
"There is a digital world coming at us and it's coming at us like a wall."