Biggest cost to Google? Sergey says, "Opportunity costs." Schmidt Wired interview

another cool bit in interview:

What is Sergey's hot button? He cares a lot about the culture. He cares a lot about deal structure. He is the better negotiator of the three of us. Larry is the deepest of the thinkers in terms of the strategic technology. For example, today, I said, Larry "Larry, what are you doing tomorrow?" And he said, "I really need to work -- I need to go talk to these three teams." And he has this face - you work with people long enough you can sort of tell - he’s thinking “ I don't have good enough touch (with the teams) on an issue.” What that really meansis Larry is going to gofindtheengineers and torture them until he is really, really sure (they are all in sync). And he's very good at that. He's very, very good. I mean, he is really extraordinary. And that talent is a useful leadership skill because? Well, here's another example to illustrate what I mean. We're arguing over the structure of our datacenters -- this was yesterday -- I thought the presentation was excellent. They had the datacenters, the components -- absolutely brilliant. And Larry says, "I just don't think that's a very good strategy," and I go, "What's wrong?" I'm a computerscientist. Ithinkit'spretty good. And he comes up with this thing that nobody had thought about -- that he and one of the engineers had been cooking up, which involved changing the way the data centers are built that was the next logical evolution. The point is he ignored every possible chain of command. He didn't tell anyone. He went to this particular engineer who's experimenting with this idea in his 20 percent time.So what I've learned here is you don't say “no” to that.

interesting interview that would have been much more interesting if they'd used typography that made it readable.

"Missed opportunity costs" said Sergey :)