Google Earnings Call Transcript

For “earnings geeks” here’s the Google transcript. No local or SMB mentions. No discussion of the “Google Phone.” No real discussion of mobile, except partnerships in passing. But here are three interesting comments from my cursory read:

• Eric Schmidt re-emphasized Docs & Spreadsheets as part of an enterprise push. He mentions it only in passing here but it echoes his earlier comments in the Wired interview.
• Google SVP Omid Kordestani mentions the “Google display network” (this will probably be what Google’s calls what it builds with DoubleClick, as well as its display style inventory on AdSense). I’d not heard this term before.
• There are additional comments by Kordestani, as well as Schmidt, about “the power of the platform” — that is, Google as advertising platform or applications platform depending on which side of the business you’re talking about.

These remarks again echo stuff in the Wired interview:

Wired: How should we think about Google today?

Schmidt: Think of it first as an advertising system. Then as an end-user system — Google Apps. A third way to think of Google is as a giant supercomputer. And a fourth way is to think of it as a social phenomenon involving the company, the people, the brand, the mission, the values — all that kind of stuff.

Many people have already commented on this but this statement/formulation is an inversion of the mantra we’ve always heard from Google about being a way to organize the world’s information.