The Power of Big Ideas

I've been thinking about "big ideas" recently and how powerful they can be. What strikes me is that so many of these ideas are so easily stated, such as "Cure Cancer" or "Put a man on the moon," but are really difficult to accomplish. At Google, the company began with a goal "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." As simply as this goal can be stated and, in some sense, understood, it also is a driver for an endless array of initiatives, intermediate goals, blind alleys, successes, and failures. One can adhere to this goal while motivating the development of machine translation, indexing and rank ordering searches of the World Wide Web, evolving massive datacenters and high capacity fiber networks and collaborative applications that allow concurrent editing of documents, presentations, and spreadsheets, to mention just a few examples.