During Google I/O's opening keynote, the company's co-founder Larry Page took some time to offer up his vision for the future.
Speaking about the kinds of things that will be possible in the future, Page said that there's still much left to discover and create, and that we shouldn't let negativity drag us down. "Create things that don't exist," he said.
"Every story I read about Google is about us versus some other company, or something else, and I really don't find that interesting," Page told the Google I/O audience, according to The Verge. "We should be building things that don't exist." Being negative, he said, "is not how we make progress," and "not every new technology is zero-sum."
Page also said that we've only done about one percent of what we can do with technology. Talking about self-driving cars, he said that alone would free up untold amounts of time for people every day.
As for competition with others like Microsoft, Page admitted that the two giants have been at odds before, but that Google still had a "great relationship" with Redmond.
"I've personally been quite sad at the industry's behavior around all these things," he added. "If you take something as simple as IM, we've had an open offer to interoperate forever. Just this week Microsoft took advantage of that by interoperating with us. You can't have people milking off of just one company."
Page has made similar comments to these in the past, particularly about negativity. In January, he said that too many companies are so caught up in the competition they often fail to create forward-looking technologies.
"I worry that something has gone seriously wrong with the way we run companies," he said. "If you read the media coverage of our company, or of the technology industry in general, it's always about the competition. The stories are written as if they are covering a sporting event. But it's hard to find actual examples of really amazing things that happened solely due to competition. How exciting is it to come to work if the best you can do is trounce some other company that does roughly the same thing? That's why most companies decay slowly over time. They tend to do approximately what they did before, with a few minor changes."
