Chapter 7. The Vision

Larry and Sergey's deep sense of purpose drove Google from the beginning: "Sergey and I founded Google because we believed we could provide an important service to the world—instantly delivering relevant information on virtually any topic," wrote Larry Page in Google's first corporate report.

Serving our end users is at the heart of what we do and remains our number one priority. Our goal is to develop services that significantly improve the lives of as many people as possible. We are proud of the products we have built, and we hope that those we create in the future will have an even greater positive impact on the world.^[]

Google aspires "to create designs that are useful, fast, simple, engaging, innovative, universal, profitable, beautiful, trustworthy and personable. Achieving a harmonious balance of these ten principles is a constant challenge. A product that gets the balance right is 'Googley'—and will satisfy and delight people all over the world."

"Larry and Sergey thought a lot about [our mission] before they got started," explained Google Vice President Marissa Mayer. "At other companies, there are these Dilbertian crews of HR people who show up and say: 'We've outgrown our mission and we need to write a new one.' That has never happened at Google. The mission is exactly what Larry and Sergey wrote back in the fall of 1998, before any of us were even here."

Despite frequent early statements that Google was about search, Mayer said that the vision always was broader than that. "It wasn't just about Web search. When I showed up, I said, 'Guys, shouldn't we be calling the company Google.com?' They said: 'Oh, we're not just a dot.com. We're not going to be just about the Web. We're going to be all kinds of things.'"^[]

In the fall of 2004, Google's top management realized they needed more structure. They engaged in a process of strategic review, or "visioning" about the company meaning, intent, and future. It all started when Page and Brin went into all-night seclusion, writing what became known as "The Tablets." (To read the Google Ten Commandments, check out the section "Ten Things Google Has Found to Be True," in the chapter "Google Culture.")