A Berkeley Alum at MIT: Google CEO Eric Schmidt Stops By

During his swing through Cambridge this week, Eric Schmidt sat down with "On Point" host Tom Ashbrook for an on-stage interview at MIT's Kresge Auditorium. The event was organized in honor of Michael Hammer, the late MIT professor, author, and management guru who died last September.

Ashbrook tried to conduct a wide-ranging interview with Schmidt, talking about everything from Google's book search project to the business problems of traditional media to Google's vast data centers. Ashbrook didn't get much from Schmidt other that his stock public-company-CEO responses: turns out that while Android is great, iPhone is the dominant smartphone today. Google runs "some number of relatively large data centers." Wow.

Schmidt has a wry sense of humor, but his dominant mode is that of the ultra-logical Vulcan engineer: every problem (or answer to a probing question) can be deconstructed and solved if you are smart enough. (In the pic, Schmidt is at center talking after the event with Rich Miner, the Cambridge exec who runs Google Ventures and helped develop the Android operating system for mobile phones.)

By the end of the event, I found myself wishing that someone with a deeper background in management, innovation, and corporate culture had been chosen to interview Schmidt, to really get at what is so novel about the way Google works as a company (and what challenges it really faces.) Clay Christensen from Harvard Business School would've been perfect -- he appeared in a video tribute to Hammer that was shown -- or Michael Cusumano of MIT. I do enjoy Ashbrook's show on WBUR, but he wasn't the right guy for this particular job.

But the questions from the audience were excellent (it was, as you might suspect, a smart crowd of Hammer's old friends and neighbors), and there were these two great quotes from Schmidt toward the end of the event: