Does Google ever think of security as something it could turn into a product?

In some sense, the answer is clearly "Yes," because part of Checkout is a security product. But fundamentally, we are a search company. We do search. We want to do things that make users feel safe and secure on the Internet to do searches. I have no idea what we'll do in the future. I don't have a crystal ball. But we're a search company, and what we want to do is help people be able to do searches and learn things and make all the world's information universally accessible and useful. And part of being useful is being secure.

Niels Provos was quoted recently as saying that the firewall is dead. What are your thoughts on that?

Niels's point was that, increasingly, business technology and enterprise technology can't be separated from the Internet and can't be separated from what consumers do. And businesses, increasingly, are using partnerships to get things done. Increasingly when I go off and I give discussions to other CIOs, what we talk about is the consumerizaiton of enterprise technology. The increasing integration of consumer technology into the enterprise space. So what Niels was talking about was that, this idea that you can't live your whole life behind one set of walls anymore. Everything that your employees do every day will include stuff they do at home, stuff that other companies have done.

We obviously believe in this idea of the Web 2.0, where you're collecting different kinds of applications together to meet consumer needs. The firewall is one line of defense, and it's still useful, just like locks on front doors are still useful. But you need other kinds of defenses as well. You may need application development standards, you may need inter-organizational understanding of things, like Stopbadware.org. It's no longer that security is something you can write a check for. Security is a process. There are no lasting technical solutions to social problems. You can't write a check to solve a social problem. So Niels is absolutely right. We think security of the future is a far more complex community based activity. It takes a village. We want to be part of the village.

That's interesting because it is in opposition to the trend of locking out social networking sites and locking down the functionality of the PC. It sounds like you guys believe that that's not going to work.