There are millions of entrepreneurs who want to come up with the next Google. Maybe you are one of them. You almost certainly know one.

Guess what? Google is afraid of you – haunted that the same disruptive forces which transformed the company from a garage project by two kids maxing out their credit cards into a global superpower in 10 short years could render them irrelevant. Just like that.

“The fear is the next Sergey and Larry will come up with a disruptive technology or service that will eliminate the need for Google," Google vice president of online sales and operations John Herlihy told the Digital Landscapes conference at UCD, according to SiliconRepublic.com. "That spurs us on to deliver the best quality return on investment to advertisers in an open and transparent partnership that works for them."

Note the use of the word "eliminate." Sure, it's a setup for the pablum that Google is doing great stuff, better than anyone, etc. But the public expression of that a dominant – and feared – player is driven by that kind of metaphysical fatalism should give competitors as much pause as it does wannabees hope.

More enterprise survival tips from the horse's mouth:

“(W)e think that scarcity breeds clarity. If, for example, we have enough resources invested in something, we halve it and eliminate overheads."

“(W)e ... celebrate failure. Here’s an analogy – the Roman legions used to send out scouts in different directions. If a scout didn’t return, the army didn’t head in that direction. We seek feedback at every opportunity on something – we either kill it, adjust it or redeploy resources."

Herlihy also predicted the obsolescence of the desktop in a a few years, and that cloud computing and the mobile internet (in which Google is heavily invested) is the next wave – well covered by our friends over at Gadget Lab.

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