Peter Thiel Says Google’s Not Really a Tech Company

From IEEE Spectrum:

As you may imagine, technology executives take exception to his theory. Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, debated Thiel on Monday, at an Aspen, Colorado event sponsored by Fortune magazine. Thiel landed a good one by zeroing in on Google’s own investment policy, which he said was essentially to put its cash under the mattress:

Google is a great company. It has 30,000 people, or 20,000, whatever the number is. They have pretty safe jobs. On the other hand, Google also has 30, 40, 50 billion in cash. It has no idea how to invest that money in technology effectively. So, it prefers getting zero percent interest from Mr. Bernanke, effectively the cash sort of gets burned away over time through inflation, because there are no ideas that Google has how to spend money.

More here.