Another great day at Google.

I have this strong memory from Barack Obama's first presidential campaign.

It was November of 2007, and Obama was speaking to a rapt audience of Google employees in Mountain View,

California.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

It was the kind of optimistic message we heard a lot of back then.

We also know that the Google story is more than just being about the bottom line.

It's about seeing what we can accomplish when we believe in things that are unseen.

When we take the measure of our changing times and we take action to shape them. And that's why we're here today.

Tech was the key to a better future, a way to innovate and disrupt, and to give Americans more tools to connect directly with their government.

Together, we could open up the government and invite all citizens in while connecting

all of America to 21st century broadband.

And now, all that feels like such a long time ago, even though some of the players from that administration

are about to come back into the next one.

It's such a worthwhile exercise to go back that far because the climate was so different.

That's Cecilia Kong. She's a tech reporter for the New York Times.

She reminded me that Obama didn't just visit Google when it came to his

administration's embrace of technology. He actually also held a town hall at Facebook. He had a

fundraiser at the home of Mark Benioff of Salesforce.com. He had dinner with all these tech

CEOs, including Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt of Google at the time.

But the framing was so different then, which was, wow, Obama gets tech.

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