Monday, July 5, 2010

Eric Schmidt On Newspapers, Mobile, and What Might Eventually Kill Google

Google CEO Eric Schmidt spoke at the Activate 2010, and the Guardian has an overview of some of his comments. Eric says “Mobile is the hottest area of computer technology ... The smartest developers now are writing apps for mobile before they write for Windows or Apple Mac desktop operating systems. Part of that is because these devices are hugely personal to us when we use them.” On how we read newspapers in the future, he says “I think it’s delivered to a digital device, which has text, obviously, but also colour, and video, and the ability to dig very deeply into what you are supplied with ... The most important thing is that it will be more personalised.”

Eric was also asked about what keeps him awake at night, and what might eventually kill Google. He said:

Almost all deaths in the IT industry are self-inflicted. Large-scale companies make mistakes because they don’t continue to innovate. For example, ’nowness’ – real-time information – is a new concept that wasn’t around when Google started, or even a few years ago. Now we integrate it into our searches.

My fundamental fear about Google is that we have the same feature as other companies, which is that we lose that edge. If you lose that edge... But I think that will be a long, long time from now. External threats are likely to come from a truly innovative company that builds itself a big enough business quickly enough that we can’t catch it. It’s not different from other industries in that sense, except that in IT it happens so fast.

The next great success will be built even faster than Google, and the one after that even faster. It’s just how it is.

[Thanks Manoj!]

Eric Schmidt On Newspaper ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (4)

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