1. Eric Schmidt: smartphones are the future for Google and the world | Media | The Guardian 30/06/2010 13:23
Eric Schmidt: smartphones are the
future for Google and the world
The chief executive of the search giant believes smartphones will
empower the poor and is the equivalent to the arrival of TV
Jemima Kiss
The Guardian, Monday 28 June 2010
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The Google chief executive says the decision to pull out of China was not down to revenue but was about wanting to
be a ‘good global citizen’. Photograph: Paul Sakuma/AP
Phenomenally successful, but also imitated, envied and feared – Google is the
technological icon of our time. But is its ubiquity and influence a force for good?
Chief executive Eric Schmidt has no doubts. He tells the Guardian that Google has
been instrumental in a generational shift in democratising information. "Over my
lifetime, we are going to go from a small number of people having access to most of the
world's information, to virtually everybody in the world having access to virtually all of
the world's information," he said. "That's because of web search, cheap phones and
automatic translation. That's a pretty amazing achievement and Google is part of that."
Yet with Google active in so many areas, from shopping to video and translation to
music, its competitors are becoming more numerous and opponents more vociferous.
Schmidt admits: "We try to do everything … We don't shake off the big goals."
In an interview ahead of his keynote presentation at the Guardian's Activate Summit
on Thursday, he makes it clear Google is positioning itself for the future through
mobile, with the development of its Android mobile system and with subsequent
Google-branded handsets. He is keener to talk about this area than the battle with
newspaper groupss such as News International, whose paywall model is partly based
on what it considers Google's parasitical attitude to original content.
The mobile battle pitches the three biggest tech firms against each other: Google, Apple
and Microsoft. Analyst Gartner puts Android as the world's fourth most-popular
smartphone operating system in the first quarter of 2010 – ahead of Microsoft in a
market it joined less than two years ago but behind Symbian (Nokia), Research in
Motion (Blackberry) and Apple.
"I believe that the very best engineering is now going on the mobile devices — the
hardest problems and the most clever solutions," says Schmidt. "You know who the
person is and where they are, and you don't get that from a desktop app." The 50,000
apps built for Android, mostly by third-party developers, cover almost every topic, but
the one killer app is still Google itself, says Schmidt.
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2. Eric Schmidt: smartphones are the future for Google and the world | Media | The Guardian 30/06/2010 13:23
Schmidt describes how our online lives are now more personal, social and mobile.
"When people are awake, they are now online, and that has a lot of implications for
society and for Google," he says. Google's secret, he adds (though it's not much of a
secret), is that it can handle more data than its rivals because it has larger networks
and data centres. Google in effect pulled its business from China earlier this year after
moving the operation to Hong Kong, bypassingChina's censorship regime. Google,
whose company motto is "Do no evil" had been heavily criticised for its decision to do
business in China and its rethink was welcomed by the industry. It also increased
pressure on rivals who still operate there.
"Google doesn't necessarily do things that other companies do. We have our own set of
principles that we work hard on. In the China case, the decision was made not for
revenue – it was about what we were willing to deal with. We want to be a good global
citizen and we believe very strongly in the openness of information."
Another key push from Google is encouraging governments to open information to the
public, via formats that developers can build useful public services around. One recent
victory for open data campaigners in the UK was Transport for London opening its
travel data for commercial use, but the coalition government has indicated it may
establish a broader public "right to data" that will have to be provided by local and
national authorities.Schmidt says Google's policy is to encourage governments to open
their data to the public. The California-based company has teams helping to prepare
"non web-resident" archives and databases for the web. "It is no longer acceptable
online for government researchers to publish documents read by 500 people in printed
form," he says. "It needs to be web first.
Once that happens, there are lots of interesting things you can do to correlate real-time
information, if that is what is needed, or put it on a map ... government services are
fundamentally about where people are, about what is going on in my town or my
school."
These projects are just as relevant in developing countries, where the introduction of
smarter, cheaper phones has created a powerful network. How does Google help
developing countries break through the digital divide, and ensure the opportunities of
the web are open to all? "Hardware manufacturers are being incentivised to make
higher volumes of lower-priced mobiles, and prices have fallen dramatically. But a
young person now in pretty much any country, if they have a mobile device, can get
access to pretty much all the world's information and get it translated into their own
language."
Arriving at Google in 2001 after a career spent in Silicon Valley, Schmidt is still excited
by its possibilities. "That's a big news thing – that's equivalent to the arrival of
television."
For more information on the Activate Summit, visit guardian.co.uk/activate
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2010
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