Google and the Future – Eric Schmidt talks about the Visions

Google is someone who changes the trend in the Industry. When Google is adopting up something new, it does mean the future is bound to change.

The news of Separation of Apple and Google came out full of surprises for most – since their visions were colliding, going hand-in-hand further didn’t make sense as per Google CEO-Eric Schmidt.

Due to certain constraints, Schmidt was unable to talk about his steps but now he has taken steps to come out the white stage and talk about where Google is headed. Eric & other top executives talks about next 5 – 10 years to the future.

New possibilities and Opportunities?

Best of both the worlds, a strategic blend of Both.

It’s obvious that the highest growth is in our core business as we get better and better at targeted ads, and those ads become more valuable. Our whole theory about advertising is that an advertisement that’s not targeted—just a random ad that you just walk by—is a waste of somebody’s money because you’re not going to buy. It wasn’t relevant to you.

Plans for Expansions in Mobile
Today, there are around mobiles 4x the no. of PCs. This is a big market. The rough number of PCs is around 800 million; mobile phones is on the order of 3 billion.

Whats more evident is, the growth rate of mobile phones is much higher than that of PCs. As per an estimate, 600 million mobile phones are Internet-capable. And that is the group that Google really cares about because those run powerful browsers. This was all kicked off by the iPhone. The iPhone sort of showed what you can do with a very powerful browser. Now there are many new kinds of devices with powerful browsers where you can have very high-quality ads, new applications, and, of course, the phone.

Business strategy, Mobile Partnerships, etc
Google is partnering with telecommunications partners. It works mostly in this way – Google shares in the revenue for the ads that are displayed on the consumer’s phones. Advertiser pays Google, and then they share it with the handset and mobile operator. Going further, it becomes more important that the telecom operators have enough capital to continue the build-outs of the so-called 3G and 4G networks.

Challenges
The phones are not fast, the networks are not as capable, the ad formats are not standardized. But on the other hand it’s very, very important to solve those problems because a phone is very personal. And so if we know a fair amount about a person, with their permission we can target a useful ad—you know, “It’s Eric. You had a hamburger yesterday, do you want pizza today? There’s a pizza store on the right.” That kind of ad is likely worth a lot of money to an advertiser because it will generate a sale. People could use advice as to what to eat and where the food is—and of course you can turn it off. So the important thing here is advertising that has value to the person is advertising that is a valuable business. That’s the business we’re in.

Android Strategy
Eric says

Android is many things. First, it’s an operating system for a mobile phone. It’s particularly powerful because of the way it was built. The software is free, you can extend it, you’re not locked into any applications vendor or any network. What we like about Android is its perfect expression of openness. A next generation of [Android-based] phones will be coming out in the fall. They won’t necessarily displace other [phones] because they’re also doing well. But we will have a significant bet in mobile phones. So from our perspective it looks like Android is going to be a success.

Legal Matters & Government Scrutiny

Google is now the subject of intense government scrutiny, just as Microsoft once was.
As far as the investigations, Google has very good answers. And what’s happening is people are comparing Google to other companies, in particular Microsoft, even though their behavior, principles, practices are quite different.

Eric had been in discussion with various government regulators. But he has deliberately not slowed down the kind of consumer changes he thinks are important to make the world a better place. And he would never want to slow that down because of fear, if you will. Still, Google is much more sensitive.

We spend a lot more time thinking about how will we communicate, what will be the knee-jerk reactions, what will be the sophisticated reactions, how will people perceive what we’re doing. Because we understand the rules are different for us.

ALL SAID AND DONE

Evidently, everything in Google’s visions converge and diverge to the mobile market. Google feels there’s still alot is to be done and We agree.