Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt described his company as part of a “gang of four” kings of consumer technology, along with Amazon, Apple and Facebook. Explicitly not on that list: Microsoft.
Speaking at the opening interview of the All Things D conference in southern California, Schmidt seemed determined to sideline the world’s largest software company as an enterprise play. He said Microsoft was “not driving the consumer revolution in the minds of consumers,” and claimed that the majority of its profits came from corporate sales. The Xbox gaming system didn’t count as it was “not a platform at the computational level,” Schmidt said.
And Schmidt sounded a warning that Microsoft shouldn’t feel safe from Google in the enterprise space either. The former CEO said we were seeing “the death of IT as we know it,” as more and more companies move their data off local servers and online. Google and Microsoft are competing aggressively in the cloud-based services market.
Schmidt had a mixture of praise and criticism for Apple, a partner in some things (search, maps) and a competitor in others (the increasingly brutal Android vs. iOS war in the mobile space). Schmidt called Apple a company that makes “beautiful products” — but also one that clamps down too harshly on iOS developers. Android developers have much more freedom to launch apps, he said.
“The Apple model is the reverse of the Google model,” Schmidt told interviewers Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg. “The Google model is, let the market decide.”
When it came to Facebook, Schmidt made his admiration clear. “For years, we missed something: identity,” he said. “The industry missed it and Google missed it … Facebook is the first general way of disambiguating identity, and that allows you to build a platform.” He also admitted that Google “screwed up” in some of its early social media efforts, specifically the much-maligned and short-lived Google Buzz platform.
At the same time, Schmidt said the industry could “benefit from having an alternative platform” in social media. Google plans to officially launch one such small alternative, the +1 system, on Wednesday. Yet Schmidt seemed to downplay the importance of +1, saying that Google’s search product was “good enough” to fight back waves of SEO optimizers without needing the social layer.
Schmidt was intent on quashing rumors that he was looking for an exit from Google after stepping down from the CEO role earlier this year to make way for co-founder Larry Page. Schmidt and co-founder Sergey Brin were still very important to the company, he insisted. “We have an agreement that if there’s anything important, the three of us will talk about it,” he said, later adding: “I look forward to working at Google until after death.”
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Once again signaling his close ties with Silicon Valley, President Barack Obama plans to draft Twitter CEO Dick Costolo to his National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee.
In a White House statement released Thursday evening, Obama named Costolo, along with Scott Charney, corporate VP of Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing Group, McAfee President David G. DeWalt and three others, as potential appointees. The group oversees the availability and reliability of telecom services in the U.S.
Costolo became Twitter CEO last October after co-founder Evan Williams stepped down.
The move is Obama’s latest overture to Silicon Valley. In his January State of the Union address, the president name-checked Google and Facebook. The following month, Obama shared a dinner with Eric Schmidt, then-CEO of Google; Apple CEO Steve Jobs and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, among others, at the home of Silicon Valley venture capitalist John Doerr.
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Sometimes it pays to get demoted. After being replaced by Larry Page as the CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt became the company’s executive chairman earlier this month. And that change will reflect very positively in his pocket.
As CEO, Schmidt had a salary of $1 per year — a popular figure for CEOs — but now, according to a SEC filing from Google, he will be getting $1.25 million per year, with the possibility of a target bonus of 400% his base salary.
Schmidt already received very generous compensation for stepping down as CEO: $100 million in stock and stock options. Additionally, he announced in January he will be selling 534,000 Google shares in the next year, which at the current price of Google’s stock, would net him about $280 million.
The new salary, and even Google’s generous compensation, won’t reflect much on Schmidt’s day-to-day spending habits, however. According to Forbes, all of this is pocket change for Schmidt whose net worth is $6.3 billion.
[CNET]
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Welcome to this morning’s edition of “First To Know,” a series in which we keep you in the know on what’s happening in the digital world. We’re keeping our eyes on three particular stories of interest today.
iPhone 5 Might Not Ship Until September
Shipments of the next-generation iPhone might be delayed until early fall, reports suggest.
Amazon Announces Kindle Lending Program
Amazon announced that later this year Kindle users will be able to borrow e-books from more than 11,000 U.S. libraries.
AT&T Reports Solid First Quarter
AT&T posted positive first-quarter results with revenues up 2.3% year-over-year at $31.2 billion.
Further News
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, DNY59
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Ten years ago, Google co-founder Larry Page gave up his role as CEO to an executive who had more experience with fast-growing technology companies: former Novell CEO Eric Schmidt.
This week, Page took back the reigns of power at the company he helped create. On the surface, Page seems to be inheriting a company in great shape. It still controls two-thirds of the search market, its Android mobile OS is rapidly growing, and it has an array of successful products such as Gmail, Google Docs and YouTube.
When you peel back the layers, though, Google is a company that has many looming challenges. Facebook’s skyrocketing growth seriously threatens Google’s supremacy on the web, and its big attempts to enter the social space have flopped spectacularly. It also faces pressure from Apple, now the world’s second most valuable company, and Microsoft, whose relaunched search engine simply won’t go away.
If Page is to successfully navigate Google through these choppy waters, he needs to hire a COO that will complement his own strengths and handle many of the day-to-day affairs required to operate a company of that size.
To explain why, all you need to do is take a look at two of the search giant’s biggest rivals: Apple and Facebook.
As I argued in a previous edition of this column, Google needs its own Steve Jobs, a visionary CEO who can create new products that take off in the face of fierce competition. It took Jobs’s vision and relentless pursuit of great products to bring Apple from the brink of bankruptcy to the incredible success it enjoys today.
Jobs didn’t do it alone, though. In March 1998, former Compaq and IBM VP Tim Cook joined the company as SVP of operations and was eventually promoted to COO in 2005. When Cook first joined the company, its stock was worth less than $7 per share. Today, it’s worth more than $340. The company has grown from a $7 billion company to a $317+ billion juggernaut.
While you can’t attribute Apple’s success solely to Jobs and Cook, they have proven to be a formidable team with complementary skills. The following is from a profile of Tim Cook in The New York Times:
In Silicon Valley, Mr. Jobs is also known for relentlessness. Yet on many levels, he and Mr. Cook are opposites. While Mr. Jobs is mercurial and prone to outbursts, Mr. Cook, who was raised in a small town in Alabama, is polite and soft-spoken. He is often described as a “Southern gentleman.” While Mr. Jobs obsesses over every last detail of Apple’s products, Mr. Cook obsesses over the less glamorous minutiae of Apple’s operations.
Their complementary skills have helped Apple pull off the most remarkable turnaround in American business, and made it the world’s most valuable technology company.
In March 2008, Facebook poached Google’s VP of online sales & operations, Sheryl Sandberg. In its original press release at the time, Facebook announced that Sandberg would be “responsible for helping Facebook scale its operations and expand its presence globally,” and primarily focusing on “sales, marketing, business development, human resources, public policy, privacy and communications.” Zuckerberg, on the other hand, would be able to shift more of his attention to his strengths: engineering, product and design.
At the time, the company was worth $15 billion. Today, the company is worth $50 to $75 billion. It’s scaled from 100 million users to more than 600 million.
Zuckerberg and Sandberg have proven to be an extremely effective duo. Once again, I’d like to quote a recent profile of Sandberg in The New York Times:
“One of the reasons the company is doing so well is because the two of them get along so well,” says Mike Schroepfer, vice president for engineering.
Ms. Sandberg has focused on building the business, expanding internationally, cultivating relationships with large advertisers and putting her polish on things like communications and public policy. That has freed Mr. Zuckerberg to focus on what he likes best: the Facebook Web site and its platform.
Donald Graham, the chairman of the Washington Post Company, who once tried to hire Ms. Sandberg, says that in the last two years a lot of questions about Facebook’s viability have been put to rest.
“The combination of Mark and Sheryl is the primary reason,” says Mr. Graham, who is also a member of Facebook’s board.
While Google isn’t in dire straits, there are storm clouds on the horizon (Facebook), and it will take a visionary leader to steer the ship through turbulent waters.
That’s the role Page will try to fill. As Google’s longtime president of products, he has been the visionary behind the company’s search engine and many of its related products. As CEO, he will have even more control over the company’s product strategy, especially now that SVP of Product Jonathan Rosenberg is leaving the company. In a lot of ways, Page’s role will be identical to the ones Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg play at their respective companies.
Page doesn’t have a Tim Cook or Sheryl Sandberg to back him up, though. Eric Schmidt was always the guy who took care of care of business operations, sales, marketing, public relations and human resources — the less-than-glamorous parts of operating a multi-billion dollar company. But with the famed Google triumvirate (Page, Eric Schmidt and co-founder Sergey Brin) broken up, Page can’t rely on Schmidt because he already has one foot out the door.
Page is going to need help managing the day-to-day affairs of the company and dealing with the non-visionary tasks of HR, advertising, legal, and operations. He’s a product guy — dealing with business operations isn’t his strength or his passion. Co-founder Sergey Brin cares even less about business. He’s happy working on new products at Google and has no interest in the COO job.
That leaves Page with three options: to run everything himself, to divide Schmidt’s old responsibilities among his lieutenants, or to get a COO.
I believe Page should take a few lessons from his CEO counterparts and promote or hire someone to be his second-in-command. History shows that pairing a visionary product CEO with a detail-oriented COO is often a winning combination, especially in the technology world.
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While it’s not a drastic change — Page was already the CEO of Google once, and has had a leading role since the company’s beginning — it does raise questions of how the company will change under the new CEO.
Formally, Schmidt will focus on external affairs, relationships with businesses and governments as well as customer relations. Page will focus on internal affairs, product development, and technology strategy. But instead of Google functioning as a triumvirate, led by Schmidt, Page and Sergey Brin, Page will now be calling the shots – and taking more responsibility.
It will not be an easy task. The company faces increasing challenges to show it’s not monopolizing the search space and that it cares about user privacy. Google needs to convince the world it’s a gentle giant: huge but benevolent, successful but not at the expense of its millions of users.
The company has also had a very tense relationship with one of the largest markets in the world, China, resulting in a minute influence even in the space where Google is traditionally the best: search.
Finally, as Facebook grows larger, Google has been unable to prove it can compete in the social space. Google Buzz has been, for the most part, a failure; Orkut hasn’t been going anywhere for years; and a rumored Facebook competitor is still just that — a rumor. Google needs to either succeed at competing with Facebook (through an acquisition or a revolutionary new product) or stop trying, perhaps making strategic partnerships where needed to make sure it keeps a piece of the social pie.
What do you think? Can Page overcome these challenges and steer Google out of trouble and into a new age of prosperity?
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Mobile use is growing faster than all of Google’s internal predictions, with YouTube seeing 200 million mobile playbacks a day, CEO Eric Schmidt said in his keynote at the Internet Advertising Bureau’s Annual Leadership meeting keynote.
As proof of mobile’s growth, Schmidt cited some statistics related to this year’s Super Bowl advertisers: The number of mobile searches for Chrysler, for instance, jumped 102 times during the game, compared with only 48 times for desktop searches. And the number of mobile searches for GoDaddy jumped 315 times, compared with 38 times on desktops.
Schmidt, who spoke Sunday at the IAB event in Palm Springs, Calif., also said that 78% of smartphone owners use their phones while they shop. “This is the future and everyone will adapt,” Schmidt said. “Because people are fundamentally better off with a better and smarter and more empowered, if you will, customer.”
Mobile growth is occurring at a quicker rate than anyone expected, Schmidt noted. “We look at the charts internally and it’s happening faster than all of our predictions,” Schmidt said.
Schmidt, who will leave his post as Google CEO on April 4, used those stats to make a case for linking display advertising and mobile.
“The technology has finally caught up with the promises we talked about for so long,” Schmidt said. He predicted that display advertising could hit $200 billion business, though he declined to say when that milestone would be reached. Display is currently a $17 billion business globally. Google’s share of that is about $2.5 billion a year.
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And a fine dinner it was at the Silicon Valley home of venture capitalist John Doerr, a partner with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Take a look at the list of luminaries who were at the dinner with President Obama, discussing how government and technology businesses can work together to “win the future.”
John Doerr, partner, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & ByersCarol Bartz, president and CEO, Yahoo!John Chambers, CEO and chairman, Cisco SystemsDick Costolo, CEO, TwitterLarry Ellison, co-founder and CEO, OracleReed Hastings, CEO, NetFlixJohn Hennessy, president, Stanford UniversitySteve Jobs, chairman and CEO, AppleArt Levinson, chairman and former CEO, GenentechEric Schmidt, chairman and CEO, GoogleSteve Westly, managing partner and founder, Westly GroupMark Zuckerberg, founder, president and CEO, Facebook
Google’s Eric Schmidt closed up this busy Tuesday with the last keynote of the day at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, and he did it by sharing some very positive (but also quite vague) thoughts, some stats and a new video-editing application, created specifically for Honeycomb-based tablets.
“Android is the fastest growing mobile platform in the world,” said Schmidt, emphasizing Google’s goals of making information more accessible to everyone, helping us do everyday tasks better and spend more time with the people we love.
Although most of what Schmidt said has been taken from the utopian mobile future playbook that’s always the topic of events such as the MWC, when you’ve got Google backing up those words they have a bit more weight.
Being incredibly careful to add “with your permission” every time he tackled the subject of privacy, Schmidt said that sharing information about ourselves will make search better. He mentioned the concept of autonomous search: For example, your phone might be searching for and delivering to you important information about your surroundings as you walk down the street.
“In the future,” said Schmidt, “You’re never lost. You’re never lonely. You’re never bored. And you’re never out of ideas.”
As for the recent partnership of Microsoft and Nokia, Schmidt said that Google “certainly tried” to convince Nokia to make the switch to Android. It seems that Microsoft was more convincing this time around.
The auditorium also got an exclusive peek at a new video-editing Android app aimed specifically at Honeycomb-based tablets such as the Motorola Xoom or the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1. The app lets you add still images to a video, apply various effects such as zooming, panning and fading out, underline all that with a music score, and quickly share it on YouTube. The last bit didn’t work at the live presentation, but to be honest, due to the huge amount of people constantly accessing Wi-Fi during MWC, most of the presentations failed with that regard.
Schmidt also shared a couple of interesting stats: Smartphones sales surpassed PC sales last week; Chrome has more than 120 million active users; and 35 hours of video are uploaded to Youtube every minute, he said. Furthermore, according to Schmidt, YouTube has more than 2 billion views per day, and its revenue doubled in 2010.
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Google’s Eric Schmidt closed up this busy Tuesday with the last keynote of the day at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, and he did it by sharing some very positive (but also quite vague) thoughts, some stats and a new video-editing application, created specifically for Honeycomb-based tablets.
“Android is the fastest growing mobile platform in the world,” said Schmidt, emphasizing Google’s goals of making information more accessible to everyone, helping us do everyday tasks better and spend more time with the people we love.
Although most of what Schmidt said has been taken from the utopian mobile future playbook that’s always the topic of events such as the MWC, when you’ve got Google backing up those words they have a bit more weight.
Being incredibly careful to add “with your permission” every time he tackled the subject of privacy, Schmidt said that sharing information about ourselves will make search better. He mentioned the concept of autonomous search: For example, your phone might be searching for and delivering to you important information about your surroundings as you walk down the street.
“In the future,” said Schmidt, “You’re never lost. You’re never lonely. You’re never bored. And you’re never out of ideas.”
As for the recent partnership of Microsoft and Nokia, Schmidt said that Google “certainly tried” to convince Nokia to make the switch to Android. It seems that Microsoft was more convincing this time around.
The auditorium also got an exclusive peek at a new video-editing Android app aimed specifically at Honeycomb-based tablets such as the Motorola Xoom or the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1. The app lets you add still images to a video, apply various effects such as zooming, panning and fading out, underline all that with a music score, and quickly share it on YouTube. The last bit didn’t work at the live presentation, but to be honest, due to the huge amount of people constantly accessing Wi-Fi during MWC, most of the presentations failed with that regard.
Schmidt also shared a couple of interesting stats: Smartphones sales surpassed PC sales last week; Chrome has more than 120 million active users; and 35 hours of video are uploaded to Youtube every minute, he said. Furthermore, according to Schmidt, YouTube has more than 2 billion views per day, and its revenue doubled in 2010.
More About: android, eric schmidt, Google, honeycomb, Mobile World Congress, MWC, MWC2011, video editing
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