"The goal is to serve the customer, and all of us, including Microsoft, are trying to move to a Web model.” So said Google CEO Eric Schmidt at the end of a long day in Silicon Valley which saw the Cloud giant play host to 400 CIOs and decision makers in a bid to convince them of the merits of the new model of computing.
With sessions and presentations from the Cloud good and the great, including Salesforce.com's Marc Benioff and Amazon's Werner Vogels, the emphasis was on the wider cause of communicating the benefits of Cloud Computing in general and scoping out the offering from Google in particular, an offering that Schmidt was keen to position as being considerably wider than some expect.
“People think of Google as a search company, but we’re really an information company,” he said. “ What’s interesting about these web apps is that you can do these sharing applications now. One of the new things about the web is that it enables sharing-sensitive apps. I think of calendars as incredibly boring, but I’m wrong, calendars are incredibly interesting because they’re incredibly shared.
“So from a computer science perspective, all of a sudden we have our top engineers who want to build calendars. I’m going, what’s wrong with you guys? But in fact it’s a very interesting example. Spreadsheets are similar, the most interesting spreadsheets are highly, highly interlinked, something I didn’t know, and was not possible with the previous technology — Microsoft technology made it very difficult because they were not built in that model.”
No straight swap
Crucially Schmidt did not try to claim to his CIO audience that they could swap out all their existing on premise applications for a one to one swap with Google alternatives. “There are limitations. Our applications are not full replacements for the incumbents, we’re clear about that,” he explained. “The strategy is to get to 80%, because of our cost benefit is worth it to switch because we’re providing value.”
The Google CEO placed great emphasis on the potential and power of mobile technology allied to Cloud Computing. “What’s important now is to get the mobile architecture right because mobility will be the way you will provision in the future,” he declared. “Fast forward 5-10 years. The answer should always be mobile first. You will want to have the best app on mobile. For us the single most significant moment has been the arrival of HTML5. This standard allows for store value within the browser. It allows for application segregation and means that applications will be less virus sensitive.”
He added: We see ourselves as platform provider not content providers. One of the thing I’m most proud of is that in the next few years, more than a billion people will get mobile phones who have never had a mechanism of communication outside of their village. Outside of the US we’ve worked hard on SMS search. We also have a feature phone focus around these browsers. Most people in the future will access internet mostly from mobile device.”
Could it be magic?
Schmidt has an intriguing romantic view of some of the work going on at Google. “There are a lot of things in the web that are close to AI such as automatic page translation in Google Chrome. That kind of technology is as close to magic as I can imagine,” he suggested. “We’re close to moving this information explosion to the next level. We operate with the assumption people will carry with them a mobile device with them at all times, and that there are applications we can build/people will build on our platform that will allow people to be more productive, more fun.
“We make lots of mistakes. One weakness is that as we become more middle aged as a company it’s harder to do completely new things. Every government has a group trying to figure out what we’re up to. Information is power. The fact of the matter is that we’re disrupting industries. Most of the other large companies have collaborations as well as competitions with us. My basic objective is to find out how to grow these industries.”
He concluded with some advice to others on how to manage in a collaborative Cloud-enabled world: ask questions and listen to the answers. “People my age often don’t ask the fundamental questions. When people say things to me, I actually check every one of them. I would encourage you to challenge every assumption,” he said to his audience. “We run Google in collaborative way. We sit in rooms until the best idea comes and everyone agrees on it. There are some very smart people in your organisation that you don’t know about. The ones who are low in the org, they’re probably miserable. They’re often deep, three levels down, look for it and when you hear it jump on it.”
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