The Google boss marvels at how technology is shaping social changes, writes LISA O'CARROLL
IT’S HARD TO believe, but there are things that keep Eric Schmidt awake at night.
For the boss of Google, it’s not Apple or Facebook or China. It’s something much less tangible – it is the pace of change in the IT industry.
“My fundamental fear about Google is that we have the same feature as other companies, which is that we lose that edge,” he says.
“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.”
Sometimes, he tells a conference in London, he finds it “hard to keep up”, and the big issue is how technology is shaping social changes. He illustrated this with a story about two girls, aged eight and 10, in Australia who had fallen down a storm-drain and needed help. Instead of phoning the emergency services, they updated their Facebook status.
“I would have screamed, but that’s my generation. And it [Facebook] worked, because people crowd-sourced and they were rescued.”
Schmidt was in Britain on what many would consider a charm offensive, meeting his new friends in the Conservative Party (he lets slip he is a Tory supporter) and doing a series of talks addressing concerns over the company’s direction and its approach to privacy.
This was months after it admitted it had mistakenly collected personal Wi-Fi data in Ireland and other countries.
There are also increasing concerns about competition. Last week, the company sealed a $700 million (€552 million) deal with ITA Software that will see it go into the online travel business.
There is speculation that Google intends to enter other sectors such as property and motoring, which would pose a big challenge to real estate and car sites including Myhome, Autotrader or Carzone.
While Google eats into other businesses, there is one which is eating into the time we spend with Google every day – Facebook.
The social networking site overtook Google for the first time in the US in March, and Silicon Valley is awash with rumours that Google is about to throw down the gauntlet after the founder of Digg tweeted: “OK, umm, huge rumor: Google to launch Facebook competitor very soon, ‘Google Me’, very credible source.”
The tweet was deleted shortly after it appeared two weeks ago.
Asked by Guardianeditor Alan Rusbridger whether it was true, Schmidt responded with a non-denial. "That would be pre-announcing a product we may or may not have."
“That sounds like a yes,” quipped Rusbridger.
Being the glue which connects us is a new thing for Google, but it is already doing this with its foray into the mobile market. Google is already a serious challenger to the iPhone – Schmidt said Google is currently “turning on” 160,000 Androids phones a day – up from 60,000 in February. By the end of the year that will reach an impressive six million a day, he says.
He warns that organisations should think of their mobile strategy ahead of their internet strategy. “Mobile is the hottest area of computer technology,” he says. “The smartest developers now are writing apps for mobile before they write for Windows or Apple.
“The corollary of ‘internet first’ is ‘mobile first’.”
Within three to five years, Schmidt says, we’ll be consuming almost all of our information online. We’ll do it, he adds, “on devices that are live, not static. The characteristics of these devices are that they know who you are, they know where you are, they can play video and they carry memory.”
He refused to comment on Rupert Murdoch, who branded Google a "kleptomaniac" and "parasite" and who, last Friday, erected a paywall on his UK titles, charging £1 a day to read the Timesor Sunday Timesonline.
Earlier this week it emerged that Google is experimenting with its own paywall for newspapers, called Newspass.
“Sure, there are some people who won’t pay. How many will that be? Twenty per cent, 30 per cent, 50 per cent? We don’t know. So let’s run with the experiment and find out.”
He insists that privacy is a “permanent” issue, and is taken very seriously.
“If we violate your privacy in some fundamental way right now, not only would you leave us, but you would leave us forever. That’s how quick you would move. So the real disincentive of violating people’s trust is that we could lose our customers, and our customers are everything.”
This is slightly disingenuous – most consumers are blissfully unaware how much personal data the Android or iPhone collect on a continuous basis – and Google did photograph all our homes without our express permission for its Street View service which launches at the end of the year in Ireland.
Schmidt is a free-marketeer though, and believes privacy will be self-policing – when it becomes an issue, “the people” will fix it.
“Society will learn and push back and say it’s not OK to do this.”
