Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt revisited what is rapidly becoming a popular theme for the search engine giant – the mobile world – at the firm’s inaugural cloud computing event, Atmosphere in Mountain View, Calif.
Back at MWC in Barcelona, Schmidt outlined three factors he said were paramount to delivering a richer, more dynamic and personally fulfilling experience on mobile – computing, connectivity and the cloud.
Talking to Quentin Hardy, national editor of Forbes Media, at Atmosphere this week, Schmidt elaborated on his mobile vision, adding the novel view that there was no such thing as communication overload.
The future of computing is mobile, proclaimed Schmidt, who defined his firm primarily as an information company which had put its best developers to work on mobile applications.
And if mobile is the new path, then interoperability and security issues are bumps in the road that need smoothing out as soon as possible, according to the Google chief.
Indeed, in an era where at least half of all new Internet connections stem from mobile devices and from emerging markets like Indonesia and South Africa, more Google searches are being generated on mobile than personal computers, so the firm’s interest is no surprise.
“One of the things 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,” said Schmidt, adding that most people in the future would access the internet from mobile devices.
“Outside of the US we’ve worked hard on SMS search,” he continued, emphasizing that Google saw itself as a platform provider rather than a content provider.
“We operate with the assumption people will carry a mobile device with them at all times, and that there are applications we can build on our platform that will allow people to be more productive, and have more fun,” enthused Schmidt, declaring that his firm was close to moving the information explosion to the next level.
Google’s app Store is growing very quickly, observed Schmidt, noting that the best strategy was to provide interoperability, authentication, and then allow third parties to build the applications.
“What’s important now is to get the mobile architecture right. Because mobility will be the way you will provision in the future. Fast forward 5-10 years. The answer should always be mobile first.
“You want to have the best app on mobile. If the real action is going to be there, then making sure you know what’s going on with mobile devices,” Schmidt declared.
But with all these devices, always on, always beeping or vibrating in your pocket for attention, wouldn’t we all suffer from information overload?
Well, if you think that’s the case, You’re obviously not young enough, exclaimed Schmidt. Just look at an 18 year old if you want to see multi-tasking sensory overload working just fine.
“One of the questions you want to ask, is, ‘what’s new?’ One thing that’s really new, is that everything is now. What you’re really referring to is not necessarily that you have so many parallel streams, it’s that they’re all right now,” explained Schmidt patiently.
“What is fundamentally different now is everyone knows what’s going on exactly now. Everyone with a digital device.
If you turn off digital devices now, you take away something pretty profound. That connection is so fundamental to peoples’ lives today,” he concluded.
