Chief executive of the search giant, Eric Schmidt, has no doubts that Google has been instrumental in a generational shift in democratising information.
“Over my lifetime, we are going to go from a small number of people having access to most of the world’s information, to virtually everybody in the world having access to virtually all of the world’s information,” he said. “That’s because of web search, cheap phones and automatic translation. That’s a pretty amazing achievement and Google is part of that.” Yet with Google active in so many areas, from shopping to video and translation to music, its competitors are becoming more numerous and opponents more vociferous. Schmidt admits: “We try to do everything ... We don’t shake off the big goals.” In an interview ahead of his keynote presentation at the Guardian’s Activate Summit on July 1, he makes it clear Google is positioning itself for the future through mobile, with the development of its Android mobile system and with subsequent Google-branded handsets. He is keener to talk about this area than the battle with newspaper groupss such as News International, whose pay wall model is partly based on what it considers Google’s parasitical attitude to original content.
The mobile battle pitches the three biggest tech firms against each other: Google, Apple and Microsoft. Analyst Gartner puts Android as the world’s fourth most-popular smart phone operating system in the first quarter of 2010 — ahead of Microsoft in a market it joined less than two years ago but behind Symbian (Nokia), Research in Motion (Blackberry) and Apple.
“I believe that the very best engineering is now going on the mobile devices — the hardest problems and the most clever solutions,” says Schmidt. “You know who the person is and where they are, and you don’t get that from a desktop app.” The 50,000 apps built for Android, mostly by third-party developers, cover almost every topic, but the one killer app is still Google itself, says Schmidt.
Schmidt describes how our online lives are now more personal, social and mobile. “When people are awake, they are now online, and that has a lot of implications for society and for Google,” he says. Google’s secret, he adds (though it’s not much of a secret), is that it can handle more data than its rivals because it has larger networks and data centres. Google in effect pulled its business from China earlier this year after moving the operation to Hong Kong, bypassing China’s censorship regime. Google, the company famously linked to the motto “Don’t be evil”, had been heavily criticised for its decision to do business in China and its rethink was welcomed by the industry. It also increased pressure on rivals who still operate there.
“Google doesn’t necessarily do things that other companies do. We have our own set of principles that we work hard on. In the China case, the decision was made not for revenue — it was about what we were willing to deal with. We want to be a good global citizen and we believe very strongly in the openness of information.” Another key push from Google is encouraging governments to open information to the public, via formats that developers can build useful public services around. One recent victory for open data campaigners in the UK was Transport for London opening its travel data for commercial use, but the UK coalition government has indicated it may establish a broader public “right to data” that will have to be provided by local and national authorities. Schmidt says Google’s policy is to encourage governments to open their data to the public.
The California-based company has teams helping to prepare “non web-resident” archives and databases for the web. “It is no longer acceptable online for government researchers to publish documents read by 500 people in printed form,” he says.
“It needs to be web first. Once that happens, there are lots of interesting things you can do to correlate real-time information, if that is what is needed, or put it on a map ... government services are fundamentally about where people are, about what is going on in my town or my school.” These projects are just as relevant in developing countries, where the introduction of smarter, cheaper phones has created a powerful network. How does Google help developing countries break through the digital divide, and ensure the opportunities of the web are open to all? “Hardware manufacturers are being incentivised to make higher volumes of lower-priced mobiles, and prices have fallen dramatically. But a young person now in pretty much any country, if they have a mobile device, can get access to pretty much all the world’s information and get it translated into their own language.” Arriving at Google in 2001 after a career spent in Silicon Valley, Schmidt is still excited by its possibilities. “That’s a big news thing — that’s equivalent to the arrival of television.”
Copyright: Guardian News & Media 2010
