Google's Eric Schmidt on the New World

Here’s video from the Aspen Ideas Festival with Google CEO Eric Schmidt responding to my question about what follows the industrial age.

More of Kai Ryssdal’s very good interview with Schmidt here.

Comments

[conceptwizard:]

Nice Video. Good perspective here.

If I understand correctly that true economic change cannot take place without the funding and regulatory barriers being relaxed and realigned. This seems to be the opposite than what is actually happening. There seems to be a condition of bigger Government, more restrictions and money being diverted to an exclusive few. According to this video the opinion is that change wont happen under our current environment. So, how do we prepare America for the next stage of her economic future? I think these are the questions that need to be asked by our current administration. We are not on a path to change and we need to change to excell. Tough issues.

Jul 03 10:26 AM

[MMMPARSLEY1:]

How about government not funding both "real innovation" AND ALSO not funding broken "traditional businesses". How about reverting back to nature's primal law; competition.

It's not fair to anybody if the government helps fix an economic result.

Jul 03 09:18 PM

[whidbey:]

This is useful discussion and maybe insightful too, but it will fall on deaf ears.

Management wants a defined problem to solve and they look to slow down innovation to focus (find scale savings, build barriers, find the competitors), so do investors, they want a fixed target that can be optimized by training investors. Moving targets introduced by competition are always institutionalized and become icons not to be competed with, always to be protected with legislation and power plays. Ask any third world entrepreneur and he will tell you that institutional America can hold off any innovation until it dies. Eric is currently engaged in a few strangulation himself. Protecting the "keep" is part of his duties. Listen to him, he knows. Keeping the future of innovation open involves preventing large competitors who can not be picked off. If MSFT had not been largely a marketing organization, the GOOG entry to search could not have occurred. As it is MSFT was unable to see the threat much less respond it. That is the way to the future: new fields, few or no alert competitors and lots of luck in getting there fustist with the mostest.
Buford Forrest was right. Eric is just a two bit bureaucrat.

Jul 03 09:23 PM

[bonae:]

Regulations assure standards of integrity, these are abscent in much of the operational internet business models. The comments fail to cast a critical view on Google's own anti-competitive business practices with regard to its 'information wants to be free doctrine' and its own efforts to expend influence in maitaining the basic premis of its business which is selling advertising off views of property which is not compensated nor created by Google.

The News Industry is a good example of the need for modern internet regulations to assure entrepreneurial innovation within the information access space dominated by Google's network effects monopoly.

Google needs to be strictly regulated on Property, Privacy and Compensation issues. Though its model is very good for google, it has proven little value to entrepreneurial innovation and American Competitiveness in the Global Information Economy.

His advice is some of the worst ever offered in the field of entrepreneurial innovation and his efforts mark quite contrary goals of corporate avarice by Google.

The US needs a Civilian Department of Internet Regulation similar to the FCC with a new strong piracy enforcement arm with prosecutorial police power that levels the playing field between the modern innovator and the corporate network effects monopolist's interests.

As an entrepreneur I disagree with Dr. Schmidt who makes a strong academic argument based upon a false premise. The present, ("Might makes Right internet environment") which favors Google's platform is no longer in the National Interests or in the interests of US Leadership in Innovation.

Google's relative control in search traffic and Dr. Schmidt's large investment in continuance of that network effects monopoly make him a highly inappropriate presidential advisor in this regard.

His laudable academic credentials are just that, academic credentials which have proved in mathematical studies to be poor projections of entrepreneurial success. As the most highly paid corporate manager in History, Dr. Schmidt should not be looked to as an entrepreneur, he quite simply - is not.

Jul 05 05:38 PM