The last speaker at the Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) analyst meeting today is CEO Eric Schmidt.
Schmidt says it has become clear we are at the beginning of a massive transition to cloud computing. A global transition from one form of information sharing to another, of one form of computing to another. We can now actually see an integrated strategy for the company.
Schmidt says the strategy is search, ads, apps. Search is not a solved problem. We have no way of capturing your expert insights immediately back into search. How could we take the knowledge from the enormous number of people who use Google every day and put it into search. Makes sense for us to get higher quality content; the kind of insightful thing we are seeing all over the Web, thinking of Wikipedia and other examples.
In a company where search is the view we have of the world, he says, easy to say everything is a search problem. People with Google Docs, just leave everything there and just search. Can’t do it with any other system. Same with Gmail. People leave all there email, and leave it there. Whether desktop or enterprise or global search, or specialized content search, problem of search is powerful, fundamental and not completely solved.
On advertising: There is a different model that has been successful for us, that ads have valuable in and of themselves. Use information we glean to provide extremely targeted ads. Everything we know tells us that model should work in every market; we believe value to end user is in a targeted ad. You say, you don’t want any ads at all, he says, but actually you do.
Principle of targeting is the underlying principle, and we are not done with that by far.
In applications side, here is
