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Google's Schmidt Says He 'Screwed Up' On Social Networking

Posted by Roblimo on from the so-busy-he-didn't-notice-Facebook dept.

"Google chairman Eric Schmidt took responsibility for the search titan's failure to counter Facebook's explosive growth, saying he saw the threat coming but failed to counter it." Note: The original link's landing page was changed after we posted it. The one showing now goes to a Wired article. The same story (coverage of a May 31 conference presentation by Schmidt) also quotes him as saying, unsurprisingly, that cloud services will be 'the death of IT as we know it.'"

36 of 252 comments (clear)

  1. Yeah Right.... by Lumpy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    No company worth their salt will put all the company data "on the cloud" No way in HELL is my customer DB and accounting DB going on the cloud.

    --
    Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
    1. Re:Yeah Right.... by h4rr4r · · Score: 2

      The cloud is not one of those. We had time sharing before.

    2. Re:Yeah Right.... by mikeroySoft · · Score: 2

      Clouds don't have to be public... it's perfectly reasonable to have an internal private cloud, and that can communicate with a public-facing public cloud (where the .com gets hosted, customer portal, etc)

    3. Re:Yeah Right.... by h4rr4r · · Score: 2

      Name one, just one company that has everything in the cloud. No mail servers, no terminal services servers, no in house intranet, no local hosted sftp/ftps and all customer and accounting data in the cloud.

      Lots of companies are using these technologies where they make sense, near no one is using them in a way that gets rid of IT.

    4. Re:Yeah Right.... by VolciMaster · · Score: 2

      Nobody said it has to be the public cloud: private and hybrids exist, too

      --
      antipaucity
    5. Re:Yeah Right.... by antifoidulus · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Pretty much like every tech trend before it, and after it, cloud computing will do a fraction of what it's supporters say it will do, and many times what it's detractors say it cannot do. Just look at pretty much EVERY other tech trend ever.... dot com? Didn't really change how we bought dog food, did change how we shop for a lot of other articles though. Offshore outsourcing? According to a Gartner report in 2003 or thereabouts, right now over 50% of all US IT jobs should be in India and there was predicted to be massive unemployment in the US IT sector, while the detractors said that all the work that went to India will come back because the Indians cannot do it. The truth? Nowhere near what Gartner said, but significantly more work is outsourced than before and isn't coming back, so the detractors were wrong too.

      Cloud computing is in a similar position IMO. Of course the owner of one of the biggest clouds on the planet is going to be all gung ho about cloud computing, and of course people whose jobs may be threatened will say it will never work. But if you look in between that, there are some exciting opportunities for the cloud, but also some severe limitations that may never be completely overcome.

      Long story short, if someone is telling you "Technology x will do a-z!" and someone else shouts back "Technology x is worthless!", you are better off not believing either of them.

      --
      Monstar L
    6. Re:Yeah Right.... by MareLooke · · Score: 2

      Our AS/400 says "Hi" and "welcome to the 70s".

    7. Re:Yeah Right.... by paimin · · Score: 2

      I work for a startup that has everything in the cloud (except possibly backup - I'd bet there is a physical copy somewhere). Seriously, all of the above are handled in the cloud, and we have nobody with the title of "IT". We outsource our firewall admin, and all data services are cloud. Mind you, there are plenty of IT tasks being handled by developers, and I definitely do NOT agree that those types of tasks are going away. But I think it is conceivable that the title will fade away, and it is conceivable that very few companies will deal with local services before too long.

      --
      Facebook is the new AOL
    8. Re:Yeah Right.... by postbigbang · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Cloud is more than storage, and I understand the need for security, regulatory compliance, and general safety. The cloud is just as safe as your internal network, and they require equal effort to make them so. If you choose a reliable cloud provider, then impose your policy discipline and regimen, there is no difference between 'cloud' and your data center.

      Those that make excuses for sites that go bad do us all an injustice, just as when your data center gets cracked or you leak data, you deserve a new job flipping burgers.

      VisiCalc/SuperCalc/Lotus 123 all won because they could get real work done, rather than having an app built to do repetitive relational math. Because those worked so well, people tried to turn them into word processors because Wang and Lanier and IBM Displaywriters were so expensive. Then they started to sort stuff, and little dbs took off. It wasn't a nexus of storage control, it was impatience that drove the populist computing revolution..... and games.....and pr0n.

      --
      ---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
    9. Re:Yeah Right.... by mikeroySoft · · Score: 3, Informative

      A server farm can host a 'cloud', certainly, they aren't necessary the same thing.
      Servers are hardware. A 'cloud' represents a logical infrastructure, independent of the hardware it's currently sitting on.
      With such an abstraction, you can more easily and reliably do things like disaster recovery, load balancing, storage migration, fail-over.. etc.. Gives the infrastructure the agility to deal with change, whether it's planned or not.

    10. Re:Yeah Right.... by walterbyrd · · Score: 2

      Can you really not figure it out? Really?

      A "private cloud" is an internet site that is not open to the general public. For example, I work for the DoD. When Airman Pike, in Korea, wants to check his personnel records, he goes to - what might be called - a "private cloud." The internet servers are owned and operated by the DoD, and only open to DoD personnel. The servers are located here in the USA, in a secure facility on a military base, but they can be accessed, securely, from anywhere in the world.

      It is a perfectly sensible way of doing things, and not hard to understand at all.

    11. Re:Yeah Right.... by FredFredrickson · · Score: 2

      The advantage of amazon is that they've got a staff who are experts at distributing the workload in a server farm, while keeping the cost of the farm proportional to only the amount being used. It's prohibitively expensive to own and operate this infrastructure if you only expect to get bogged down on black friday, but don't want to buckle under the load.

      It's more than co-location or managed hosting. It's a price efficient way of distributing load. Of course, if it's like any other technology, as this equipment gets cheaper and easier to use it's likely you'll see a move from the cloud back to hosting it yourself. Technology has a funny way of ebbing and flowing like that. The original 3D movies had complete server farms that were prohibitively expensive to run unless you were a major player (i.e. pixar). But as processors get better and cheaper, starting your own render farm is becoming more realistic, and there are some very impressive amateur renders out there. (we're not all the way yet though)

      --
      Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
    12. Re:Yeah Right.... by postbigbang · · Score: 2

      And you think that the fat drive array in your data center is IN your control? The location doesn't matter if your discipline isn't up to snuff. You'll get eaten internally, or externally-- or not-- if you apply the same studiousness to both.

      --
      ---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
    13. Re:Yeah Right.... by vegiVamp · · Score: 3, Interesting

      > If local, they have to back them up [...] it IS safer for those people to have their data in the cloud.

      Only true if Joe Sixpack is willing to pay for his cloud services. All your Picasa pictures, Youtube movies and Gmail messages are explicitly not insured. They'll do their best, of course, but you're free to point me where in the terms of service they define their guaranteed backup retention policies for the user.

      > when Joe Sixpack's tablet dies and he buys a new one, with cloud services all his data is still there same as ever.

      Yes, assuming he buys a compatible tablet from the same vendor. I'd like to see you use your iCloud data on an Android tabled. Same caveat: as long as you don't pay you have no rights.

      > it is easier and more functional

      Yes, as long as you have a connection and aren't running into some volume or bandwidth cap. I don't see many users wanting to upload their 15-megapixel raw images to Picasa.

      --
      What a depressingly stupid machine.
    14. Re:Yeah Right.... by Lennie · · Score: 2

      I think what most people in the industry call 'private cloid' is using virtualisation and management tools to automatically move workloads over different privately owned servers instead of doing that manually or running dedicated servers for applications.

      --
      New things are always on the horizon
    15. Re:Yeah Right.... by Daniel+Phillips · · Score: 2

      Indeed, stick to what you're good at Eric.

      Eric's big problem, and indeed, Larry and Sergey too, is that they think "smart" is equivalent to "good at everything" whereas in fact one can be smart without being socially adept. This is not an insurmountable problem but it begins with "I'm not actually all that cool, need to bring in people who are", a tough step for a billionaire.

      --
      Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
    16. Re:Yeah Right.... by tompaulco · · Score: 2

      As long as the provider was able to meet HIPAA regulations, SOX, EHNAC ISO 9001 and whatever other accreditations your particular line of business required there would be no regulatory reason not to use a cloud provider. Now, your business will likely suffer because knowing the healthcare business as I do, few of your potential customers will want to do business with you if you don't keep your data in-house.
      We have a hard enough time just trying to convince customers that it is okay that we host our datacenter in a 3rd party dedicated service provider facility 4 blocks away and not in our own office building (which loses power about 4 times a year).

      --
      If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
  2. Direct link by jaymz2k4 · · Score: 4, Informative

    The posted url now 410's. here's a link to the article on PC mag and the wired source too...

    --
    jaymz
    1. Re:Direct link by jbigboote · · Score: 3, Informative

      try this one: http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/06/googles-schmidt-social/

  3. Death of IT again? by gad_zuki! · · Score: 2

    Before it was thin clients. Then thick clients. Then outsourcing. Then mobile devices. Then tablets. Now cloud services.

    Who exactly is going to manage all your cloud based servers? Do these guys really expect some $8/hr amazon support monkey to manage your linux patches, fix bugs, write scripts, install applications, customize applications, etc.

    If the cloud does anything, it just moves your server room to a different room off-site. You still need IT to make it do anything useful.

  4. Why did they fail? by lxs · · Score: 3, Interesting

    More specifically: why does he believe that everything on the entire Internet needs to be governed by Google? Not even Ballmer or teh Jobs are that megalomaniacal.

    1. Re:Why did they fail? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Zuckerberg is, though.

    2. Re:Why did they fail? by nedlohs · · Score: 2

      Because that way they make more money, you know the reason they exist...

  5. It's the death of IT as we know it... by dhammond · · Score: 2

    and I feel fine.

  6. Re:Death of IT *in the USA* by tekrat · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I think what he means is that it's the death of IT in America.

    I mean, with virtualization, "cloud" services can allow your admins to be in a cheaper country, like India. Since you never get to touch your hardware, your admins don't need to touch the hardware anymore either.

    It's yet another way for management to increase profitability by lowering costs by firing everyone except themselves, who all get big fat bonuses.

    What the "cloud" really provides is yet another way to make the rich richer, and everyone else poorer.

    Never mind that they are handing the crown jewels over to a bunch of people, who, should the shit hit the fan, are more than happy to steal all that data and keep it for themselves, leaving their rich corporate masters with nothing.

    It's akin to giving the serfs all the weapons to protect the castle, and then the king thinking he's somehow safe even though no guards are loyal to him.

    Greed has truly fucked up this country. We're going to find, in less than a decade, that we've given away everything that made this nation great, and we'll be left with very little to show for it. Rome was smarter than we were.

    --
    If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
  7. Dodgeball Fail by otis+wildflower · · Score: 2

    Dodgeball was Twitter before Twitter.. Google bought it and fucking squandered it, stupidity of a Microsoftian degree.

    I can't wait to see Facebook melt down though, too scamilicious to IPO in the US lol...

  8. Re:Doesn't need to counter it by creat3d · · Score: 2

    And why should every stupid fad taking over the collective time-wasting be jumped on by every company, why would we need a counter-Facebook? Seriously, how many "social networks" are there now? How about companies stick to what they do and stop trying to take over every goddamn market there is? Yeah, in my dreams...

    --
    Grammar nazis are to this community what excrements are to gold.
  9. Re:Doesn't need to counter it by somersault · · Score: 2

    How is Google any different from Facebook? It makes money in exactly the same way, through ads which are targeted by the information you enter in your searches, emails, etc.

    --
    which is totally what she said
  10. Re:Death of IT *in the USA* by gad_zuki! · · Score: 2

    Yeah, that just outsourcing. It didn't work when they tried selling it to us as the solution for everything about 10 years ago and I don't see why its suddenly going to work now.

  11. Re:Doesn't need to counter it by sstamps · · Score: 2

    Not from me it doesn't. I block all ads, I don't use gmail, and my searches are for things which aren't generally very targetable for advertisements, and not traceable back to me.

    --
    -SS "Teach the ignorant, care for the dumb, and punish the stupid."
  12. A bigger issue: Is Google a Post-scarcity place? by Paul+Fernhout · · Score: 2

    http://www.pdfernhout.net/a-rant-on-financial-obesity-and-Project-Virgle.html
    "Look at Project Virgle and "An Open Source Planet":
            http://www.google.com/virgle/opensource.html
    Even just in jest some of the most financially obese people on the planet (who have built their company with thousands of servers all running GNU/Linux free software) apparently could not see any other possibility but seriously becoming even more financially obese off the free work of others on another planet (as well as saddling others with financial obesity too :-). And that jest came almost half a *century* after the "Triple Revolution" letter of 1964 about the growing disconnect between effort and productivity (or work and financial fitness):
            http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
    Even not having completed their PhDs, the top Google-ites may well take many more *decades* to shake off that ideological discipline. I know it took me decades (and I am still only part way there. :-) As with my mother, no doubt Googlers have lived through periods of scarcity of money relative to their needs to survive or be independent scholars or effective agents of change. Is it any wonder they probably think being financially obese is a *good* thing, not an indication of either personal or societal pathology? :-( "

    --
    A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
  13. Re:Doesn't need to counter it by Bieeanda · · Score: 2

    I keep telling them, Tolkien Ring will be the death of the network as we know it!

  14. No, "social" isn't Google's problem. by Animats · · Score: 4, Interesting

    "Social" isn't Google's problem. Mobile is.

    Google revenue for 2010 was $29 billion. Facebook revenue was $1.86 billion. If Google was as successful in "social" as Facebook, it would barely affect their bottom line. "Social" just isn't that big a business.

    There are bigger businesses where Google missed out - in telephony, music sales, and movie sales. The ones where Apple is making money. Apple revenue for 2010 was $63.5 billion. That's where Schmidt failed.

    Google is trying to figure out how to monetize Android, but so far, not with great success. Apple has been very successful in using the iPhone to create a direct connection between the user's wallet and Apple's bank accounts. Google tries to do that, but not as profitably.

    Meanwhile, while ordering their people to focus on "social", Google is having problems in their core business - search. Back in Q3 2010, they merged Google Places results into web search, not realizing how easily Places could be spammed. That backfired and got them some bad press. Then there was the Demand Media content farm problem and the J.C. Penny link farm embarrassment. The press then caught onto the fact that Google isn't very good at stopping web spam, "black-hat" SEO started to go mainstream, and Blekko, with their strong anti-spam policies, started to gain traction. Now the FDA and the Justice Department are investigating Google for knowingly running ads for sleazy offshore pharmacy operations. Google may have to pay $500 million in fines.

    That's a classic big-company mistake - failing to run the cash cow properly, while management is distracted with the shiny new stuff.

  15. Google totally dropped the Social Networking ball by Civil_Disobedient · · Score: 2

    I was an early Gmail adopter, and it quickly became my defacto-standard email address; thus it became the real-world link to my online identity. But it is absolutely astonishing to me how completely and utterly Google has dropped the ball with regards to social media. Not had dropped the ball... has dropped the ball, present-tense. Because it's still dropped. And yet they keep coming up with over-engineered solutions to what is a ludicrously simple problem (Buzz? Seriously?)

    All Google had to do was give me a fucking homepage and a fucking textarea to jot down quick status updates, and voilà!--Facebook is dead in a month. No asinine games, no privacy-stealing bullshit, no invites to time-wasters, no childish crap. Just a public frontpage tied to my Gmail address. This is so simple... and they can still do it! Yet they continue to keep looking for the Rube Goldberg solutions.

    But the craziest thing is this: every Gmail account already has a public account page! They've already done most of the work! So how do you get to it? Let's fire up Google and take a look.

    Hmm... could it be this prominent iGoogle link at the top-right next to my username? NOPE. All that does it take me to a half-baked late-90s "dashboard" where I can add "gadgets" to spice up the Google homepage. Except I already have a smart phone and a desktop computer and
    they ALL want to be my primary "dashboard"... I don't need the beautifully simple Google homepage to be sullied with more fucking weather apps.

    So where could this link be if it's not in the "logged in" area of the top navigation? Well, it's not one of the primary menu bar links (Web | Images | Videos | Maps | News | Shopping | Gmail | more...) Maybe under "MORE"? Let's see... Translate, Books, Docs, Finance, Scholar, Calendar, YouTube... holy crap they've got everything under the sun, but no public account page. How about under the EVEN MORE link? You know, the link that opens up a separate page with dozens of Google-related projects? NOPE.

    The nearly invisible way to get to your public account page?
    1. Log in to your Google account
    2. Add /account to the URL
    And there you go.

    WHAT THE HELL, GOOGLE?

    And notice how the top-right menu has changed? Now instead of the lame iGoogle link, we've got a My Account link.

    WHAT THE HELL, GOOGLE?

    So they've already got an account page. Just put a TEXTAREA on top and show the last 5 posts and you're DONE. DONE. That's the END OF FACEBOOK. That's all you have to do, guys! Christ almighty it's so infuriating I have to stop typing so I can mop up all the frothing spittle.

  16. CP/M, Baby! by Jeremiah+Cornelius · · Score: 2

    SuperCalc and CP/M - The combo that built KayPro!

    That said, I worked as a student, part time in the first computer store I could remember - '78, '79. The month that VisiCalc "broke", there were suits showing up: "I need a VisiCalc".

    OK. Do you have a ][ or ][+ ?

    "Oh, do I need those? Get me one of them, too."

    --
    "Flyin' in just a sweet place,
    Never been known to fail..."
  17. Re:Google totally dropped the Social Networking ba by LordArgon · · Score: 2

    What you suggest sounds like a less-capable Twitter. I think you're greatly over-simplifying social networking. Almost nobody uses it simply to have a website; those inanities you hate are what actually get and keep users. In fact, I see no "social" in your social networking at all.