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

"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.'"

Comments

Yeah Right....

[Lumpy]

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.

Re:Yeah Right....

[antifoidulus]

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.

Re:Yeah Right....

[postbigbang]

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.

Re:Yeah Right....

[mikeroySoft]

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.

Re:Yeah Right....

[vegiVamp]

> 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.

Direct link

[jaymz2k4]

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

Re:Direct link

[jbigboote]

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

Why did they fail?

[lxs]

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.

Re:Death of IT *in the USA*

[tekrat]

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.

No, "social" isn't Google's problem.

[Animats]

"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.