Wednesday, November 4, 2009

Google CEO Schmidt: On tech, innovation, Google Wave and Maps Navigation

By Galen Moore

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Google Inc. (Nasdaq: GOOG) CEO Eric Schmidt met with reporters in Google’s Cambridge office today to talk about technology’s role in the economy and Google’s plans for new products like its turn-by-turn navigation service, Google Maps Navigation (they don’t intend to put TomTom out of business), and Google Wave (the company plans to expand distribution in weeks).

Here are some of the highlights:

On Google Wave:
“They’re getting ready for a much broader distribution. Ready means very soon. Very soon is like weeks not years,” Schmidt said. “The experiment has yielded a very, very innovative model and a lot of buzz. We want to see if it will scale.”

The project is already well above Google’s initial investment projections, Schmidt said. Google is “careful” not to tie Wave to its Chrome browser and operating system project.


Massachusetts vs. Silicon Valley:
“I don’t see much difference,” Schmidt said. The quality of the people and the science are equivalent, he said. “I think it’s a somewhat unfair question. If you think about it, the biotech revolution did occur here. It occurred physically within a mile of here. I see no reason why you couldn’t have very large and very global companies in IT headquartered here, and I would do it in IT.”


IT’s role in innovating out of the downturn:
“I think you need to make an affirmative decision to build a set of industries in which America will lead,” Schmidt said. The most interesting area will be advanced manufacturing — batteries, materials sciences, nanotech and other “new things produced in really small volumes that are tech-intensive,” he said — and that industry will need computers and software. “That’s, I think, where the narrative starts.”


On Google Maps Navigation:
“There’s a lot of things you can do with it. You can imagine advertising businesses built on top of it. You can imagine all other types of businesses on top of it,” Schmidt said. “The product is easy if you have the data. It’s impossible if you don’t. What I like about the easy product is they made it incredibly snappy.”

Schmidt said the turn-by-turn service is “an opportunity for monetization later on if we care to.”


On Google’s lobbying efforts:
Google’s lobbying, which the company spent over $1 million on in the third quarter of 2009, according to the Associated Press, is “education, not influence,” Schmidt said. The company lobbies on issues like net neutrality and Internet privacy, he said. “Because people don’t understand how the Internet works, they write laws that could hurt the Internet.”