Google CEO Eric Schmidt spoke at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo Orlando recently. His talk was interesting as he focused on where we go from here and what we are going to be living in 2014. He had some really interesting points, including the idea that the web will be dominated by Chinese-language and social media content, delivered over super-fast bandwidth in real time. Mr. Schmidt did highlight the need to move the web to an even more 'Real Time' basis, and agreed that figuring out how to rank real-time social content is "the great challenge of the age."
Read Write Web has extracted 6-minutes of the most interesting portions of the talk which you can watch below:
The most interesting concepts boil down to a few that are pretty relevant even today...
* Moving away from focus on US and Western Europe, and look at Pan Asia
* Teens today are going to set what Web 5.0 will look like, and it isn't destination driven.
* Moore's Law continues to hold true, which means the power of even the home PC is going to be a super computer of today.
* Within five years there will be broadband well above 100MB in performance - and distribution distinctions between TV, radio and the web will go away.
* Video, video, video
* The web will move towards actual 'Real Time'
* It's because of this fundamental shift towards user-generated information that people will listen more to other people than to traditional sources. Learning how to rank that "is the great challenge of the age." Schmidt believes Google can solve that problem.
These all support the concepts around Brand Communities, you don't want to build your site and hope people come, they are not going to work that way. You need to build a community or relationship and leverage the assets and collective value of that relationship to create exponential value for the community and for your own business.
You can watch the whole 45-minute video here, there are many interesting insights that are presented throughout. Some of the concepts include a general statement that a Google OS Netbook will be here in 2010, with HTML5 local caching for offline use. Additionally, it is clear Google is investing in platform and systems to offer value add as the user base gets more advanced and has higher demands.
Of course Mr. Schmidt is a brilliant mind and amazing business man, but the future is hard to predict and though Google has a perspective, it isn't unprecedented that large players have miscalculated the future, regardless of the amount of talking and propoganda they introduced into the market.
