Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt held a lunch with many journalists.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1939258,00.asp
Schmidt said he was in New York to sign the previously announced deal with Time Warner and to reviewthe company's operations in the city, which has grown to include about 500 employees.
Employees in New York are now 500 people!
He said the decision of how to act in China was "one of the most controversial decisions the companyhas ever made," and it took over a year of internal arguments before the company came out with itspolicies. "It is a hard call, but it is a clear call" to do business in China, he said, and do as theChinese government requires it to.
It was most controversial dicisions that ever made. But its call is clear now.
I think that it was a arguments between "suits" and "geeks", wasn't it? It's good choice to enhance business in China, but it's not Google. It shold be free, not censered.
Overall, Schmidt said, he expects advertising will be the growth engine of Google for a very long time, but not just text ads, also display ads, adding that the main Google.com search pages wouldremain with just text ads. Overall he said the ad market is at least half a trillion dollars in revenue, so Google has a lot of growth potential.
Advertising will be the growth engine of Google for a very long time.
I asked if customers understood how Google was targeting advertisements, and Schmidt respondedthat they don't understand it very well. "We try as hard as we can to disclose it," he said, but that'swhy issues of trust are so important, he said they need to trust that the information won't be abusedby Google or by governments.
Google will increase the types of ads and personalize ads. To disclose information behind the results or not is difficult problem.
Already, he said, video sites like video.google.com are growing very fast and are in a constant stateof overload. But, he said, "The next 6 months is when video really takes off."
He said he didn't know whether the biggest market for video would be free videos with ads, videos for sale, or a hybrid model. "One of the things about the Internet is that every experiment is tried," he said.
Video will really takes off in the next 6 month. I agree with that market in video(TV) ads is very big. But isn't it also the dicision of "suits"? Do geeks in Google want to do that with their own heart?
But he did say he saw Microsoft and not Yahoo as the long-term primary competitor, because of itsmoney in the bank and history. However, Schmidt was quick to say that the acquisition of Writelywas not meant to create a competitor to Microsoft Office, which he said solves a complicated andimportant problem of work productivity. Writely is a server-based editing system where you canmove your files around, he said, and there are places where a rich text editor is useful in Google.
"Office is not the business we're in," Schmidt said, saying the company wanted to do new things.
It was not for entering Office market to acquire Writely. They will do new thing. What's that?
Schmidt said he saw Writely and other server-based tools as another way to collect and organize the world's data. "All the world's information includes personal information," he noted.
But Schmidt also said the company can't possibly be doing all the things that people say it is working on. "We're not really that exciting," he said.
But he also noted that the company's image also gives it a certain aura within the technology industry. "The mystique works in our benefit," he said. "It's an engineering recruitment tool."
They may gather all information from Google Desktop and make them searchable, and they'll need office software. Is it the answer?
Finally, Schmidt addressed the topic of Google Base, which has been rumored as a potential eBay competitor. Schmidt called that concern an overstated one, and he said Base is instead just a database of structured information, which is easier to index and rank than regular web pages. Most Google Base information points to eBay or similar sites, he added.
It was overstated that Google Base will be a potential eBay competitor.
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