Time magazine interviews Eric Schmidt. Big thumbs up for the technologies Google is already pushing, as you might expect. Not too sure he answers the question, though…
Q. In what ways are all the new tech startups — the so-called Web 2.0 companies — changing the competitive landscape for Google?
A. Web 2.0 is a marketing term, and it’s not a term that I use, but the underlying rationale technologically is correct, which is why it’s really happening. The basic argument is, if you think about it: it would be better for you to have all the data and all the applications that you use on a server somewhere, and then whatever computer or device you’re near you would be able to use. Let’s say you have a PC or a Mac at home and at the office, and you have a BlackBerry and a portable and so forth and so on. You’re constantly moving files around. What happens if you drop your ThinkPad and break it?
It’s just a better model to have the computation and the applications use what we call a cloud, somewhere in the Internet. I, among other people, have been talking about this for 15 years, well before Google was founded. It turned out to be really hard to pull off. But now finally these broadband networks are fast enough that you can actually do it. You just don’t need to always have everything on your local computer. So what I like about Web 2.0, as it’s called, is that it’s really the popularization of all this different technology. The other thing that’s interesting about Web 2.0, as it’s expressed, is that there’s another way of making money, which is the advertising model.
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