ERIC SCHMIDT, executive chairman of Google, caused a stir at the Mobile World Congress in 2010 when he announced the company’s policy was going to put “mobile first”. His thunder was stolen this year, however, as the moment he took to the stage in Barcelona to make a keynote address, Apple – Google’s great rival – announced it was going to launch iPad 3 at an event in San Francisco next Wednesday. Immediately, there were titters on Twitter about the coincidence.
Schmidt’s talk revealed little about Google’s direction. The talk began with a product demo from Hugo Barra, Google’s product management chief, which showed off new features from its Chrome browser for Android, a product that is already available. The load time of pages, which is instantaneous owing to pre-caching, drew applause. Other features included a pop-up window for small, difficult-to-see link pages and the stacking of tabs, one on top of the other on a device screen.
Schmidt followed with remarks on the digital divide, using the fact that the number of people on the planet reached seven billion in 2011 as an opportunity to lament for the two billion poor – the unfortunates from what he calls “the digital caste system” – who are without online access. He suggested improved data in computing would enable governments to better predict economic crises and argued that “developers are the builders of human freedom”.
He was on surer ground with off-the-cuff predictions. He stated that smartphones (Google is the world’s biggest-selling smartphone software-maker) will be as cheap as “feature” phones next year. He mentioned that Google’s driverless cars have clocked over 200,000 miles in testing and are poised to take advantage of law changes in states like Nevada and California which will usher in the era of the self-drive car, with its promise of greater road safety.
“By 2020, fibre networks will be deployed in almost every city,” he said. “It’s something that Google is already working on in Kansas City where we’re building a super-fast driver network. If you go to South Korea or Japan where those networks have already been built, you see it’s really life-changing. Translation, voice recognition, Google maps are all routinely used today. These things all happened even faster than scientists predicted.
“While we overestimate short-term technological change, we tend to massively underestimate the more seismic changes. People that predicted that holograms and virtual reality would be commonplace soon are absolutely right. Think about the changes these will make on your life. You need to go to a conference across the road from work. Meantime, your favourite artist is playing live. In future, you’ll be able to dispatch a robot so you can experience both events.”
