His name is Eric Schmidt and hes the chairman and CEO of Google, the search engine and advertising goliath thats building a thriving business based on giving away services and applications for nothing or next to nothing.
The editor and author Chris Anderson calls this effect feeconomics: where the technologies which power the web are driving down the cost of doing business online to the point where they are so cheap, they can be handed out at zero cost.
Its the same philosophy adopted by Google when it came into being a decade ago and which it has pursued ever since through giveaway services such as email, photo editing and storage, video sharing and of course its eponymous search engine.
And most of it for nix, as long as youre happy to accept a smattering of the text-based contextual advertisements served up alongside the freebies, which in turn encourage more time spent on the internet.
The more things that people and companies do online, the more ads they see and the more money Google makes, writes the author Nicholas Carr in strategy+business magazine.
While search continues to be Googles main money spinner, Dr Schmidt took the opportunity yesterday during a visit to Sydney to outline some of the other trends he believes could be among the next big things.
While search continues to be Googles main money spinner, Dr Schmidt took the opportunity yesterday during a visit to Sydney to outline some of the other trends he believes could be among the next big things.
He called one of these in-the-pipeline developments information understanding.
The eventual goal is for Google to make a suggestion as to what you should do tomorrow, he explained during an extended interview with smh.com.au.
Dismissing suggestions that it smacked of Big Brother and or that it encouraged mental laziness, he said such a service could only work with the explicit permission of the user.
Computers are better at remembering things and people are better at reasoning, said Dr Schmidt, 52, a soft-spoken computer scientist who joined Google in 2001 as the grown-up who was supposed to keep an eye on the youthful co-founders and their inexperienced team.
Youre going to have a more interesting life if you have the computer do the stuff the computer is good at and you do the stuff youre good at.
The two other trends are already works in progress. One is the shift from desk-based computing to mobile computing. Later this year, a number of mobile phone makers will launch devices based on Googles new Android mobile operating system.
Just as the PC became this extremely powerful platform and really did change our world, the same phenomenon should occur on mobile phones, he said.
Another big change in the works had to do with what he described as the ubiquity of location-based data - in other words, the kind of information that can placed on a map.
That could include traffic information, flight details, bus routes and schedules - all able to be called up on your computer or phone.
Earlier, at a press conference, he spoke about the coming shift to cloud computing where users will store their files and applications online instead of on their local computers and hard drives.
Dr Schmidt has described the cloud concept as akin to having banks manage your money rather than you manage your money.
What were going to do is were just going to put the intelligence and the data and so forth on servers run by professionals - also known as us - so that you dont need to spend the weekend debugging your computers at home, he said yesterday.
Dr Schmidt admitted, however, that his predictions have not always been on the money.
In October 2000, he made a bad really bad call that could have cost him dearly.
Nobody really gives a sh– about search, he told John Doerr, a venture capitalist who was trying to talk him in to taking a management position at Google.
Dr Schmidt, who was then head of software company Novell, later changed his mind and the following year was appointed chairman then CEO of the fledgling internet search company.
He went on receive stock options that made him a billionaire after Google floated in 2004.
Last month, Forbes magazine listed him as the 48th richest person in the US with a net worth of $US6.6 billion ($NZ8.1 billion).
For the past seven years Dr Schmidt, along with Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, has been part of the triumvirate running an operation that has developed a reputation for being one the worlds most admired companies.
These days he has no such misgivings about search.
Last year, between 97 to 98 per cent of the companys revenues of $US16.6 billion were derived from little text advertisements that are largely served up in searches.
Ive made many mistakes, Dr Schmidt said yesterday when reminded about the anecdote from eight years ago and recounted in David Vises book The Google Story.
That was a big one. You learn from your mistakes. Im more careful now to get my facts straight.
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