Google‘s executive chairman Eric Schmidt took the stage in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, for the D9 Conference late yesterday to give his exclusive take on the tech world. During the interview with All Things Digital‘s Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg, Schmidt dished on the technology industry’s most important players, and took the blame for Google’s inability to successfully make it in the world of social networking.
One of the interesting talking points was what Schmidt calls the technology world’s “Gang Of Four,” the companies with the most influence, who dominate the industry in their own special ways. Those companies are: Google, for its information; Facebook, for its relationship and identity data; Apple, for its “beautiful products;” and Amazon for online shopping. Noticeably absent from the commanding crew: Microsoft.
When the conversation steered to Facebook and Google’s still-struggling social strategy, Schmidt took the challenge head-on.
“Facebook’s done a number of things which I admire,” he said. “It’s the first generally available way of disambiguating identity. Historically, on the Internet such a fundamental service wouldn’t be owned by a single company. I think the industry would benefit from an alternative to that.”
Schmidt added: “Identity is incredibly useful because in the online world you need to know who you are dealing with.” And if Google had access to the kind of identity information Facebook has on file, “we could compute a better answer, because we’ll know more about you,” he said. “From Google’s perspective, it would be useful to have the information; it would make our products better.”
When the interviewers later asked Schmidt about his regrets during his tenure as Google CEO (a baton he recently passed to founder Larry Page), the search giant’s failure to successfully tap into the social sphere was, in fact, his failure. “I clearly knew that I had to do something, and I failed to do it,” he said. “A CEO should take responsibility. I screwed up.”
In other news: It’s rumored that Google will launch its newest attempt to tap into social media, a service called +1, sometime today. Maybe this time, it’ll stick.
This "Gang of four" crap is really dumb. They are trying to create (if they haven't already) a good ole' boys group to dominate the rest. Of course each one of the companies Eric mentioned do not directly compete with each other (which is why Microsoft was not included), but I think, and hope Eric will find Mark Zuckerberg doesn't play by his rules.
So, you really think Google is not directly competing with Apple? Even after they created the (almost) sole competitor to the iOS, and apple created their publicity (remembering that GOOG is primarily a publicity company)? Even Steve Jobs said it's war now, "we did not enter the search business, they entered phone business" [or something on those lines..].
Also with facebook, do you think that GOOG wants to play nice with FB? No, you just read the article, they wanna compete directly against facebook dominance.
And even amazon put an App market in the android ecosystem directly competing with googles app store, albeit I would not reject some form of compromise between these two companies.
Microsoft only competes with google on the phone side, and it's a landslide, WP7 has no major significance, beyond their live games, lol. Only now is google starting to compete with it in the netbook segment, which is already in itself being consumed by the tablet segment.
I believe the reason that he excluded M$ is that it's a sluggish giant and they have no worries of surprises coming from them. Well, let's see how win8 plays out and hope that competition gets more and more fierce!
I do think Google considers Facebook and Apple competitors. Right now they are playing as friends to the media, but we all know that behind the scenes, they are planning their attack on each other.