Today I found time to watch the complete recording of Eric Schmidt’s (CEO of Google) appearance at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in February.Already commented heavily as “Google got the heat from Telco” (here) I was surprised to see that in my view he didn’t get too much heat and actually followed the Google approach: “Be Open” (I don’t want to comment on the “Don’t be evil” here).
My short summary on his messages:
- Google is (mainly/only) in the advertising business (something most telco operators can not say of themselves)
- Google will create a lot of very cool applications that the users will like
- Google expects infrastructure providers (fixed and mobile) to work on sufficient bandwidth so users can enjoy these applications
- any well run infrastructure provider should be able to earn money on the increased bandwidth demand and by offering different bandwidths for different prices (and a few other things like security, payments/banking)
Interestingly while Eric tried the “We in the mobile/ telco/ communications/ computer industry” notion, in the Q&A session a lot of questions have been around “we/our (mobile) industry” vs. Google. It felt like it takes still some time for the mobile industry to realize that this is now the Internet – Google – Apple time.
Google meets the Telco Industry