Global CIO: Google CEO Eric Schmidt's Top 10 Reasons Why Mobile Is #1
4/15/2010 01:25:00 AM
kenmouse
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Speaking to 400 CIOs, Schmidt said "the answer should always be mobile first." In his own words, here are 10 reasons why that's so.The mobile future has arrived. And if you think the changes it's causing so far have been crazy, just wait until later this year when it starts to really exert its influence. The big question: are you ready?
A few months ago, when we put together our Global CIO: The Top 10 CIO Issues For 2010 list, one of the 10 was "The Mobile Enterprise and the Mobile Mindset." And a column last month asked, "Global CIO: Will The Mobile Tipping Point Bury You?".
And on Monday, Google CEO Eric Schmidt articulated a very clear sense of why Google is so bullish on mobile computing not just among its enormous consumer base but also for its newly significant market of CIOs in the enterprise.
As you consider your own company's mobile strategy and evaluate whether you're putting enough muscle behind it to match the dynamics of your marketplace, it would be helpful to consider the mobile perspectives of Schmidt, who on Monday shared those with 400 of his closest CIO friends at the day-long Atmosphere 2010 cloud event at Google headquarters.
From Schmidt's comments, here are his top 10 reasons, in descending order, why "the answer should always be mobile first."
10) Google's jumping in with both feet. "If you go back and you look at history, the [IT] problems we all face today are the same problems we had 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, but the technology solutions are quite different and the industrial structure is quite different. . . . For example, Sun, when I joined in 1983, had a diskless computer—well, Google has announced a diskless computer for shipment later this year and I explain to people we announced this when you all were born (laughs)—I mean, you get no credit for this (laughs)! It worked then, and it helped build a great company. Of course, it was a 1 Mips computer, as opposed to a 1 Gigahertz computer, but it was a fine computer at the time."
9) The 2-second boot! "The promise of Chrome and Chrome OS is that the devices you give to your employees will have a 2-second boot time, and they'll be completely disposable."
8) All for $350. "So the price point that you-all should think about are the current netbook pricing, which is in the $300, $400 kinda price points—and those prices are completely determined by the cost of the glass, the cost of the processor—in our case, Chrome and Android are free, so there's no software tax associated with all of this."
7) The relentless march of technology. "But for example, much of the network computing discussion that was done now was really announced by Larry Ellison and others with the network computer in 1997. Now, they didn't work at all—didn't work at all—but that didn't mean that the argument wasn't right—it's just that the product didn't work. It was sort of embarrassing for those of us that participated in it, and so one of the questions you want to ask is, 'What has changed?' And the thing that has changed is this enormous march of technology—Moore's Law, all the things that all of you know—have made it possible to do the things now that we only dreamed of a few years ago."
6) Google Goggles and the power of magic. "We introduced a product called Google Goggles, which is you take a picture of things and then it actually goes out to I don't know how many sets of server farms, but a whole bunch, and then it says, "Is this a fruit? Is this a plant? Is this a menu? Is this voice-translation? Is this a landmark? Is this a face? And so forth. And then they vote on what the object is, and they tell you what they think the object is, and it's spooky . . . that kind of technology to me is as close to magic as I can imagine. I go, 'Oh my God, we can do that.' So we're very very interested in moving the understanding of information, because of this information explosion, to the next level. But we operate under the assumption that people will carry mobile devices with them all the time, that those mobile devices will be always connected through one data network or another for obvious reasons, and that there are applications that we can build or that others can build on top of our platform that will materially make them more productive, better at work, have more fun, be better entertained."
5) Put your best people on mobile projects. "In other words, you should literally put your best people and your best team on a mobile app that enables a business process—and by the way, everybody has these, right, cause ultimately every company has people who are in motion, they're moving forward, they're with the customer. So imagine there are all sorts of sales-tracking applications—if that's where all the real action's going to be, then making sure that you know what's going on with all those mobile devices within the firm—because your employees will come in and they'll interoperability and they'll also want safety and security too and those will be really important."
4) Mobility will determine how services are provisioned. "What's really important right now is to get the mobile architecture right, because mobility will ultimately be the way in which you provision most of your services. Now, today that seems crazy, because today the mobile devices are largely a problem in the corporation because they don't fully support all the existing enterprise apps and so forth. But if you fast-forward five or 10 years, with the investment and growth in mobile computing, the kinds of things you can do with mobile devices—and mobile devices here includes very small devices all the way up to very large tablets, even if you think of it as netbooks—so mobility is part of it. The way I like to articulate it is, the answer should always be mobile first."
3) The 'Everything Now' 18-year-old. (Schmidt's interviewer asks if all of our devices and forms of electronic communication are inevitably leading to "communication overkill":) "No! You're obviously not young enough anymore! Try finding an 18-year-old—watch what they do! The level of input"—(interviewer jumps in and asks if it's a matter of having an on/off switch)—"many people have searched for an 'Off' button for their teenager, trust me—it just doesn't work (laughter from audience). One of the questions you really want to ask about this is, at the end of the day, what is new? If you go back to what have we been building over the years, and what is really new? There is one thing that's really new, and it's that everything is 'now'. What you're really referring to is not the fact that you have so many parallel streams but the fact that they're all current, right?"
2) The Information Explosion. "We want to enable that to be more organized. And so if you think about the information problem—interesting statistics: between sorta the birth of the world and 2003, there were five exabytes of information created—that's the total over that period. In the last bit, we create 5 exabytes every two days. So plot that curve and now you see why it's so painful to operate in these information markets. The information explosion is so profoundly larger than anyone ever thought—I certainly, it's larger than anything I ever thought—but that's what this opportunity creates."
1) The Fundamental Connection. "But getting back to this question of information overload: what is fundamentally different now is everybody knows what's going on exactly now: one way to express that is to imagine for a moment—everybody here has a digital device? Turn it off. Turn it off right now. What if I just take it away from you? (Pauses a few seconds while gazing out at audience.) That's something pretty profound—your connectivity to that whole world—your personal world, your professional world, and so forth—that connection is so fundamental to people's lives today, whether it's personal or professional—that's not gonna happen."
So there you have 10 perspectives from Eric Schmidt on the imperative for the mobile enterprise. Having seen these ideas, do you still feel your mobile strategy holds up?
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