I think the next CEO can not be an outsider. For a company like Microsoft the next CEO necessarily has to come from inside, just my opinion. And the cloud and enterprise vice president Satya Nadella would be a decent choice. The next CEO has to be about the future, not the past.
Or Microsoft could pull a Yahoo, and bring in Vic Gundotra, a former Microsoft soldier. Gundotra just might bite, since Larry Page is just getting started and Vic might already have hit the glass ceiling at Google. Gundotra's Microsoft past and Google present is an amazing combination. And many would say Microsoft has also had the Yahoo problem: it is widely considered a has been company. The shine just is not there anymore.
Microsoft could not have become Google. We should not be surprised Google has not been able to become Facebook. Facebook is not Twitter. Twitter is not FourSquare.
I have been arguing at this blog that it just is not in Google's DNA to do social. Being very good at information necessarily clashes with you becoming very good at social. There is a clash.
But social is big and getting bigger. What is Google to do?
I think Google should focus on the information and search aspects of social.
I'd love to have a ridiculously good blog search engine. And I'd love to have ridiculously good Twitter search results.
And Facebook is not doing Android, Google is. That is big one.
The Chrome OS is a really big one.
It is not possible for one company to come up with everything. That is unrealistic. That is not possible. Google is still doing cutting edge work. But it is not doing all cutting edge work. That is reality.
The world’s largest search engine covets a key to the magical kingdom called the social web. It would do anything to become part of that exclusive club that, for now, is the domain of Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook and to some extent, Twitter..... Having failed to hire a head of social, Google decided to put its man for all seasons, Vic Gundotra, in charge of social. .... Social is more than just features ..... what it can’t do is internalize empathy. It doesn’t know feelings. It doesn’t comprehend that relationships are more than a mere algorithm .... the social web is moving toward a future where serendipity replaces search.....Buying Slide, investing in Zynga or launching Google Me are great ideas in theory, just as is the idea of me playing baseball!
"There was 5 exabytes of information created between the dawn of civilization through 2003," Schmidt said, "but that much information is now created every 2 days, and the pace is increasing...People aren't ready for the technology revolution that's going to happen to them." .... user generated content .... "If I look at enough of your messaging and your location, and use Artificial Intelligence," Schmidt said, "we can predict where you are going to go." ...... "Show us 14 photos of yourself and we can identify who you are. You think you don't have 14 photos of yourself on the internet? ..... diseases and other crises will become predictable as well ..... "In our lifetimes," Schmidt says, "we'll go from a small number of people having access to information, to 5 billion people having all the world's knowledge in their native language."
Schmidt envisions a radically changed internet five years from now: dominated by Chinese-language and social media content, delivered over super-fast bandwidth in real time. Figuring out how to rank real-time social content is "the great challenge of the age" .....Today's teenagers are the model of how the web will work in five years - they jump from app to app to app seamlessly. ....... Within five years there will be broadband well above 100MB in performance - and distribution distinctions between TV, radio and the web will go away. ..... "We can index real-time info now - but how do we rank it?" ..... Not discussed were distributed social networking, structured data, recommendations, presence data and other factors that could complicate Google's plans.
tweeting the same link over and over can boost a page's rank ..... Too many tweets over a certain period of time will be noticed by Google's algorithm. Tweets are just one of many "signals" Google uses to determine rank and cannot be as easily gamed
Google had been automatically redirecting google.cn to google.hk, its uncensored site in Hong Kong, but stopped that practice earlier this month and simply included a link to google.hk on the google.cn site in order to pacify Chinese lawmakers.
a social-networking type of display where soldiers interact as "buddies" and track each others' movements on the battlefield. ..... soldiers would carry smartphones with them into battle ..... Military satellites can focus in on minute features you can't see when using consumer-grade technology like Google Earth, so the software installed on RATS could potentially zero in on facial features or be used to read license plates..... the Indian military is another potential customer for this Android-based technology
