“The mobile web is not the mobile web, the mobile web is the web.”
The following infographic is how Google perceives and classifies the web:
Google's Approach To The New Age
While Google acknowledges there are important and ascending areas of web usage – video, social and mobile – none will produce anything close to the revenue and profits for Google like search has.
The following video is a “fireside chat” with Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
The following are excerpts from Eric Schmidt’s commencement address at Carnegie Mellon’s 112th commencement ceremony, held May 17, 2009.
You cannot plan innovation. You cannot plan invention. All you can do is try very hard to be at the right place and be ready.
How should you behave? Well, do things in a group. Don’t do things by yourself. Groups are stronger, groups are faster. None of us is as smart as all of us.
I wonder what Thomas Edison would think about Mr. Schmidt’s comments above?
Maureen Dowd writes about the current state of the newspaper industry in her latest New York Times column titled: Slouching Towards Oblivion.
In her article she quotes two key figures from opposite sides of the same content coin; Eric Schmidt and Sam Zell.
Let’s start with the content game’s biggest loser’s comments first – Sam Zell.
Zell now realizes his purchase of the LA Times and Chicago Tribune was “a mistake”.
Zell adds, “It’s very obvious that the newspaper model in its current form does not work and the sooner we all acknowledge that, the better.” Zell also said he probably would not try for a merger because “that’s like asking someone in another business if they want to get vaccinated with a live virus.”
I don’t know about the virus metaphor, but I do know that any business expecting to profit by reaching an audience through sales of print ads is an obsolete business model.
Now to comments from the content games biggest winner – Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, Inc.
Via Dowd, Schmidt, “reassured me that newspapers would last 500 years, but only for a boutique market: commuters taking trains, cabs and subways on the East Coast and in cities like London and Paris.”
“For somebody who lives in the suburbs,” he said, “especially if they’re driving and they have kids screaming in the back seat, why would they prefer a physical newspaper over something that is more personal.”
I don’t know if newspapers will last five hundred years or not but agree those that do survive will do so serving a niche market – not a general market – like the markets every major daily newspaper serves.
In no other way can a print media distribution cost structure begin to even hope to compete with a digital media distribution cost structure.
The new Content Kings will be those who’s business cost structure and distribution model is build on bytes not paper and ink costs and distribution.
Today’s Saturday Interview in the New Yorks Times was with Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
One of Schmidt’s answers was simple yet profound:
“We have a product that is more measurable, more targetable, and we are the innovator in the space. At some point, people need to sell products, and at some point they realize that the best advertising is measurable advertising, and they conclude that we do that.”
Businesses who haven’t yet concluded measurable advertising is better than unmeasured advertising fall into three categories.
They are:
1. Layman
2. Laggards
3. Luddites
In a future post, I will describe my experiences explaining search advertising to each type.
Search Marketing Communications 
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