Raja Jasti’s Blog - Renaissance Thinking

Eric Schmidt’s speech at MWC reveals google’s mobile first strategy:

He  read off a flurry of statistics highlighting the growth of the mobile industry, pointing out within three years sales of smartphones will surpass sales of PCs. He noted that in developing countries such as India, Google searches were more likely to be made on a mobile phone than on a desktop computer; he highlighted the rescue stories from the aftermath of the Haitian earthquake and called the mobile technology that enabled some of them fundamental to the human existence. “This is all part of the same view that information is fundamental, and the joint view that mobile communication is ‘it,’” he said.

In Schmidt’s view, he explained, the current mobile ecosystem and its future incarnation are the result of three intertwining factors: computing power, connectivity and cloud computing. “The Internet is humongous. The notion of publishing and microblogging is an explosion that will drive networks further into everything we do,” he said. “Today’s generation doesn’t call it a mobile phone; they call it a phone. That’s a win for everybody sitting here.”

The mobile phone is the meeting point of these three trends, he said, and furthermore, any device that is not connecting in this way is considered not interesting, but lonely. As the mobile phone is the high-volume end point of these trends, it becomes the defining product in that space, he said. “It’s like magic,” he said. “All of a sudden there are things you can do you never even believed were possible.”

This led to his belief in the “mobile first” doctrine, as Google programmers are doing work on mobile applications and technology first, because “mobile apps are better apps” and that’s what top programmers want to develop. “It’s more specific, more human, more location-aware, more satisfying to them,” Schmidt said.

Eric Schmidt’s vision of the power of combination of internet and mobile is something we also share at our company.

I checked out Google Buzz this morning. It is basically twitter type functionality integrated in Gmail.

It makes sense to add twitter type functionality with other communications such as email/IM etc. It this gains critical mass I can see it challenging twitter and even Linked in. I am not sure if it can challenge Facebook because FB is too big and has great reach.

The challenge for google buzz will be to gain critical mass as it is late into the game.