Eric Schmidt: Cloud Computing will empower new Mark Zuckerbergs

 

That was the message from Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google on the final day of Salesforce.com's Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, the world's largest Cloud Computing event. 

 

The success of firms like Salesforce.com in the B2B space  and Facebook in the consumer market will lead to a new generation of innovation and entrepreneurial innovators, he claimed. "They will change the world," Schmidt predicted. "What I'm most excited about is what the next generation of entrepreneurs can do on top of these Cloud platforms. What I do know is that the next generation of these leaders will be something involving mobile, local, social."

 

Talking about innovation, Schmidt said that technological evolution went in four distinct phases: connectivity. connection/publishing, applications and now social/personal.  This evolution has caused many of the sceptics of Cloud Computing not only to revise their thinking but also to race to play catch up with the pioneers in the space. 

 

"Many people doubted that the Cloud Computing apps model would work…you talk about real time. Now it's going to be real real time," he said. "It’s hard for incumbents to move to new, faster model…The lesson to be learned over and over again in tech is that it moves. If you don't move to it very quickly, it's very hard to get back into the space."

 

So how do both new firms and the legacy incumbents make their mark in what is rapidly becoming a crowded market? Schmidt takes a starkly pragmatic view: "Just think of a way to release a new version of your software every day, without bricking it. Once you've mastered that, do it globally. Once you've done all of that, you've got a world-class software development organisation. The tools are good enough now that you can operate that way."

 

And keep it simple, he urged. "Engineers trying to solve technical problems have little experience of what consumer wants," he commented. "As a computer scientist, I love that complexity. I didn't understand that other people wouldn't love that complexity."

 

Older firms can reinvent themselves to compete in the new Cloud paradigm, he enthused citing Apple as a prime example. "You've got to take the current company and get it there. Figure out how to lead it into this new platform," he argued. "Apple proves that if you organise around the consumer, the rest of it will follow. Try and figure out how to solve the consumer problem and then the revenue will show up. What [CEO] Steve [Jobs] has done in Apple is certainly the best CEO performance in the world in 50 years and maybe 100 yeas, because not only did he do this once, he did it twice."