Google"s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, is known for making some rather bold, and sometimes incorrect, public predictions about his company, and the tech world in general. Remember when he said in 2011 that Google TV would be inside all new televisions by mid-2012? More recently, he offered the idea that everyone in the world will have an Internet connection by 2020.
This week, Schmidt is making some 2014 predictions for Google in a new Bloomberg TV video clip. This time, his prognostications are fairly unexciting. One of them is, "Everyone is going to have a smartphone." He notes that there are now more smartphones and tablets being sold than personal computers and that those mobile devices, combined with cloud services, will lead to a "whole new generation of applications."
He also says that 2014 will also see the "arrival of big data and machine intelligence everywhere" which he believes will change "every business globally", thanks to companies being able to learn more about each of their customers. One major development that Schmidt says is still something of an unknown quality is new advances in genetics research that could help solve many medical issues.
So where did Google miss the boat in 2013? Schmidt admits the company underestimated the rise of social networks, which he says he takes responsibility for. He adds that Google won"t make that same mistake again but doesn"t go into details. Google launched its own social network, Google+, in 2011, and it has slowly been integrated into many other of the company"s services since then.
Source: Bloomberg TV on YouTube