Wow. If this guy ever ran for President, I would vote for him. You have to watch him to believe. Full transcript on TechCrunch.
On mobile:
They’re probably the most important of all. Today, everyone here in the audience has a mobile phone. It’s the last thing you would leave anywhere, head phone, has a GPS, knows where it is. The powerful mobile phones have powerful browsers. They have cameras, as we’ve discussed before. You can do a lot with them. Fast forward a few years from now with the content and the capability of that with a new generation of applications. We expect eventually that the important of uses of the Internet will be on mobile phones. Mobile phone usage is growing faster than personal computers. There are many more of them, on the order of 4 billion in the world. In our lifetime, the majority of people, at least 5 billion, maybe 5 1/2 billion will have mobile phones.
The good news is that we work in a technology where prices are improving. Prices — it’s a constant price reduction business. I have no idea, by the way, how these hard earned companies make any money at all. Prices are so low now. But the corollary benefit is the explosion in digital devices where people never could have imagined having access to these things 10 or 20 years ago, the obvious example being in the gaming industry where the game devices are as powerful as the personal computers today. The real story is going to be on the mobile phones to get back to that. Everyone has a mobile phone. And even in the third world, and that’s the worst example, the Israel divide, you can build networks where people use SMS which are these short messages, the 160 character messages to actually do searches and queries, and we do that in those markets. And if you’re a farmer who’s depending on the price, the weather forecast, that query may determine whether you go bankrupt or not –
There are on the order of 250 million users in China of the Internet which is more than the number of users that we have in the United States today. And that’s an important milestone. And they have many, many hundreds of millions to go. There are about 500 million mobile phone users in China.
On technology:
All of those things are uniquely human and uniquely special. The technology has made us closer together. It has also made us more stressed. If you look at the history of technology over a couple hundred years, it’s all about time compression and making the globe smaller. It’s had positive effects, all the ones that we know. So we’re much less likely to have the kind of terrible misunderstandings that led to World War I, for example. Think about it in the Cuban missile crisis. There was literally a red phone that they actually installed over miscommunication over a nuclear weapon. And it was one that one submarine in the Cuban missile crisis that they couldn’t find, and they were worried was about to launch a nuclear weapon. Think about the damage that that would have done to humanity. Today, that’s not going to happen because of, among other things, cell phones. So we benefit from this inter-connectiveness. We have to learn as a society what it means to be interconnected all the time. It means, for example, that not everything is as important as everything else. Since I have access to every, every crisis in the world because it’s always blaring at me on cable television, that doesn’t mean I have to worry about every one of them. This is also known as knowing where the off button is.
On the United States:
Science and education funding and essentially to move the ball forward. One of the things about economics is everyone assumes the economics are static. Real wealth is created by businesses, not by financial engineering. And by businesses that build new products that solve new problems. In American jobs, and this is primarily in American — obviously American stimulus package — need to be high paying for a reason. We’re losing out to low-cost manufacturing economies when we have the best scientists, the best innovators, the best educational system, and it should pay off. And what it pays off is innovation, new products that pay well.
The innovation — the model that we have about faculty, graduate students, all the things that we talk about is — many countries are trying. It takes 50 years to replicate that, and maybe a different culture. So we remain, we America, remain by far the place of choice for education, in particular higher education.
Eric Schmidt:Unemployment is up. We’re not at the bottom here. The quicker we can get through this, the quicker we can get to the other side. I do believe that the recovery, when it occurs, will be led by the kind of businesses that we’re highlighting new, ones that solve a new problem. I, for example, believe that green energy, sort of rebuilding the energy infrastructure of America, is a great project. It’s a great project for this president who can then use that to reduce our dependence upon foreign oil, increase American jobs –[applause] and build a whole set of export oriented industries. And, oh, by the way, help materially solve the climate change issue which is very serious.
Charlie Rose:So we’ll come through this?
Eric Schmidt:Absolutely. One of the things is if you have a choice between being in America and being in the other countries in a global slowdown, you’d much rather be here, although it’s more painful, you’ll get out faster.[applause]
