Google's New Rule: Mobile First
During a Tuesday keynote here at Mobile World Congress, Google chief executive Eric Schmidt touted the idea of "mobile first," or the notion that most things are now being created with mobile in mind, and shot down the idea that Google wants to turn network operators into dumb pipes with Google services on top.
"We understand that the new rule is mobile first," Schmidt said. "Mobile first in everything. Mobile first in terms of applications. Most first in terms of the way people use things. And it means … that we have a role now to inform, to educate through all these devices."
Google programmers now want to do work on mobile first, before the desktop, Schmidt said. "That is, in fact, a change," he said. "Every product announcement we've done recently – of course we'll have a desktop version – but we'll also have one on a high-performance mobile phone."
Schmidt encouraged the mobile community gathered for the conference to develop software and networks that will work together, figure out solutions to bandwidth hogs, to leverage the power of the cloud, and create products that users can't live without.
"Perhaps the phrase should be mobile first simply because it's our time to be proud of what we've built together," Schmidt said. "I'm proud to say that I think it's now the joint project of all of us to make mobile the answer to pretty much everything."
During a question and answer session, however, Schmidt fielded inquiries about how Google views network operators. Schmidt took umbrage at one individual's suggestion that Google wanted network operators to be "dumb pipes" so Google can provide all their services on top of that.
"I disagree with your premise completely," Schmidt said. "In the first place, I feel very, very strongly that we depend on the successful businesses of the operators globally, and I disagree with you that quote 'we're trying to turn the operators into a dumb pipe.'"
Operators are crucial to handle issues like security, dynamic signaling, and load balancing, Schmidt said.
"We are not going to be investing in broad-scale infrastructure," Schmidt said. "We're going to have the operators do it."
Schmidt suggested that might be at the heart of the question, and insisted that "it's important for operators to be able to deal with too much capacity and misuse of the networks because we understand at a fundamental level that wireless networks have constraints on them."
"The only specific issue we have is that we don't want operators to choose between different vendors of the same kind of content," Schmidt said, which is what pending net neutrality rules at the FCC would prohibit.
When asked if five years down the road, the average consumer would be a customer of Google or a customer of Verizon, T-Mobile, AT&T, or other wireless providers, Schmidt said that his "actual view is that the customer will be the customer of both."
"The relationship that the operator is going to have with the device is going to get much more sophisticated. The operator will have … the billing relationship, the support relationship, an educational relationship, a platform relationship, if you will," Schmidt said. "Google will also know more about the customer because it benefits the customer to tell Google more about them. The more we know about the customer, the better the quality of searches; the better the quality of the apps. They're different, however. The operator one is required, and the Google one will be optional. And today I would say the minority choose to [opt in], but I think over time a majority will."
Last week, in a small number of trial locations across the U.S., with the goal of providing speeds up to 1 gigabit per second. The company put out a call for submissions from city and state officials, and plans to make selections by year's end.
Despite the plan, Schmidt insisted Tuesday that Google is not becoming a provider.
"We're not getting into that business; it's a very tough business," he said. "It's not a business for which we're very well-optimized."
Schmidt framed the endeavor as more of a research project. The current ceiling for U.S. broadband speeds is about 100 megabits per second, and Google wants to "break through that ceiling," discover the types of the technologies that are required to hit 1 gigabit per second, and then share that information with the industry.
"Google benefits from adoption of broadband everywhere," Schmidt said. "We benefit from strong mobile broadband networks as well as strong fixed networks."
Google is still focusing on fixed because the company does not "think there's going to be one solution for data access," Schmidt said. "Wi-Fi will also continue to get better … in the same way that LTE becomes this amazing standard in mobility space. From my perspective, having an all-fiber network is ultimately always going to have more bandwidth because the bandwidth within the fiber is essentially unconstrained."
A big push at this year's show has been LTE 4G networks. Google has invested in the competing, WIMAX-based Clearwire operation, but Schmidt said he believes there is room for both technologies.
"We invested in WIMAX for same reasons we support LTE," he said. "We benefit in the adoption of high-speed broadband. WIMAX, as you know, has series of trials in number of countries, including America, and seems to be doing well. So we benefit regardless and are happy to see both succeed."
Google's Android platform has been another topic of discussion at the show. Schmidt reiterated that it is Google's goal to "make everything available for all platforms." When asked what the app landscape might look like in the years to come, he said "the most likely scenario for any of these things is the number of platforms goes very large … and winnows down for smaller numbers. I don't know how long it will take, but the competition going on now I think is hugely beneficial to the end user."
Just don't expect Google to jump into the content business.
"From a Google perspective, we'll participate in the cloud, we may offer some subscription services, but we're not going into the content business. We're going to stay as a platform," Schmidt concluded.
Google did not introduce any new products Tuesday, but an engineer did show off a preview of Google voice search in German, as well as a Google Goggles Lab that can take a picture of something and translate it into another language. Another engineer showed off Flash running on Android.