Google CEO Eric Schmidt used his keynote address at Mobile World Congress to outline a bold new strategy tonight: Putting mobile software before the PC and betting Google’s entire future on the mobile in your pocket.
Speaking to a packed auditorium, Schmidt described the mobile phone as more than a gadget: “the phone is your alter ego,” he said. “It doesn’t think as well as we do, but it has a better memory. It has a better notion of where we are, and can take pictures. This really gives us an opportunity. It’s time to get behind this. What I would suggest now is that the new rule is ‘mobile first’. Mobile first in everything. Mobile first in applications, and how we use things.”
Schmidt had previously demoed new translation and voice search services in Google’s arsenal, and waxed lovingly about the Android OS, which now sells on 60,000 handsets every day, already a 100% increase on the month before.
“It’s time for us to make Mobile First the right answer,” he told a gripped audience of mobile industry employees. “Here we are, Mobile First, surrounded by the awesome power of networks you have created. The scale and computational power of the servers. The job here is to create magic, and put that all together in ways that make people think ‘oh my god, how did I live without this before’”
Schmidt explained that Google would, from now on, be producing mobile versions of all its applications and services before worrying about desktop computers. “At Google our programmers are working on things mobile first,” Schmidt beamed. “Of course we’ll have a desktop version, a high quality version, because our customers love them, but we’ll also have one on mobile phones. The top programmers want to work on those programs – it’s more human, more personal, more satisfying to them.”
Can Google bet the farm on mobile, and clean up? Give us your thoughts in the comments section below.
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