在
一些人看来，最近谷歌(Google)的日子过得不太顺利。它的股价下跌。在曾经由谷歌主导的领域，半路杀出苹果(Apple)的iPhone，以一个绕过浏览器和谷歌搜索框的平台为基础，掀起了互联网的新一波增长。“应用程序”(app)的革命，将要终结谷歌在网络广告领域的霸主地位。但这些都是老皇历了。最近的一个周五，《华尔街日报》一群编辑和谷歌首席执行长施密特(Eric Schmidt)一起聊天。从施密特的话听起来，谷歌完全不像是一家面临中年危机的公司，面临死亡威胁就更谈不上了。
Zina Saunders
谷歌首席执行长施密特
当然，苹果手机销售利润相当可观，而谷歌是免费向手机生产商赠送Android操作系统。但不要担心，施密特说，当有10亿人在做某件事情的时候，赚钱的方式就多了，肯定的，相信我，我们会从中赚到大把的钱。
他说，在科技领域，整个来讲，如果你拥有一个有价值的平台，你就可以将其变现。比如iPhone用户产生的搜索收入，谷歌要和苹果分成，但Android手机的搜索收入全部归谷歌。施密特说，单这点差别就足够支持Android的持续开发。
然后很快还有Chrome OS操作系统。谷歌希望这个系统在平板电脑和上网本当中发挥Android在智能手机中的作用，也就是让谷歌在将来占据强势地位，把竞争对手──在这里就是微软(Microsoft)──远远地抛在后面。
能这么容易吗？自年初以来，谷歌的股价已经下跌近250美元。财务专家已经开始质疑，为什么不从充裕的现金当中拿出更多的钱，通过股票回购和股息派发的方式返还给股东？一些人怀疑，种种诱惑只会鼓励施密特和创始人布林(Sergey Brin)、佩奇(Larry Page)组成的谷歌三巨头把钱大量浪费在那些从来不会有回报的花哨点子上。《财富》(Fortune)杂志最近称谷歌为“现金奶牛”，并建议人们更多地关注怎样挤奶，而不是离开它去寻找下一个发财机会。
但在施密特看来，真正的挑战还不是多数投资者心目中的那种。而是在于，当“搜索”已经过时的时候，谷歌应该怎样维护它在网络广告（几乎是其所有利润的来源）领域中的地位？
谷歌搜索框和“谷歌一下(Googling)”这个动作不再是我们在线生活中心的那一天即将到来。这会带来什么？施密特承认，他们正在力图搞清楚搜索的未来。他说，我是用一种积极的心态来说这句话的，我们仍旧乐于从事搜索业务，请相信我；但有一种想法认为，越来越多的搜索是在不需要你打字的情况下替你完成的。
他具体地说，我认为，多数人不希望让谷歌来回答他们的问题，他们想让谷歌告诉他们，接下来他们该做什么。
假设你正沿着街道走路，由于谷歌搜集了你的信息，我们粗略知道你是谁，你关心什么，你的朋友是谁，谷歌还知道，你接下来要去哪儿。施密特让一位听众想像各种可能性：如果你想喝牛奶，而不远处就可以买到牛奶，谷歌将提醒你在哪里会买到牛奶。它将告诉你前面有一家收集了各种赛马海报的商店，而你正在阅读的关于19世纪谋杀案的故事就发生在下一个街区。
施密特说，新一代功能强大的手持设备即将面世，它会常常给你惊喜，告诉你一些你想了解却并不自知的信息。施密特说，令报纸从根本上吸引读者的因素──即偶然发现信息的惊喜──现在可以计算出来了。我们实际上可以用电子方式制造出这种惊喜。
施密特显然关注着他的听众，当天包括一些热衷报纸业务的人。他用悲伤的语调谈起“美国报业的经济困境”。他向我们断言，在未来的信息泛滥中，可信的“品牌”将比以往更重要。但他很快补充说，是新品牌还是现有品牌赢得胜利，还需拭目以待。但谷歌希望押注的一件事是：（收集新闻类业务无法带来足够收入）问题的唯一解决方式是增加将业务转化为收入的机会，而我知道的唯一途径是通过目标广告，这就是我们要做的。
施密特是目标广告的拥趸，仅仅因为他相信任何有针对性的东西。他说，以个人为目标的力量──技术将非常精湛，人们很难观看或消费一些从某种意义上讲不是为他们量身定做的东西。
想想有点儿可怕。不过，对投资者和企业高管来说，最大的问题当然是哪些公司能够把握这些机会。谷歌可能自视为传媒业的朋友和帮手，不过它也明白要控制住具有针对性的信息。施密特说，随着你从搜索业务进入到下一个阶段，你真的希望能从语法到语义，从你输入的内容到你的内心所想。这基本上就是人工智能的作用。我认为我们将在很长时间内成为这一领域的全球领跑者。
不过，在实现这一目标之前，谷歌面临着越来越多的法律、政治和监管障碍。谷歌牵头的净中立争论形势急转，其在“公共利益”领域的很多前盟友如今都在大喊“叛徒”。
谷歌本周与前对手Verizon提出的一套净中立原则最引人注意的是，这些原则并不适用于无线上网。施密特对一个新闻网站说，无线对有线的问题变得很混乱，这实际上是美国联邦通讯委员会(FCC)的问题，而不是谷歌的问题。
等一下。互联网的未来难道不是无线上网吗？无线上网难道不正是谷歌和Verizon之间就宣传谷歌Android软件而建立的新合作关系的基石吗？不过，谷歌如今打破了与盟友的同盟，敢于说出在移动网络上推行净中立原则是完全不切实际的，因为在可预见的未来，移动网络的需求很可能会超过其能力。
即使这不会成为政治上对谷歌不利的因素，谷歌也仍面临着越来越多的反垄断、隐私权和专利审查。这些审查是由华盛顿政界越来越多的反对者发起的，最近的反对者是甲骨文公司(Oracle)及其创始人埃里森(Larry Ellison)。施密特听天由命地承认，有些人天生反对谷歌做的任何事，第一个反对者将是微软。
施密特熟悉这种游戏──90年代作为Sun电子计算机公司（又名：升阳电脑，Sun Microsystems）首席技术长，他是对微软发起反垄断攻击的主要挑起者之一。他说，如今既然风水轮流转了，谷歌将做据他说微软没能做到的事情──确保每一步行动都是对消费者好的，对竞争对手公平的，进而坚持不懈并获得成功。
原来是这样。在政治上比较麻烦的隐私问题上，谷歌对自己的动机也持一种类似的大度看法。施密特说，监管是没有必要的，因为谷歌有强烈的动机正确对待用户，一旦谷歌对用户的私人信息做了任何让他们感到紧张、不舒服的事情，他们马上就会弃用谷歌。
真是这样吗？一些人或许质疑，例如，如果有用户在Picasa上面存有一千张照片，能做到说不用谷歌就不用谷歌吗？对于在Gmail上存了10年电子邮件的人，或者对于一位以谷歌“Docs”取代微软“Office”、已经产生依赖的小企业主来说，也能做到说不用谷歌就不用谷歌吗？。谷歌这些服务希望达到的目标不就是用户的粘性，甚至是略显过度的粘性吗？
当然，施密特认为这些问题不是谷歌所能回答的。这无疑是对的。他说：我认为，当所有的事情对每个人都是可用、可知、可录时，社会并不明白发生了什么事情。他非常严肃地预言，有一天，每个年轻人到成年时都有权自动改名，目的是与存于朋友社交网站上的小时候的胡闹行为一刀两断。
他说：我的意思是，我们整个社会真地需要思考这些事情；我还没有谈那些真正骇人的东西，如恐怖主义和接触邪恶事物的途径。
这并不是说谷歌怀疑社交媒体的价值。施密特对Facebook给予他最高的赞美，说它是一家“举足轻重的公司”。虽然目前这个行业存在“很多夸大之词、很多风投资金”，但他预计，在刚刚诞生的这一大群初创公司当中，还会有一到两家“举足轻重的公司”冒出。
有人可能会问，虽然有当前的荣耀，但谷歌自己到头来是不是也会昙花一现？在技术上，这家公司有着充足的信心。施密特描述，YouTube在问世后不久的那些日子里，由于大量视频从服务器流向全世界的用户，是怎样差点“搞垮”了谷歌。解决办法是“代理缓存”(proxy cache)，也就是让全世界大量本地服务器来存储最热门的那些视频。施密特说，谷歌发明的这项技术让我们能够把那些东西放在离你非常近的地方，这是一项巨大的技术成果。
但对于YouTube以及谷歌的大量项目来说，如何赚钱的问题仍然待解。谷歌抓住了搜索浪潮，各种迹象显示它为手机浪潮的到来也已经做好了准备。至于往后会是什么样的浪潮，你的猜想可以和施密特一样准确。
Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
（更新完成）
To some, Google has been looking a bit sallow lately. The stock is down. Where once everything seemed to go the company's way, along came Apple's iPhone, launching a new wave of Web growth on a platform that largely bypassed the browser and Google's search box. The 'app' revolution was going to spell an end to Google's dominance of Web advertising.
But that's all so six-months-ago. When a group of Journal editors sat down with Eric Schmidt on a recent Friday, Google's CEO sounded nothing like a man whose company was facing a midlife crisis, let alone intimations of mortality.
For one thing, just a couple days earlier, Google had publicly estimated that 200,000 Android smartphones were being activated daily by cell carriers on behalf of customers. That's a doubling in just three months. Since the beginning of the year, Android phones have been outselling iPhones by an increasing clip and seem destined soon to outstrip Apple in global market share.
True, Apple sells its phones for luscious margins, while Google gives away Android to handset makers for free. But not to worry, says Mr. Schmidt: 'You get a billion people doing something, there's lots of ways to make money. Absolutely, trust me. We'll get lots of money for it.'
'In general in technology,' he says, 'if you own a platform that's valuable, you can monetize it.' Example: Google is obliged to share with Apple search revenue generated by iPhone users. On Android, Google gets to keep 100%. That difference alone, says Mr. Schmidt, is more than enough to foot the bill for Android's continued development.
And coming soon is Chrome OS, which Google hopes will do in tablets and netbooks what Android is doing in smartphones, i.e., give Google a commanding share of the future and leave, in this case, Microsoft in the dust.
Can it all be so easy? Google's stock price has fallen nearly $250 since the beginning of the year. Financial pundits have started to ask skeptical questions, wondering why it doesn't give more of its ample cash back to shareholders in the form of buybacks and dividends. Some suspect that all that temptation merely encourages Mr. Schmidt, along with founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page -- the triumvirate running the company -- to splurge on gimmicky ideas that never pay off. Fortune magazine recently called Google a 'cash cow' and suggested more attention be paid to milking it rather than running off in search of the next big thing.
But to hear Mr. Schmidt tell it, the real challenge is one not yet on most investors' minds: how to preserve Google's franchise in Web advertising, the source of almost all its profits, when 'search' is outmoded.
The day is coming when the Google search box -- and the activity known as Googling -- no longer will be at the center of our online lives. Then what? 'We're trying to figure out what the future of search is,' Mr. Schmidt acknowledges. 'I mean that in a positive way. We're still happy to be in search, believe me. But one idea is that more and more searches are done on your behalf without you needing to type.'
'I actually think most people don't want Google to answer their questions,' he elaborates. 'They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.'
Let's say you're walking down the street. Because of the info Google has collected about you, 'we know roughly who you are, roughly what you care about, roughly who your friends are.' Google also knows, to within a foot, where you are. Mr. Schmidt leaves it to a listener to imagine the possibilities: If you need milk and there's a place nearby to get milk, Google will remind you to get milk. It will tell you a store ahead has a collection of horse-racing posters, that a 19th-century murder you've been reading about took place on the next block.
Says Mr. Schmidt, a generation of powerful handheld devices is just around the corner that will be adept at surprising you with information that you didn't know you wanted to know. 'The thing that makes newspapers so fundamentally fascinating -- that serendipity -- can be calculated now. We can actually produce it electronically,' Mr. Schmidt says.
Mr. Schmidt obviously has an eye to his audience, which this day consists of folks with an abiding devotion to the newspaper business. He speaks in sorrowful tones about the 'economic disaster that is the American newspaper.' He assures us that in the coming deluge trusted 'brands' will be more important than ever. Just as quickly, though, he adds that whether the winners will be new brands or existing brands remains to be seen. On one thing, however, Google is willing to bet: 'The only way the problem [of insufficient revenue for news gathering] is going to be solved is by increasing monetization, and the only way I know of to increase monetization is through targeted ads. That's our business.'
Mr. Schmidt is a believer in targeted advertising because, simply, he's a believer in targeted everything: 'The power of individual targeting -- the technology will be so good it will be very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not in some sense been tailored for them.'
That's a bit scary when you think about it. But for investors and executives the big question, of course, is which companies will control these opportunities. Google may see itself as friend and helper to the media business, but it also clearly sees itself in control of the targeting information. Says Mr. Schmidt: 'As you go from the search box [to the next phase of Google], you really want to go from syntax to semantics, from what you typed to what you meant. And that's basically the role of [Artificial Intelligence]. I think we will be the world leader in that for a long time.'
Between here and there, though, the company faces ever-growing legal, political and regulatory obstacles. The net neutrality debate, which Google has led, has taken a sudden turn that has many of its former allies in the 'public interest' sector shouting 'treason.'
What was most striking about the set of net neut 'principles' Google produced this week with former antagonist Verizon was that they didn't apply to wireless. 'The issues of wireless versus wireline gets very messy,' Mr. Schmidt told one news site. 'And that's really an FCC issue, not a Google issue.'
Wait. Isn't the future of the Internet wireless these days? Isn't wireless the very basis of the new partnership between Google and Verizon, built on promoting Google's Android software? But Google has now broken ranks with its allies and dared to speak about the sheer impracticality of net neutrality on mobile networks where demand is likely to outstrip capacity for the foreseeable future.
If that weren't about to become a sticky political wicket for the company, it also faces growing antitrust, privacy and patent scrutiny, fanned by a growing phalanx of Beltway opponents, the latest being Larry Ellison and Oracle. 'There's a set of people who are intrinsic oppositionists to everything Google does,' Mr. Schmidt acknowledges resignedly. 'The first opponent will be Microsoft.'
Mr. Schmidt is familiar with the game -- as chief technology officer of Sun Microsystems in the 1990s, he was a chief fomenter of the antitrust assault on Bill Gates & Co. Now that the tables are turned, he says, Google will persevere and prevail by doing what he says Microsoft failed to do -- make sure its every move is 'good for consumers' and 'fair' to competitors.
Uh huh. Google takes a similarly generous view of its own motives on the politically vexed issue of privacy. Mr. Schmidt says regulation is unnecessary because Google faces such strong incentives to treat its users right, since they will walk away the minute Google does anything with their personal information they find 'creepy.'
Really? Some might be skeptical that a user with, say, a thousand photos on Picasa would find it so easy to walk away. Or a guy with 10 years of emails on Gmail. Or a small business owner who has come to rely on Google Docs as an alternative to Microsoft Office. Isn't stickiness -- even slightly extortionate stickiness -- what these Google services aim for?
Mr. Schmidt is surely right, though, that the questions go far beyond Google. 'I don't believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time,' he says. He predicts, apparently seriously, that every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends' social media sites.
'I mean we really have to think about these things as a society,' he adds. 'I'm not even talking about the really terrible stuff, terrorism and access to evil things,' he says.
Not that Google is a doubter of the value of social media. Mr. Schmidt awards Facebook his highest accolade, calling it a 'company of consequence.' And though 'there is a lot of hot air, a lot of venture money' in the sector right now, he predicts that one or two more 'companies of consequence' will be born among the horde of new players just coming to life now.
A skeptic might wonder whether, despite present glory, Google itself might yet prove a flash in the pan. The company has enormous technological confidence. Mr. Schmidt describes how YouTube, its video-serving site, almost 'took down' the company in its early days, thanks to the swelling outflow of video dispatched from its servers to users around the globe. Salvation was the 'proxy cache' -- lots of local servers around the world holding the most popular videos. 'The technology that Google invented allows us to put those things very close to you,' says Mr. Schmidt. 'It was a tremendous technological achievement.'
But with YouTube, as with lots of Google projects, there remains the question of how to make money. Google captured the search wave and shows every sign of positioning itself successfully for the mobile wave. As for the waves after that, your guess may be as good as Mr. Schmidt's.
Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
But that's all so six-months-ago. When a group of Journal editors sat down with Eric Schmidt on a recent Friday, Google's CEO sounded nothing like a man whose company was facing a midlife crisis, let alone intimations of mortality.
For one thing, just a couple days earlier, Google had publicly estimated that 200,000 Android smartphones were being activated daily by cell carriers on behalf of customers. That's a doubling in just three months. Since the beginning of the year, Android phones have been outselling iPhones by an increasing clip and seem destined soon to outstrip Apple in global market share.
True, Apple sells its phones for luscious margins, while Google gives away Android to handset makers for free. But not to worry, says Mr. Schmidt: 'You get a billion people doing something, there's lots of ways to make money. Absolutely, trust me. We'll get lots of money for it.'
'In general in technology,' he says, 'if you own a platform that's valuable, you can monetize it.' Example: Google is obliged to share with Apple search revenue generated by iPhone users. On Android, Google gets to keep 100%. That difference alone, says Mr. Schmidt, is more than enough to foot the bill for Android's continued development.
And coming soon is Chrome OS, which Google hopes will do in tablets and netbooks what Android is doing in smartphones, i.e., give Google a commanding share of the future and leave, in this case, Microsoft in the dust.
Can it all be so easy? Google's stock price has fallen nearly $250 since the beginning of the year. Financial pundits have started to ask skeptical questions, wondering why it doesn't give more of its ample cash back to shareholders in the form of buybacks and dividends. Some suspect that all that temptation merely encourages Mr. Schmidt, along with founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page -- the triumvirate running the company -- to splurge on gimmicky ideas that never pay off. Fortune magazine recently called Google a 'cash cow' and suggested more attention be paid to milking it rather than running off in search of the next big thing.
But to hear Mr. Schmidt tell it, the real challenge is one not yet on most investors' minds: how to preserve Google's franchise in Web advertising, the source of almost all its profits, when 'search' is outmoded.
The day is coming when the Google search box -- and the activity known as Googling -- no longer will be at the center of our online lives. Then what? 'We're trying to figure out what the future of search is,' Mr. Schmidt acknowledges. 'I mean that in a positive way. We're still happy to be in search, believe me. But one idea is that more and more searches are done on your behalf without you needing to type.'
'I actually think most people don't want Google to answer their questions,' he elaborates. 'They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.'
Let's say you're walking down the street. Because of the info Google has collected about you, 'we know roughly who you are, roughly what you care about, roughly who your friends are.' Google also knows, to within a foot, where you are. Mr. Schmidt leaves it to a listener to imagine the possibilities: If you need milk and there's a place nearby to get milk, Google will remind you to get milk. It will tell you a store ahead has a collection of horse-racing posters, that a 19th-century murder you've been reading about took place on the next block.
Says Mr. Schmidt, a generation of powerful handheld devices is just around the corner that will be adept at surprising you with information that you didn't know you wanted to know. 'The thing that makes newspapers so fundamentally fascinating -- that serendipity -- can be calculated now. We can actually produce it electronically,' Mr. Schmidt says.
Mr. Schmidt obviously has an eye to his audience, which this day consists of folks with an abiding devotion to the newspaper business. He speaks in sorrowful tones about the 'economic disaster that is the American newspaper.' He assures us that in the coming deluge trusted 'brands' will be more important than ever. Just as quickly, though, he adds that whether the winners will be new brands or existing brands remains to be seen. On one thing, however, Google is willing to bet: 'The only way the problem [of insufficient revenue for news gathering] is going to be solved is by increasing monetization, and the only way I know of to increase monetization is through targeted ads. That's our business.'
Mr. Schmidt is a believer in targeted advertising because, simply, he's a believer in targeted everything: 'The power of individual targeting -- the technology will be so good it will be very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not in some sense been tailored for them.'
That's a bit scary when you think about it. But for investors and executives the big question, of course, is which companies will control these opportunities. Google may see itself as friend and helper to the media business, but it also clearly sees itself in control of the targeting information. Says Mr. Schmidt: 'As you go from the search box [to the next phase of Google], you really want to go from syntax to semantics, from what you typed to what you meant. And that's basically the role of [Artificial Intelligence]. I think we will be the world leader in that for a long time.'
Between here and there, though, the company faces ever-growing legal, political and regulatory obstacles. The net neutrality debate, which Google has led, has taken a sudden turn that has many of its former allies in the 'public interest' sector shouting 'treason.'
What was most striking about the set of net neut 'principles' Google produced this week with former antagonist Verizon was that they didn't apply to wireless. 'The issues of wireless versus wireline gets very messy,' Mr. Schmidt told one news site. 'And that's really an FCC issue, not a Google issue.'
Wait. Isn't the future of the Internet wireless these days? Isn't wireless the very basis of the new partnership between Google and Verizon, built on promoting Google's Android software? But Google has now broken ranks with its allies and dared to speak about the sheer impracticality of net neutrality on mobile networks where demand is likely to outstrip capacity for the foreseeable future.
If that weren't about to become a sticky political wicket for the company, it also faces growing antitrust, privacy and patent scrutiny, fanned by a growing phalanx of Beltway opponents, the latest being Larry Ellison and Oracle. 'There's a set of people who are intrinsic oppositionists to everything Google does,' Mr. Schmidt acknowledges resignedly. 'The first opponent will be Microsoft.'
Mr. Schmidt is familiar with the game -- as chief technology officer of Sun Microsystems in the 1990s, he was a chief fomenter of the antitrust assault on Bill Gates & Co. Now that the tables are turned, he says, Google will persevere and prevail by doing what he says Microsoft failed to do -- make sure its every move is 'good for consumers' and 'fair' to competitors.
Uh huh. Google takes a similarly generous view of its own motives on the politically vexed issue of privacy. Mr. Schmidt says regulation is unnecessary because Google faces such strong incentives to treat its users right, since they will walk away the minute Google does anything with their personal information they find 'creepy.'
Really? Some might be skeptical that a user with, say, a thousand photos on Picasa would find it so easy to walk away. Or a guy with 10 years of emails on Gmail. Or a small business owner who has come to rely on Google Docs as an alternative to Microsoft Office. Isn't stickiness -- even slightly extortionate stickiness -- what these Google services aim for?
Mr. Schmidt is surely right, though, that the questions go far beyond Google. 'I don't believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time,' he says. He predicts, apparently seriously, that every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends' social media sites.
'I mean we really have to think about these things as a society,' he adds. 'I'm not even talking about the really terrible stuff, terrorism and access to evil things,' he says.
Not that Google is a doubter of the value of social media. Mr. Schmidt awards Facebook his highest accolade, calling it a 'company of consequence.' And though 'there is a lot of hot air, a lot of venture money' in the sector right now, he predicts that one or two more 'companies of consequence' will be born among the horde of new players just coming to life now.
A skeptic might wonder whether, despite present glory, Google itself might yet prove a flash in the pan. The company has enormous technological confidence. Mr. Schmidt describes how YouTube, its video-serving site, almost 'took down' the company in its early days, thanks to the swelling outflow of video dispatched from its servers to users around the globe. Salvation was the 'proxy cache' -- lots of local servers around the world holding the most popular videos. 'The technology that Google invented allows us to put those things very close to you,' says Mr. Schmidt. 'It was a tremendous technological achievement.'
But with YouTube, as with lots of Google projects, there remains the question of how to make money. Google captured the search wave and shows every sign of positioning itself successfully for the mobile wave. As for the waves after that, your guess may be as good as Mr. Schmidt's.
Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
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