Eric Schmidt, chief executive officer of Google, speaking with James Fallows in ‘How to Save the News,’ an article published in the June 2010 edition of the Atlantic:
“‘It’s obvious that in five or 10 years, most news will be consumed on an electronic device of some sort. Something that is mobile and personal, with a nice color screen. Imagine an iPod or Kindle smart enough to show you stories that are incremental to a story it showed you yesterday, rather than just repetitive. And it knows who your friends are and what they’re reading and think is hot. And it has display advertising with lots of nice color, and more personal and targeted, within the limits of creepiness. And it has a GPS and a radio network and knows what is going on around you. If you think about that, you get to an interesting answer very quickly, involving both subscriptions and ads.’
“This vision, which Schmidt presented as utopian, helps illustrate the solution Google believes it will find; the problem it knows it can’t solve; and another problem that goes well beyond its ambitions.
“The solution is simply the idea that there can be a solution.”
Photo of Eric Schmidt at the World Economic Forum 2007. Copyright World Economic Forum (www.weforum.org) and swiss-image.ch. Photo by Severin Nowacki.
