Google Inc executive chairman Eric Schmidt said missing the rise of social media was the biggest mistake he made at the world’s largest search-engine operator.
“In our defense, we were busy working on many other things, but we should have been in that area and I take responsibility for that,” he said in an interview on Bloomberg Television on Tuesday.
Schmidt led Google as chief executive officer from 2001 until 2011, when he became executive chairman, during which time the Mountain View, California-based company went public and became a go-to site for search and advertising.
Yet Google initially paid little attention to Facebook Inc, which started in 2004 and has since become the world’s biggest social network with more than 1 billion members who use the service to connect and share interactions with friends.
Facebook and Google are now locked in a battle for online and mobile advertising dollars. To compete in social networking, Google introduced a Google+ social service in 2011.
Google said in October last year that it has about 300 million consumers who visit the Google+ stream of content from friends, while the total users logged into the service who undertake a monthly social action — including surfers who watch a video on YouTube recommended by a friend or endorse a search result — is 540 million.
Not seeing the rise of social networking is “not a mistake we’re going to make again,” Schmidt said in the interview.
He also predicted this year would be a victory lap for mobile computing: “The trend has been that mobile was winning. It’s now won.”
The ubiquity of hand-held computers will open up new possibilities for applications in entertainment, education and social life, Schmidt said.
Changes in US stock index membership also underscored the shifts in corporate power. Last year, the S&P 500 dropped slumping retailer J.C. Penney, which shed more than 50 percent of its value, replacing it with social networking company Facebook, which more than doubled for the whole of last year.
Twitter’s entry to the market, raising US$1.8 billion, made some of the biggest news during the year. The still money-losing social network power’s stock quickly more than doubled from its offer price of US$26 to above US$63 on Tuesday.
Additional reporting by AFP
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to