Eric Schmidt interview

Business 2.0 :: Magazine Article :: Features :: The 70 Percent Solution
By John Battelle, November 28, 2005 "

Before he arrived at Google (GOOG) in 2001 to serve as adult supervision for Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Eric Schmidt was little known outside Silicon Valley. With his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley and research stints at Bell Labs and Xerox�s (XRX) famed Palo Alto Research Center, he had a solid reputation among geeks, cemented by his championing of the Java programming language as Sun Microsystems�s (SUNW) chief technology officer. And he faced his first real management test as CEO of Novell, the troubled software maker that has fought a long, difficult war with Microsoft (MSFT).

These days Schmidt is on a stellar winning streak, recruiting top talent, seeing his company through a stunning IPO, and fending off rivals from Barry Diller to Bill Gates to Terry Semel -- while trying to keep Google�s good-guy reputation intact. How does he do it? One rule was handed to him by Brin and Page when he walked in the door: Don't be evil. The other one is a formula he uses to stay on track while innovating: Spend 70 percent of your time on the core business, 20 percent on related projects, and 10 percent on unrelated new businesses. Business 2.0 talked to Schmidt to find out how he and his colleagues live by those rules.

Click title for rest of the interview

Google Base as threat to classifieds

Print newspapers are getting gutted.
No wonder their stocks are crumbling.
I recall Dave Webb telling me years about that Classifieds were the lifeblood of newspapers...

"Rupert Murdoch once described them as the ?rivers of gold??the lucrative classified-advertising revenues that flowed into big newspaper groups. But the golden rivers are being diverted online as the internet breaks the grip that local and regional newspapers once held over their advertising markets.

Typically, a local newspaper would expect to get some 80% of its revenue from advertising, of which around two-thirds would come from classifieds. But last year in the San Francisco Bay area, job ads worth some $60m were lost from newspapers to the web, reckons Classified Intelligence, a consultancy."

Online advertising | Classified calamity | Economist.com

"Perhaps the most significant development came on November 16th, when Google started up a prototype service called Google Base. It offers a searchable database of free listings, including small ads which can be narrowed down to postal regions. Among its first offerings were used cars. In time, Google could challenge eBay, whose own auction listings now work much like a giant classified website?especially with its ?buy-it-now? options. But eBay charges sellers. Even so, it sold more than 450m items in the three months to September 30th, for almost $11 billion."

BW Rob Hof on GoogleBase

Google Base Goes Live

Lightweight, some comments follow

BW on Google's Analytics

Analyzing Google's Analytics Strategy: "The online giant's decision to make its Urchin Web Analytics software free could spell disaster for search-engine optimization companies"

Scanning Books and the issues involved

Stewart Brand: "Information wants to be free ...

Online books | Pulp friction | Economist.com

Information also wants to be expensive"

Conundrum
Ideal would be anything written available anywhere, anytime.
Problem is how can Publishers get paid?

Google Analytics - here we go

Google blows up another business

The Trail of a Clicked-On Ad, Brought to You by Google - New York Times

"When you put Google's application next to any one of the existing ones, you'll not see glaring differences except that one of them is free,"