Google CEO Eric Schmidt envisions a radically changed internet five years from now: dominated by Chinese-language and social media content, delivered over super-fast bandwidth in real time. Figuring out how to rank real-time social content is "the great challenge of the age," Schmidt said in an interview in front of thousands of CIOs and IT Directors at last week's Gartner Symposium/ITxpo Orlando 2009.
Gartner is the largest and most respected analyst firm in the world and much of what Schmidt said in his 45 minute interview was directed specifically at business leaders, but we've excerpted 6 minutes that we believe is of interest to anyone who's touched by the web.
Highlighted comments include:
There's lots more in the full 45 minutes of Schmidt's interview, including a statement that a Google OS Netbook will be here in 2010, with HTML5 local caching for offline use.
That's the roadmap, though, that's guiding much of what Google is doing today. From Chrome OS to Google Social Search.
Does that sound like a compelling vision of the future? Not discussed were distributed social networking, structured data, recommendations, presence data and other factors that could complicate Google's plans. What do you think the web will look like in five years?