Google's Eric Schmidt on What the Web Will Look Like in 5 Years
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:
- Five years from now the internet will be dominated by Chinese-language content.
- Today's teenagers are the model of how the web will work in five years - they jump from app to app to app seamlessly.
- Five years is a factor of ten in Moore's Law, meaning that computers will be capable of far more by that time than they are today.
- Within five years there will be broadband well above 100MB in performance - and distribution distinctions between TV, radio and the web will go away.
- "We're starting to make significant money off of Youtube", content will move towards more video.
- "Real time information is just as valuable as all the other information, we want it included in our search results."
- There are many companies beyond Twitter and Facebook doing real time.
- "We can index real-time info now - but how do we rank it?"
- It's because of this fundamental shift towards user-generated information that people will listen more to other people than to traditional sources. Learning how to rank that "is the great challenge of the age." Schmidt believes Google can solve that problem.
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?
See Also: ReadWriteWeb's Top Trends Defining the Future of the Internet
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It's because of this fundamental shift towards user-generated information that people will listen more to other people than to traditional sources. Learning how to rank that "is the great challenge of the age."
User Generated Content is going to be the collective dumbing down of our entire population.
Steve, you could help changing that if you'd pull your own weight and leave more thoughtful comments. :)
Five years is a factor of ten in Moore's Law, meaning that computers will be capable of far more by that time than they are today.
Doesn't this require significant infrastructure build-out (fiber-optic I assume) and who is building such a network in the US?
I would think building such network in the US alone would take more than 5 years and many billions of investment. For all I know such networks are well underway in Europe, Japan, S. Korea, etc.
I agree on many fronts, except if the Internet is really full of Chinese content, how are we mere English speaking folks going to understand a word of it? :)
Won't content just be targeted towards certain regional and language based audiences as it is currently?
I'm also not 100% sure that people will listen to 'other people' more than traditional news sources either, that is unless they manage to address the ranking of real-time data issue. How do you know who to trust? At least when you read something off the BBC website you assume it has some degree of legitimacy, and more importantly accountability if they have it all wrong.
Sorry, wrong quote. Now I'm dumbing down the Internet.
I was referring to this quote: "Within five years there will be broadband well above 100MB in performance - and distribution distinctions between TV, radio and the web will go away."
It's because of this fundamental shift towards user-generated information that people will listen more to other people than to traditional sources. Learning how to rank that "is the great challenge of the age."
Let your personal network (and their personal network) rank it in a bottom-up manner:
http://iss.im
Figuring out how to rank real-time social content is "the great challenge of the age,"
APML's time is almost here :)
Chris, you may very well be right!
wow...
Based on the some of the comments here, I seriously worry about the future of our society if our knowledge is based on user generated information :)
It will be interesting to see exactly how much the chinese language will dominate the web.
Considering that the chinese speaking people up greater than 1/6th of the global population, it's just a matter of time before that reflects in the content of web production.
Just based on that alone, I think translation and cross compatibility platforms and services will become much more important than they currently are.
Also,
As for indexing and ranking content, that's an intriguing question. Considering that "time" is part of the most ranking algorythms (in one way or another), the processes may need to shift to other factors completely.
Things that come to mind might be origins of the content, reputation of the originator, and permeation (repeats) and of the content.
China has more English speakers than any nation on earth. India is second and Brazil not far behind. Why would the net suddenly go Chinese? Seems inefficient and for the Chinese, bad business. Predicting the future is risky unless you are a powerful innovator. Otherwise you're just projecting trend lines and not accounting for revelations of thought. Yikes!
While there may be much more Chinese language content, I suspect there will be browsers and OSs far more capable of instantaneous translation. That part has been omitted from the prediction. Either translation must grow, or population growth must decrease.
Content in Chinese may very well account for a large portion of total volume in 2015 but it will appeal almost exclusively to a Chinese audience and as such it will be far from dominant on the Web.
Meanwhile English content will continue to be produced and consumed not only by the native English speaking audiences but also by International audiences, particularly the cultural and technical elites. The quality of content in English will continue to far surpass that of content in Chinese.
I was expecting better insight from the man who leads Google.
I'd like to know how Chinese will dominate the web when most of it is off limits to them...
Even large online game companys use separate servers just for china - because of sensorship issues.
Eve online for example has one worldwide server for everyone in the world in which thousands of players all play the same game. but they had to create a separate server *cut off from the world* which requires a chinese citizen ID number to play.
How many people play on the world wide server? 40,000 to 50,000 peak. The chinese one? 3,000.
Most of google searches that offend chinese sensor's tastes are blocked, and even movies are heavily edited.
In short: how can they dominate the web when they can't even access a large majority of it?
"It's because of this fundamental shift towards user-generated information that people will listen more to other people than to traditional sources. Learning how to rank that "is the great challenge of the age." "
I agree, already we are seeing this shift inside organisations as well as on the internet as a whole. The move to Enterprise 2.0.
We are just beginning to work on this problem at http://binaryplex.com for Enterprise content which is a slightly different problem field - Enterprises have a lot better internal reputation and trust mechanisms for a start; I can usually work out who said something in a reliable way which is a first step to measuring their reputation.
The scale of this problem on the internet is huge - before you get to reputation, you need to know what their interests are (@ChrisSaad could be right, it's the dawning of APML!) but also reliable identity, real-time and other factors to measure reputation and opinion. It will take a combination of efforts and someone like a Google with their resources to make a major dent in this for the broader internet.
Thanks for the summary - a very interesting 6 minutes.
Don Ward worries about building infrastructure as in fiber-optics. My hunch is that it's more likely to go satellite for ubiquity. I also suspect a buncha stuff is going to happen we have no clue about. Who would have imagined the i-phone 10 yrs ago?
I Think Geo tags and iphones will see off laptops home pc
Langue will just develope "like" it as with sms - but ye a think Google will still be ahead and microsoft will be second
I'm never impressed with Schmidt's predictions or analysis. These do nothing to make me change my opinion.
These are "ruler" based predictions, you take a trend and you straight-line it out. Projecting the present into the future is never a good idea.
Everyone is misreading the implications of this Chinese content issue.
It doesn't matter that the internet will be dominated by Chinese-language content. We don't use the "whole" internet. We only use what directly appeals to our culture, language, and sensibilities which is a tiny sliver of a fraction of available content. More Chinese content does not mean less english content, any more than more chinese people means fewer Americans.
This isn't going to directly impact the typical American web surfer. This is a larger concern for Google because they cannot avoid dealing with the growing Chinese content and remain a relevant international force in searches.
The growth of Chinese content is overstated for the simple reason that the CCP will not allow the free exchange of ideas. As a participant in the Communist Party's effort to police the web, Google should know this.
The Chinese population accounts for half the Internet users in Asia and nearly 25% of the world's Internet users. And that's despite only having an Internet penetration of 25.3%. During the last 9 years, China experienced an Internet user growth rate of 1,402%. Right now, the Internet penetration in developed countries has already reached its peak - most developed countries have Internet adoption rates of over 70% already. That means that non-English speaking nations are going to play a much bigger role in shaping the future of the Internet because they make up most of the world population. Given the size of China's population and the sheer number of young people in the country, it simply has to be expected that a huge volume of web content will eventually come from China.
This doesn't mean that we're going to have to learn Mandarin to use the Web. It just means that the number of Chinese websites will eventually outnumber the number of English websites - that alone will make Chinese the dominant language of the Internet. The Chinese aren't going to use English on their websites, because most of their people can't speak English and many of those who can speak it can't actually read and write English well enough to use it.
There might be more Chinese language content...but ICANN has not even approved Mandarin in web addresses yet...So like so many other "in 5 years" predictions..I am betting this one will fall flat, maybe in 15 years, and by then, I would hope the ability of systems to translate language in real time will make whatever language you type in moot.
Yeah because Chinese is so easy to learn. There's not even one language of "Chinese". Mandarin anyone? Plus some other forms of it. A lot of the Chinese are illiterate anyway because their language is insane to learn. It's incredibly complicated. Japanese would make more sense to me. They are even slowly changing over to Roman letters or "romanji".
Please w/ this dumb China is going to take over everything. China is only interested in China. It's a bunch of crap and people have been telling me this for YEARS. Shut up.
Also it's pretty hard to "dominant" the web when people can barely control P2P.
I'm amazed at the arrogance all one has to do is look at the Chinese banking sites to see what's coming...I have yet to visit a site that didn't come up in at least 5 languages translation as simple as a click on their site...the Chinese language is not a barrier...
China already has the pipes...the U.S. is lagging behind in speed...didn't anyone here watch the Olympics...as far as consumer day to day use of the net...the U.S. is kind of behind...
Them chinks is takin over the interwebs! ima grab ma gun and wait for em to come thru ma screen!
Interesting to see the changes Google is talking about. I am not sure of Chinese language content however. Purely from inter-operability perspective english should continue to dominate the content.
Good post Marshall.
"...the great challenge of the age... It's because of this fundamental shift towards user-generated information that people will listen more to other people than to traditional sources. Learning how to rank that is the great challenge of the age."
Indexing real-time user generated information and distributing said info around the globe almost instantly to those that want to listen to it, when they want to listen to it, where they want to listen to it and how they want to listen to it (and without charging for it)... hmmm... that's a tough one.
Someone will figure it out! I just hope it's not the loudest voice that wins. I hope it's some kid from the middle of nowhere.
I don't see the internet changing much at all with exception faster access, and more readily public access. I think all this tech and internet stuff will simply be used more on other devices besides computers or phones. What's next for online communications...a Real Time, Ajax based, Twitter, email application that notifies us when someone thinks about us? Will Google be caching a comment while this is being typed? Will FriendFeed tell my Mom about this comment before I can go to the bathroom?
I say watch your TV's, DVD's, home security, and even your fridge. Appliances are starting to connect now, and
sooner or later people are going to expect TV's to do the things are computers do online. But this all leads to what I have been mistakenly forecasting for years...voice activated everything. Computer...TV On!
如果五年后的互联网内容将来归中文，咱们从今天开始！
@ Lyn: Pretty much everyone in China speaks Mandarin, alongside a local language. They have a 90%+ literacy rate (the 10% illiterates will be almost all from isolated farming communities).
Google have made a big mess in China already, so I'd take Schmidt's words with a large pinch of salt. They've basically failed due to an ignorance of the culture there, and so you shouldn't take any predictions they make seriously.
Chinese will form a significant part of the web material, but it won't be read much outside of the borders.
The history of never having freedom of speech/press in the country means that the rest of us won't be missing much.
(Comment 29 was intended for easy translation using translate.google.com. Get used to using it!)
RE " These are "ruler" based predictions, you take a trend and you straight-line it out. Projecting the present into the future is never a good idea"
I agree with Tom on this. In fact all Schmidt is doing is paraphrasing what he worries about. What about:
- identity management
- (your) content management
- security management
- information management
- 'we didn't see that coming' management
Someone will break through with something in at least one of those.
Does this mean that China will become more democratic or we will become more authoritarian?
If China dominates the web and remains a dictatorship we have lost the war of ideas.
Cisco and Google help Chinese police round up dissidents. Will they use their expertise on the rest of us.
好吧皇帝，如果你这样说。
I think the technology will begin to disappear. Computers will be less visible since they will be embedded in just about everything. Screens will show up everywhere with the ability to validate your login to access your data.
Most everything will be served from a cloud so you will be able to access your ebook, audio book, recipe, movie, file from any device that is connected to the internet.
Social networks will feed channels of content to you and you will feed what you are interested in to those who are connected with you.
Without a doubt though, your hub will be your own website/gateway/portal where your channels of communication will originate and terminate.
In 5 years, the web will be about controlling your own brand and your own experience. Advertising will evolve to more of a discovery through relationship model than pitch and push.
Semantics and Structured Data will begin reward those who are willing to play by the rules to be found much easier that those who do not.
Filtering and sorting will probably be as important as search because some of the best discoveries in life are usually the result of something you are not searching for.
Discovery engines will evolve to help people tap into a need by relating experiences with related products, services and events. (Just finishing a great Hemingway novel might make you a great prospect for a fly fishing trip to Spain, a night out on the town at a local tavern or a desire to watch For Whom The Bell Tolls with Gary Cooper.)
Great article! I am looking forward to the full 45 minute interview.
Ha ha, Google Language Tools translated Kaiser Kuo's "Kaiser" as "the Emperor" in my preceding comment.
Nice post, Marshal.
I'm not in the least surprised.
I lecture students from some of China's leading universities and while this is a generalisation, they adopt and mash up, and their general knowledge about the West and tech is not reciprocated the other way. Reasons of course; again this is a perception.
Here I'm giving an undergrad class a task after a forty minute accelerated lecture. What is the future of the web?
Regarding broadband speeds, although the word has already been appropriated, the concept of Outernet - the net on everywhere - has been a constant theme for me, written up on Apple Pofiles.
Most likely our ambitions will run alongside these new variables, but I'd imagine there's some furious modeliing and trend extrapolation going on.
Was it John McHale that said: "The future of the past is in the future. The future of the present is in the past. The future of the future is the present".
Should that read the future ic Chinese?
Learn your Chinese language now so you will be ready in five years time.
dominated by Chinese-language? That will require a lot of time to learn the language. As so many chinese people are learning English, I belive, English or a simpler English will still be the domiating language on internet.
Of course this shift has to do in large measure from sheer numbers of net usage
Agree on pretty much all points but the first – China is the world's largest English-speaking country, with their systemic emphasis on English-language education and content only growing. Schmidt is dead wrong on this one – yes, content originating from China will prevail in 5 years, but it will be in English.
Never trust people with a tie who predicts what has already happened by being the first to perceived it in the rear-view mirror.
Hi,
New gurus will replace old ones. Google is only one of them, but for the moment the most efficient for search on the web.
Nobody knows what will happen with climate changes. Asia is particularly threatened by natural disasters.
Badly intentioned people will be able to fake on social networks and they would "make" our opinion.
In such an information flow, we will need to set limits and to find a way to control legality without hurting personal liberty.
Karin
Er, mobile?
FFS.
I wonder what Steve Case thinks?
Mb or MB?
To everyone saying that the Chinese population will write in English. Huh? No they won't. They will write in the language they're most comfortable in (for you it's English, right?), which for them will be Chinese.
Content will predominately be local, and in Chinese (Mandarin if video/audio). Translation software will allow you to do much of the work, but it won't be seamless for some time. Also thinking of all the dubbing/subtitling that alot of new content will have to undergo. Text translation is easier than audio/video, and a/v is become a larger chunk of content.
What WILL happen though, is that people that can read/speak Chinese will have access to more content than those that don't. That will put these Chinese readers at a great advantage, since among those that currently use the internet are probably the most educated, and therefore the most likely to know English, they will have access to a much greater part of the internet (provided it's not 100% filtered out for them).
1. Translation will be a major factor so it won't matter what language you speak/read/write. 2. All content is user-generated when you stop to think about it.
中文 vs English
In 5 years.. I would bet on 99 to 1 on the second!
(And this is comming from a Portuguese native speaker)
我会讲中文!
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