Schmidt: Enterprise is Google's next opportunity
Google CEO Eric Schmidt in an onstage interview Wednesday at the Gartner Symposium in Orlando, Fla.
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)ORLANDO, Fla.--Eric Schmidt runs a company that earns most of its money from consumers, but the Google chief executive believes business customers are the company's next big opportunity for growth after selling ads.
"Enterprise is a huge priority for the management team and me personally," Schmidt said Wednesday in an onstage interview in the belly of the enterprise technology beast, the Gartner Symposium here. "It's the next big billion-dollar opportunity after our display (ad) business."
Google might not be at the core of every company's operations, but Schmidt has some roots in the information technology community that assembles in force at Gartner Symposium. Before Google, he was chief technology officer at Sun Microsystems and CEO of Novell.
Google has a variety of business-oriented products and services--Postini for security, Checkout for online shopping, a search appliance for in-house search. But the highest profile effort is Google Apps, which in its premium incarnation delivers Gmail and an online office application suite for $50 per user per year.
Schmidt argues there's not so much difference between enterprise and consumer markets as there once was, and the gap is narrowing. Gmail is one example:
"Gmail's growth is accelerating from its current position of users as we seem to be gaining share from everybody else," Schmidt said. "That's a good example of the consumer and enterprise growing together."
And Google is primarily interested in areas where the two worlds collide. "We'll keep trying to find ways to span enterprise and consumer," he said.
When it comes to pricing, Google wants to fund its own work but not charge much. The biggest constraint from customers is feature availability, not price, he said.
"Most of the sales activity is a discussion about strategy. Our prices are so much lower than everybody else's, there's never a price discussion," Schmidt said.
The company considered giving its enterprise applications away for free but rejected the idea, he said.
"We looked at ad-supported enterprise applications and decided most corporations would not be comfortable with random ads showing up on somebody's desktop," Schmidt said.
Schmidt also said the era of the Netbook is arriving--in particular, Netbooks running Google's forthcoming Chrome OS, a browser-based operating system.
With advancements such high-speed networks and browsers that can store data on a local computers and display hardware-accelerated graphics, the PC is growing obsolete, he argued.
"Maybe in a year it'll be possible for procuring a Netbook that costs a factor of five or 10 times cheaper than what you're getting today," he said.
Chrome OS is due to arrive on Netbooks in about a year, he said, reaffirming the existing schedule.
Editor's note: This blog was updated several times during Schmidt's live interview. The final update was published at 2:50 p.m. PDT .
Stephen Shankland writes about a wide range of technology and products, but has a particular focus on browsers and digital photography. He joined CNET News in 1998 and since then also has covered Google, Yahoo, servers, supercomputing, Linux and open-source software, and science. E-mail Stephen, or follow him on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/stshank. 
A phone enterprise users will embrace.
[CNET editors' note: Personal attack deleted]
Does it check availablility and calendaring through Exchange?
Does it link to an Exchange GAL?
Hype machine... no substance, consumer focused, halo brand, "do no evil"... now that is truly funny. When is the last time you heard of a company doing no evil? In the name of profits every company will do whatever it takes to make profit... period. Google like every other company is responsible to its shareholders who are on that a$$ to keep growing profits at any cost... we have seen it with Google in the Book Search deal... we have seen it in a lot of place (HIPAA and the Google's Healthcare Portal strategy which side steps HIPAA to sell private and confidental information to phrma and whoever else wants it...)
Sorry the halo is really horns and the intent is control of information for selling... that model doesn't meet an Enterprises needs no matter what sheep's wool you wear.
And it has a great software keyboard and bigger , higher resolution screen than the iPhone.
Replaceable batteries are also preferred by the enterprise IT.
Are you serious? Google makes almost all of its money selling adds to businesses not consumers. Google has yet to figure out a good way to make money directly from consumers. It is true that their revenue is all based on traffic from consumers, but everything they offer those consumers if free.
It is businesses that use Google Adwords, the bulk of Google's revenue.
- by BIGELLOW October 25, 2009 5:18 PM PDT
- While it is true that Google collects all of its money from businesses, I think the point the article was trying to make (though poorly) is that Google's money is directly tied to the amount of traffic they get from consumers. It is the action of the consumers... viewing their websites... viewing websites with their ads... clicking those ads... that generates the money for Google. If the consumer didn't do these things, Google would not be making the money from businesses at all. Businesses only pay Google when consumers take action.
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(18 Comments)When Google makes moves to make money from the Enterprise, this will directly involve businesses making decisions regarding what tools and services their employees use. So, from a marketing perspective, this is a different process. Now, Google needs to make products and services that businesses want (besides just advertising to consumers).
Google was smart, though... by targeting consumers first... they were able to get these consumers to switch to using Google's products in their workplace, thus forcing the hand of IT in some instances. Some of these consumers also work in IT departments, thus being a built-in marketing tool for the Enterprise. If they had tried tackling the Enterprise market first, they could have still won the battle, but it would have been a much harder battle to fight.