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The Olive Branch Extended to Mobile Phone Groups by Google’s Chief Executive

Eric Schmidt, the Chief Executive of Google, extended the olive branch out to the mobile phone industry by speaking for the first time at the Mobile World Congress. “I feel very, very strongly that we depend on successful businesses for the operators globally and I disagree that we are trying to turn the operators into dumb pipes.” – Eric Schmidt, Google Chief Executive
He went on to talk about the need of more advanced and sophisticated networks and the fact that Google will not be investing in any broad scale infrastructure. He further stated that they are going to have the operators do it.
After the conclusion of the meeting he wanted to make very clear that the involvement of Google on the mobile scene is one to make the operators money, not to take it out of their pockets.
Schmidt talked about how almost all of the most interesting operator growth is now coming from the mobile data and that not just Google but the operators are growing due to the explosion in usage.
From the perspective of Google they do recognize that the operators have very hefty fixed costs and that they have made bandwidth purchases that are more limited in nature so they aren’t trying to run roughshod over that specific principle.
On the contrary Google talks about that a large majority of operators are telling them that they should actually be building applications that will help with sales of higher speed services that so much money is being spent on. Google hopes to turn things into a very symbiotic relationship.
Schmidt talked about that himself and Google don’t have problems with network operators trying to get back investment dollars by doing deals with content providers or revenue sharing in return for proving guaranteed connections for services with one of those services being HD video. He did however invoke the concept of net neutrality and when asked if Google would pay he replied simply, “The answer is we wouldn’t.”
The comments stemmed from a warning by the Vodafone Chief Executive that the currently fierce debate in the United States over net neutrality would hamper any revenue raising attempts from the content providers.
The Vodafone Chief talked about how network companies should be allowed to be able to make deals with the content companies that want to ensure a specific level of service quality for users by dealing up and down the value chain.
“So network operators, content owners, application owners should be able to freely deal and we should try and have competition in all segments.”
It is being promoted by those within the industry that a holistic view of the entire value chain should be taken and that any rules put in place should make sure that it fosters completion at every single level.
The end result should be that with the continued efforts by Google and others and the strides that are being made within the industry that the end user is going to keep getting more and more options. So in the end the consumer wins.

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This entry was posted on Friday, February 19th, 2010 at 3:35 pm by Matt Heman and is filed under Cell Phone Applications. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.