Business 2.0 has an interview with Eric Schmidt, the former Sun and Novell executive who is Google's chief executive. He didn't give much away, but John Battelle did raise the issue of whether Google saw itself as a portal -- because if looked at as a portal, it looks pretty weak.
OK, so does that mean Google's a portal? Because if you think of it that way, as Terry Semel [of Yahoo] recently pointed out, it ranks as one of the smaller ones.
Well, if I can be obnoxious --
Please.
You're using a tired model of looking at corporate behavior. You're looking at us based on market share for technologies and ideas that were invented 10 years ago. A much better way to ask that is to say, Are the things that we're doing consistent with the mission of the company? We're not in the portal business, we're in the business of making all the world's information accessible and useful. We never have the conversation that you just asked. The test that I apply -- and we do this every day, 70/20/10 -- is to ask how a feature will extend the core, the adjacent, or the innovative stuff to fulfill our mission. That's the sort of drug that we all take, and it works really quite well. So it may very well be that what you said is correct, and it may not matter very much.
The 70/20/10 is the Google rule for allocating time. Schmidt says: "We spend 70 percent of our time on core search and ads. We spend 20 percent on adjacent businesses, ones related to the core businesses in some interesting way. Examples of that would be Google News, Google Earth, and Google Local. And then 10 percent of our time should be on things that are truly new. An example there would be the Wi-Fi initiative."
