A short but nice sharing session. But I do not agree with the idea that “biology in the future will be statistical.” As of now, only 5 percent of all biological problems have been solved and we cannot solve the remaining 95 percent using statistics; we need discoveries and innovation, a blend of physics, math, and chemistry.

Schmidt says, “The education system is currently run for the benefit of the adults and not the children.” This is a profound statement, and the suggestion that this should change so benefits depend on outcomes is a welcome one.

Schmidt’s comments on the number of interviews required to make a good hire is also something HR and recruitment folks should take note of.

It is fascinating to hear this man talk!

Agree with Eric’s views, especially on hiring, technology, and education. But I somewhat disagree with Eric’s suggestion that the high-wage German manufacturing and export-based employment model is a better one for countries to experiment with. Most “proven” employment, economic, social security, or welfare models seem to break down when they are applied to higher-population or agrarian countries.

Very timely. His comments on how most of the developers are now focusing on mobile apps first is the future.

Interesting stance on some big topics.

With regard to employment, the emphasis seems constantly to be on youth unemployment, whereas the data in most OECD nations appears to point to a looming crisis in middle-age and senior employment and engagement. This shift is being driven by an aging demographic bulge but also by the velocity and depth of technology change.

The older workers are in danger of being left behind, and importantly for society, their knowledge and experience is not being translated and transported through to the younger generation, resulting in ineffective knowledge transfer but also in a widening of social alienation across age groups. The oldies go off to gated villages with golf courses while youth workers are left to repeat all their mistakes that could have been avoided if there had just been an effective interaction network with seniors.

Mobile and cloud computing are huge developments, as Eric outlines. I just wonder about the form factor of handheld mobile devices—particularly mobile phones and PDAs as opposed to tablets—in terms of their ability to truly support and enable deep Web interaction. I watch people struggling to use the inadequately sized screens to accomplish tasks that are easy on a laptop or home PC. This problem will only grow as bandwidth improvement encourages mobile Web access.

Surely the real breakthrough, and Eric touches briefly on it, will be when voice is empowered to the point where our most powerful natural communication tool is the only interface we require to instruct and represent our needs and wishes to services provided via the Web. I should be able to freeze conversations, recall conversations, rewind and analyze for future use the content of my conversations. I should be able to instruct and obtain services, and provide identification to and from the Internet by simply talking to the Web...no need for texting and typing anymore.

Perhaps Google will morph to become the global telephony provider, and in the process they will redefine what “voice telephony capability” is able to do. Certainly it will be far more than simply providing a telephone-line network for transporting voice and data. A real telephony service provider will be a provider of powerful applications delivered over the network to do so much that many people cannot yet envisage, let alone appreciate. That will be the real breakthrough.

As an educator (I used control charts as feedback on teaching) and the father of two sons who just out into the workforce, I especially liked the joblessness and reforming education vignettes. Eric is right: we’re a dying culture if we don’t fix those. The dig at academia—if all discord, it's a university—is also well taken. You need discord plus deadline. I’ll go check Sal Khan as result. Thank you for presenting this!

He knows what he is talking about and his ideas are breathtakingly simple.

Very compelling insights! I particularly liked Schmidt’s comments on mobile first and big data, both of which have dramatic implications for healthcare–the field that I work in.

It is the combination of these two big trends that promises to transform life sciences and healthcare to such an extent that Google or a similar company can potentially be the largest life sciences company in a few years from now. Moving biology from under microscopic examinations of tumor cells to quantitative modeling of the tumor genome, for example, is a feat that is being made possible by real-time processing of big data. We ran models recently that show that if you are single, earning less than $100,000 a year, and drive an SUV—along with a few other parameters that we were able to get entirely from the public domain—the probability that you are diabetic is north of 76 percent. The approach that Google mastered (correlation is not causality) was the one we employed to get there. Interestingly, none of this data transgressed Privacy of Health Information norms since we did not use health data at all in the model. Harvard’s Nicholas Christakis recently showed obesity can cluster, with the implication that social contagion can cause obesity to be transmitted using sociometric analysis and mathematical techniques. The same techniques can now predict drug abuse, depression, and risky sexual behavior in the case of HIV and AIDS, in a sort of metaphoric extension of “tell me who your friends are, and I will tell you who you are.”

Meanwhile, advances in evolutionary cognitive neurosciences are beginning to show that there is much more to genomics than what we currently understand. The human genome may be but a tiny part of the biome that includes small celled micro-organisms, which are an integral part of what we call “human” and, together, suggest the hologenome (another exponential expansion of data) that we are beginning to unravel.

Schmidt says that most of today’s youth will be working in healthcare. That is a prophetic insight that resonates strongly with me for all these reasons.

Mr. Schmidt really got my attention with his take on “mobile first” and the demise of the content/distribution structure as we currently know it. It is rather interesting that in a sense, it feels like we are making a full circle back to “mainframes” with cloud computing, except we are combining this with these super powerful mobile devices. Is it possible that are setting ourselves up to go through the same “mainframe to PC” cycle all over again?

Talking about strategies, one thing that's on my mind—or for that matter, on everyone’s mind—is social media analytics. Looks like while Google has all the tools, systems, and software that can churn out statistical numbers for your client, what Google needs to do is go one step beyond this and provide actionable intelligence to companies. So instead of providing data to your client, why not go ahead and analyze the data, and provide companies with the intelligence so they can act to compete in business and be more customer-centric.