Google CEO Steps to the Mike; Battelle Quizzes MSN Live Labs Man
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Written By Reprise Media | April 7, 2006 | Share This
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Top men in search are letting loose with words this week. Google CEO Eric Schmidt made a speech last night to the Economic Club of Chicago, recapped in a post at VC Confidential (via Threadwatch). And John Battelle corralls a refreshingly candid Gary Flake (formerly of Overture and Yahoo!), the founder and director of MSN’s Live Labs.
Schmidt used his speil to stress the importance of targeted advertising in a world populated by the ever-distracted, and that untargeted styles of marketing used in media like TV and telephones would be increasingly irrelevant as consumers use the likes of TiVo and ‘do not call’ lists to filter out unwanted ads. Instead, he touted the consumers comprising online social communites as an essential marketing goal. Schmidt also noted that the collective knowledge of such groups is also largely untapped; he spoke about attempts to mine the internet’s wisdom of crowds, including their predictive abilities - for instance, certain hedge funds have been delving into chat rooms to suss out stock assessments.
Over on Battelle’s blog, it didn’t take much coaxing to get Gary Flake to open up. He talked about search architecture (”64 bit systems pave the way for entirely new forms of relevance that look at how pages relate to one another”), owned up to MSN’s past mistakes (”What didn’t I like about our old UI? Where do I begin? There is so much to choose from…to be blunt, it sucked”), and the pros and cons of Microsoft’s culture. Flake’s not shy about cheerleading for his colleagues (”these are simply wonderful people in every way”), nor about taking a hard, self-critical look about how MS operates:
“I don’t think MS is particularly clear in how it communicates things to the outside world. I also think that MS often makes mistakes by trying - wait for it - too hard. Specifically, instead of doing one thing and nailing it, we’ll sometimes do six slightly duplicative things in parallel - each being slightly below critical mass - which can create confusion inside and outside of MS until we’ve had time to sort things out better. So, yes, I get frustrated at times. So it goes. For me, frustration is a biological signal that means I should try harder, which is a good and helpful thing.”
Related: MSN Mad About Labs
Topics: Interviews |