Known for doing wacky stuffs such as bringing out a guide for switching from iPhone to Android, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt recently took out some time out to provide Bloomberg TV his tech predictions for 2014.
According to Schmidt, only one thing is going to dominate headlines in the technology industry in 2014 and it is mobile. "The trend has been that mobile was winning. It's now won," he said in the interview. "There are more tablets and phones being sold than personal computers. People are moving to this new architecture very fast."
"Everyone is going to have a smartphone," predicted Schmidt. According to him, a "new generation of applications" were also about to emerge to fill the changing needs for entertainment and social networking.
In the predictions that he made, apart from mobile, he also noted the "arrival of big data and machine intelligence everywhere". He expects them to be a significant base for new services and their roles in changing "every business globally."
One of the biggest disruptions that Schmidt acknowledged he was unsure about, was the genetics area. "We don't really know what's going to happen" he said. "Advances in DNA sequencing and the ability to have personal genetics records will yield discoveries in cancer treatment and diagnostics over the next year."
Schmidt also acknowledged that the search engine giant may have missed spotting the growing opportunity in social media. "At Google, the biggest mistake I made was not anticipating the rise of the social networking phenomenon," Schmidt said. "Not a mistake we're going to make again. I guess in our defence we were busy working on many other things, but we should have been in that area and I take responsibility for that."
