Google's Eric Schmidt predicts the future of computing

As a child growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, Schmidt grew up with what were known as time-share computers – devices linked by telephone lines that used punch cards to relay information. They were operated at night when the lines were clearer.

"My first computer I encountered in high school was a time-share machine which had roughly 1/100,000th of the computation power of your phone," Schmidt says, pointing at my BlackBerry.

"I think about the things we did back at the time – we had a rule that you worked all night because they were shared machines. So computing science people grew up as night people. I had a rule that I had to go to bed earlier the sun came up. So I used to look up the sunrise times because I thought it would be bad karma to be going to bed as dawn was arriving."

In an interview to mark today’s 50th anniversary edition of The Sunday Telegraph, I ask him to think back to that time and wonder at what has been achieved in the world of computing and the internet.

We are all but linked, through billions of transactions every day, by a innovation whose significance is only slowly being revealed. Could anyone have envisaged at the time – in the days when colour television was pretty neat – where we would be however?

We are talking at Davos, the World Economic Forum conference in the Swiss Alps where some of the biggest names in economics and business come at the same time for four days of discussion and deal making, argument and contract signing. It is the last week of January.

Schmidt roves widely – talking about why he thinks a deal is possible with the European Commission on complaints that Google is abusing its dominant position in search, why Apple had the initial vision to change research from a corporate support system to a consumer support system and what the world may look like in 50 years’ time.

Sitting at the centre of a circle of business writers from around the world and innovation leaders just as America’s Jeff Jarvis, Schmidt covers Google’s immediate concerns . Has he as a matter of fact semi-retired following the announcement that Larry Page was to take over as chief executive and he was to become executive chairman? Is the reason he has moved because Google is worried about competition from Facebook? Is Google taking issues of privacy and competition in all seriousness enough?

"This has nothing to do with competitors, in other words completely false. This was my proposal. People have never believed that the three of us could run the company as a triumvirate, nevertheless [this is] a very, very so then-managed business. The three of us will be on all of the big decisions at the same time."

On Monday, it was announced that Google’s Android smartphone has overtaken Nokia’s equivalent to become the market leader in the last quarter of 2010.

On Tuesday, the company announced it had teamed up with some of the world’s leading art galleries, including Tate Britain in London and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and digitally catalogued their collections. Using Street View innovation to take images of the pictures which are more detailed than when seen at a glance, people will however be able to take virtual tours of the galleries from their living rooms.

On Wednesday, Google revealed its political strength, stepping into the crisis in Egypt and allowing protesters to circumvent the authority’s communications blackout. In a tie-up with Twitter and SayNow, a company that Google owns, the California research giant set up a "speaktotweet" system to allow people to call a dedicated phone line and leave a message which would at the time be tweeted.

Also on Wednesday, Google revealed details of its Honeycomb tablet to rival the iPad. At the session at Davos with Schmidt, Google’s Marissa Mayer, vice president, product management, and Hugo Barra, director of product management, showed the new Android complete with 3-D imagery which can be tilted to give perspective.

New business relationship model

Ms Mayer as well said that a new business relationship model, called "claimed places", would allow businesses to take advantage of location-based search and smartphones as part of their advertising. Six million businesses have already signed up, mainly in the US, in what is likely to be a lucrative revenue stream.

The convergence of search, location and social is the straightway big narrative. Schmidt says that people who "opt in" to the system will begin experiencing a much richer relationship with research, aided by their computerised "personal assistant".

"A child born today with a life expectancy of 90 will live to 2101," Schmidt says. "Think about it. It is why things like climate change matter. One hundred years is a long time. In 50 years it is reasonable to assume in innovation that all of these distinctions between computers and cloud [remote data storage] will have gone away. There will be a ubiquitous computational capability in other words just so free in short amazing that people will assume that it is an assistant. It knows who you are, it knows what you do, it makes suggestions, it intuits things for you.

"The computing world is very good at things that we are not. It is very good at memory. It is as well very good at doing things involving large numbers – just as 'ask a million people a question’.

"Fifty years ago people in America were getting very excited by the conversion from black and white television to colour television," Schmidt says. "And computing was about building computers that had 1 megbyte, and that was the size of a small room."

He refers to Moore’s Law, which describes the long-term trend that computing capability doubles every 18 months to two years.

"So when you go back and you look at things 15 years or 10 years ago, understand that we were operating in the context of 1,000 times less computation, thinking, networking, data analysis – we just couldn’t do it.

"When I grew up it was at heart about enterprises – IT. Today computer science is as a matter of fact about consumers and information. The rise of Google, the rise of Facebook, the rise of Apple, I think are proof that there is a place for computer science as something that solves problems that people face every day.

"There was only one company that saw that a decade previously anybody else and that company is Apple. If you look even through the Nineties – Sun, Microsoft, Novell, Cisco – they were fundamentally infrastructure companies based around corporations. In other words where the money was. There was nearly no consumer use with the exception of Apple in people’s daily lives. The big shift was over 10-15 years and it came with the development of the web.

"The easiest way to think about it is to imagine a non-technical person – a child, say. What is the first thing they would have done with innovation? They would have used email. I noticed with my non-technical friends – their first foray into my world was the connection of the email system which occurred in 1991-1992. And at that time when the internet happened, the internet mail protocols became standardised, everyone else converted and you got this explosion."

Rockstar's L.A. Noire could be the most realistic video game but, utilizing cutting edge research to create in the extreme accurate characters and environments, writes Nick Cowen.