Erich Schmidt at CES

It's interesting what different writers took away from Eric Schmidt's talk at SES. It's like blind men describing an elephant.

Here are just a few examples:

ZD Net's Donna Bogatin ins obsessed with the answer to the question she managed to ask Schmidt: Are Google's ads too expensive? With convoluted logic she argues that without set prices, the ignorant public is bidding them up too high.  Wall Street brokers used the same argument against Google's Open IPO: Don't worry your pretty little heads, we're experts, we'll set the fair price for you. What these folks don't understand is that Google believes in the Wisdom of Crowds. So do I. A crowd does a better job of setting a fair price (among other things) than any small group of experts. In the case of AdSense this is a straight matter of supply and demand.  People are paying more for ads because they think it's worth it. It's the fairest system possible. If Google's competitors start getting a bigger percentage of ads, Google's prices will drop. That's as it should be.

Donna also weighed in with a rant about Google's secrecy when it comes to its measurements of click fraud. I think Donna is anti-Google. Fair enough.

China View was interested in the fact that Schmidt said governments were the worst threat to privacy. The site has a .cn domain and is published in several languages, including two Chinese dialects, but Google News directed me to the English .com domain. I don't know enough Mandarin to tell if the same articles appears in the Chinese version. But the English version is a bit of subversion through innuendo. Schmidt's speech seems primarily focused on the U.S. government until  he says, as quoted by China View, "The more interesting question is something where a government, not just the U.S. government but maybe a non-U.S. government would try to get in Google's computer systems."

Search Engine Journal covered everything.