Blog | Silex Technologies, India

If you enter the words “what will the web look like in 5 years” into Google, the top two links returned by the search engine take you to a speech about the future of the Internet given by Google CEO Eric Schmidt last week at an technology analysts conference in Orlando, Florida.

Cynics might say that this is, indeed, the future. In five years, they would tell us, the monstrously profitable and popular Google search-engine – which already controls 77 per cent of the American market – will be so dominant that every request will feed back not only advertisements sold by Google but also advertisements for Google itself.

Schmidt, of course, didn’t quite it put it this way. According to him, in five years time, a real-time, broadband intensive, video and app-centric web will be overrun by Chinese-language content. No surprises there, especially since he wrapped up his prophesy in the orthodoxy of the social web, arguing that user-generated networked information would increasingly replace professionally created content as the backbone of the online knowledge economy.

But what Schmidt failed to address is what Google will look like in 2015. That’s the $150 billion question that Eric Schmidt could probably answer. And, of course, it’s a question that he will never address, at least not in public or on a YouTube video.