MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Eric Schmidt has a message: Don't let the lava lamps fool you. Google Inc. is serious.
As Google's chief executive, Schmidt presides over a headquarters filled with trinkets, pets, free food and bouncy-ball chairs. But the whimsical workplace belies the company's focus on cold, hard numbers.
Schmidt, 51, oversees operations -- a crucial role as the company hires voraciously to improve the search engine and launch a dizzying variety of products, such as the online spreadsheet program released last week.
Along with founders Larry Page, 34, and Sergey Brin, 33, Schmidt has shepherded the company from a money-losing start-up to an Internet giant with a market value of $117 billion in five years. With their holdings each worth billions of dollars, the three executives draw annual salaries of $1.
But rivals such as Yahoo Inc. and EBay Inc. are teaming up to counter Google, even as it increasingly encroaches on the turf of software powerhouse Microsoft Corp. The federal government has pressed Google and other Internet companies to turn over data on users' e-mail and search habits. Newer programs such as Gmail crash often. And a recent internal review found that Google had failed to invest enough resources in its bread-and-butter product: the search engine.
Schmidt -- a former executive at Novell Inc. and Sun Microsystems Inc. -- met with The Times last week to discuss Google's growth strategy and the competition.
Question: We're seeing so many Internet companies forming alliances: Google invested in AOL last year, Yahoo and EBay recently teamed up, Microsoft is trying hard to strike deals. Is the industry maturing?
Answer: The industry is going to develop as a partnering industry, not as a monopoly industry. It will not end up in a structure with one dominant company. It won't be Google and it won't be Microsoft and it won't be Yahoo. It will be a collection of companies.
It's not going to end up in the PC model that everybody talks about. The reason is because the advertising industry, which monetizes it, is not a single-solution space.
After a hundred years of consolidation, the media industries are down to five mega-media companies. It seems like every day you hear some component is sold or purchased or retargeted and transferred from one large company to another.
That's the more normal structure of large industries. We should expect that should be the eventual structure of this industry.
