Google boss eyes the future

Google CEO Eric Schmidt has acknowledged that providing applications and other services to business customers will be an important strategy for maintaining growth of the company.

Speaking at a press event in Paris on Tuesday Schmidt responded to a question on how Google intends to maintain its phenomenal growth rates when the stream of ad revenues from old media to new media, which has sustained the company so far, begins to plateau.

He said: "Small businesses and universities are likely to become a significant business for Google as [they] use our leverage in terms of sales and infrastructure."

Google owes its present position to building mass-market applications - search, most notably - but in the last two years it has begun to focus on more business-targeted applications and devices, such as the Google Search Appliance, Google Mini and more recently Google Apps Premier Edition.

Despite acknowledging that it is increasingly looking to businesses as potential customers, Schmidt denied claims that the company is taking on Microsoft. He said: "We keep saying we are not doing that and no one believes me. We don't position them as competitive - it is a sharing paradigm."

In a wide-ranging question and answer session with more than 120 journalists from across Europe, Schmidt was quizzed on a range of subjects, including his reaction to the departure of the chief executive of Yahoo!, Terry Semel. He said: "Terry and I started at the same time and we got to know each other well. He really did an excellent job and I am sure Yahoo! people will miss him."

The Google boss was asked whether he had any advice for Semel's replacement, Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang, but Schmidt refused to be drawn: "It would be very presumptive of me to give advice to Jerry - he is a very smart guy."

Andrew Donoghue writes for ZDNet UK