In recent conversation with Salesforce CEO Google Chairman has stated that “Steve Jobs gave the best performance by a CEO in 50 years, maybe 100 years. He not only built Apple once, but twice. Jobs resigned from his position as Apple’s CEO last week.
“It’s certainly the best performance of a CEO in 50 years,” Schmidt said of Jobs. “We’ve all benefited from the tremendous innovation at Apple. And I say this as a very proud former board member atApple.”
Schmidt was on Apple’s board until Android came in the way and started competing with iOS, causing a major conflict for the then Google CEO. He did say that he was proud to be on the board of Apple in the past. When asked about the differences between the ‘Steves,’ (Steve Jobs and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer), Schmidt quipped, “there are differences in ability.”
As for what will be hot in the future, Schmidt says definitively: the next generation of leaders and startups to emerge will involve mobile, local, and social. He explains that we’ve exhausted the limits of the PC as a platform, the future will be mobile first.
He also recalled his days at Sun when nearly two decades ago young innovators were developing systems that would now be called cloud computing.
He explained that light, less complicated systems are creating environments where enterprises no longer have to spend millions of dollars and wait several years of development cycles for innovation to take hold. New cloud and mobile technologies, he said, have “wiped out” that idea.
Schmidt said technology evolved in four phases. First was basic connectivity, followed by connection and publishing. Later, the application phase took hold, and now the industry is entrenched in the social and personal phase of technology.
