Former
Google CEO Eric Schmidt has once again named social media as the one that got away. Speaking on In Good Company, the podcast hosted by Norges Bank Investment Management CEO Nicolai Tangen, the 71-year-old said Google briefly led the space during his time in charge. Losing that lead, he said, was his biggest mistake as CEO.
It is a regret Schmidt has voiced before. He ran Google from 2001 to 2011, and weeks after handing the top job to co-founder Larry Page, he admitted he had seen the Facebook threat coming. “I clearly knew I had to do something and I failed to do it,” he said at a tech conference that year. “A CEO should take responsibility. I screwed up.”
“There was a moment when Google was ahead of everybody else in social media. It was fairly short,” Schmidt told Tangen. “I was CEO at the time. I take responsibility for not getting ahead of that. That was a big error.”
Orkut and Google+ were Google’s biggest bets on social media
That early lead belonged to Orkut. Built by Google engineer Orkut Büyükkökten in his 20% time, the invite-only network went live in January 2004, a month before Facebook. In its first few months, more than half its traffic came from the US, with Japan a distant second.
The audience shifted over the years. By 2008, Orkut was among the most visited websites in Brazil and India, two markets where it stayed popular long after users elsewhere had moved on.
Facebook overtook it in India in 2010 and in Brazil in 2012, and the company closed Orkut in September 2014.
Google+ was the bigger, more aggressive attempt. It arrived in June 2011, about three months after Page took over, and drew 10 million users in its first two weeks while still invite-only. That was barely 1% of Facebook’s 750 million users at the time, but the company pushed on, crossing 90 million registered users by January 2012.
Sign-ups never turned into lasting engagement. After a bug exposed data from up to 500,000 profiles, the search giant closed the consumer version of Google+ in April 2019, citing low usage. Smaller efforts such as Buzz and Friend Connect had already been wound down.
Eric Schmidt says being too slow was his biggest personal failing
On the podcast, Schmidt went a step further and pointed the finger at himself rather than the company. “I think that I’m just too slow,” he said. “When I look back, everything was foreseeable. I just didn’t see it soon enough.”
He said he now works in “a world of time compression”, where “the people who beat me saw it quicker than I did”.
AI has only made that pressure sharper. Schmidt told Tangen that AI models take around six months to build and go out of date within five months of release. The next cycle, he said, could be measured in days.
Even so, he does not claim to have fixed the habit. Talking about the AI boom earlier in the same conversation, Schmidt said he is “always not first”. He prefers to wait and see where the curve is heading before he moves.