Google Instant: Is Eric Schmidt The Next Steve Jobs?

Google has built an empire on the open web. But suddenly there are signs the company is shifting toward a more insular application-based future like the one Apple is built on. What’s going on here?

“Wired” recently made waves with its August cover story asserting “the web is dead.” Some argue that this is overstating and oversimplifying the case, but certainly a new internet landscape is in fact taking shape—one based on the insular offerings of applications rather than the open fluidity of surfing the web on a personal computer.

This would seem to spell trouble for Google, whose primary value has been in connecting all points on the open web, serving as a lubricant to provide the very fluidity that is the web’s most defining feature.

But over the last years, Google began to shift its center of gravity—quietly at first, and then quite loudly, with CEO Eric Schmidt’s kenote speech today in Berlin marking a particularly voluble moment in the transition.

Last year marked Google’s first foray into the hardware market with the Android phone, the first real sign that it was embracing the captive audience that comes with proprietary hardware and the applications it runs.

Then recently it was reported that Google was aiming to launch a competitor to iTunes by Christmas, then yesterday the company announced plans to launch Google TV next year. Then came the kicker: today’s speech on the future of search.

“Schmidt says he believes that in the future, your mobile phone will quickly and automatically deliver personalized information to you based on your physical location and interests,” reports the NY Times.

“When I walk down the street,” Schmidt relayed in his speech, “I want my smartphone to be doing searches constantly – ‘did you know?’, ‘did you know?’, ‘did you know?’, ‘did you know?’.”

What this means is that the future of search may look a lot more like the way you interact with iTunes than the way you currently interact with Google.

You currently use Google as a conduit to hop around to all kinds of different locations on the wide-open web. As mobile devices get more sophisticated and take up more and more of our time spent on personal computing, as most studies suggest they will, the one-on-one relationship of the consumer to the application may start to overshadow the infinite web of relationships an individual confronts on the World Wide Web.

To me, the new developments at Google signify that, like all great companies and great executives, Google will adapt to the times. No matter how big and ubiquitous they may be, if Google can stay sensitive to what consumers want Eric Schmidt just may find his way into our hearts and establish the kind of brand loyalty long reserved for Apple.

Eric Schmidt may be the new Steve Jobs.