According to the Hollywood Reporter when asked for a prediction on where the Web is heading Schmidt told a panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland: “I will answer very simply that the internet will disappear.”
The Internet’s presence will become so all-encompassing that we won’t even be aware that it’s there, The Google executive chief said.
He said: “There will be so many IP addresses … so many devices, sensors, things that you are wearing, things that you are interacting with that you won’t even sense it … It will be part of your presence all the time. Imagine you walk into a room, and the room is dynamic. And with your permission and all of that, you are interacting with the things going on in the room.”
Schmidt said the result would be “highly personalised, highly interactive and very, very interesting”.
Schmidt also spoke about the issue of market dominance following the European Union’s long-running investigation into Google’s apparent monopoly of the search engine market.
He said the rise of apps on the smartphone was leading to “a future reordering of dominance”.
He said: “All bets are off at this point as to what the smartphone app infrastructure is going to look like … I view that as a completely open market at this point.”
