General Session - Internet: The New DNA
Moderator: David Kirkpatrick, Fortune
Martin Sorrell, WPP
Ray Ozzie, Microsoft
Pierre Omidyar, Ebay
Marissa Mayer, Google
Dave started off by looking for one of his panelists to consider whether the Internet is really a separate thing, or if it’s such a bedrock connectivity capability, do we even need to think about it? Ozzie, now Microsoft’s chief technologist, talked about the legacy thinking we have about all of our computing and communication devices; for example, the current thinking about, say, cell phones is that they’re connected to the phone network. “I think of all of these as experience delivery devices,” he said. Mayer responded about new ways that people are blurring the lines between their devices, such as the second most popular site in Japan, guyao.jp, which simply streams broadcast television over the Internet.
Omidyar focused on the value of the Internet for connecting people. “This is the first time in human history that we have a technology that enables communication and rich interaction between people all over the planet…And the only real progress that has happened is when people get together in groups,” said Omidyar. “Now…people can get together…and move things forward on their own agenda. That is a fundamentally new environment we find ourselves in.”
Sorrell, head of the second largest ad agency in the world, and whose Group M subsidiary buys about 23% of media around the world, said that Internet advertising this year will be 13-14% of the UK market - which is more than newspaper advertising. “The biggest impact that this will have is on measurability. We will be able to track very accurately,” he said. That means the end of the old adage, “I know that half my ad spending is useless. I just don’t know which half.” Mayer believes it’s possible to take it a step further, and link advertising to purchasing behavior. “What you’d really like is for people to pay cost-per-acquisition,” she said. “And if you could track all the way through that process, it would really help.”
Omidyar turned the conversation away from the monitoring of behavior, to supporting it. “There’s tremendous value in enabling users to do what they want to do. It’s easy to have the feeling, well, we’re just running the control panel back here…. The real successes have come from giving people the tools they need to achieve their own needs, their own ambitions.”
Kirkpatrick asked, "Is the U.S. doing enough on broadband?" Ozzie’s response: “I think the U.S. is making steady progress…[but] I would like it to be much broader, I would like it to be accessible to anyone, worldwide…We’ve just got to keep investing.” In a later question, Mark Anderson of Strategic News Service took Ozzie to task, saying that our broadband standing in the world is miserable, and getting worse.
Turning back to Mayer, Kirkpatrick quoted highly-visible billionaire Mark Cuban as saying, “’All that Google can really do is search.’ Is there more to Google than search?” Mayer claimed, “There’s still a lot more we can do in search.” But beyond that, she believes that social networking is most interesting, with the opportunity to leverage community interaction as a platform for other applications. “You can imagine having a lot more context around people, such as seeing vacation photos and knowing more about what people were doing.” She also pointed to video and other new advertising opportunities.
There was a lot of talk about individual usage of the Net, but if it’s really the new infrastructure, I would have liked to hear from Ozzie about device-to-device interaction, which will likely pass human usage of the Net in a matter of years. The Internet isn’t just our new DNA, it’s the new DNA of our devices.
gB
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