Too often innovation is centered on creating the next new thing rather than innovating around the most commonly used apps and usages. Like accounting. Or spreadsheets. Or calendars. Schmidt gets at this well – and the need to make whatever you do mobile. Killer points.
“Companies are about sharing,” Schmidt said. “One of the new things in the last five years about the web is that it enables sharing-sensitive apps.”
He continued, “I think of calendars as incredibly boring, but I’m wrong, calendars are incredibly interesting because they’re incredibly shared. So from a computer science perspective, all of a sudden we have our top engineers who want to build calendars. I’m going, what’s wrong with you guys? But in fact it’s a very interesting example. Spreadsheets are similar, the most interesting spreadsheets are highly, highly interlinked, something I didn’t know, and was not possible with the previous technology — Microsoft technology made it very difficult because they were not built in that model.”
Schmidt also recommended to the executives present that “You should always put your best team on your mobile app that enables your service. The answer should always be mobile first.”