Eric Schmidt Thinks Most TVs Will Have Google TV In Six Months. Is He Nuts?
by Matt Rosoff on Dec 8, 2011, 1:32 AM
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 Google chairman Eric Schmidt spoke at Le Web conference yesterday, where he made a wildly optimistic statement about Google TV, As cited by PaidContent.org (and many other sources), Schmidt said: By the summer of 2012, the majority of the televisions you see in stores will have Google TV embedded in it. The majority? More than 50%? By May 2012? That's crazy talk. The first version of Google TV was such a flop that Logitech saw more returns than sales in the first quarter of 2011. So what's going on here? Schmidt was probably looking at the unlikely rise of Android smartphones from zero to majority market share in less than three years. The new version of Google TV is built on the latest version of Android, and developers can build apps for it in much the same way they build Android apps for phones and tablets. But Android took off in smartphones because of the iPhone. Think back to 2008, when it was clear that the iPhone was not only going to be a hit, but was a huge leap forward from every other call phone on the market. Competing cell phone makers and carriers who didn't want to play by Apple's rules were desperate to catch up. Android gave them a quick and relatively inexpensive way to do that. But there's no sudden threat to drive TV makers into implementing Google TV. Unless Schmidt knows more about Apple's TV plans than the rest of us. If Apple's iTV really comes out in 2012 as Apple analyst Gene Munster says it will, and it's really as revolutionary as the IPhone was, other TV makers may indeed look to Google for a savior, just like the cell phone makers did a few years ago. It seems really unlikely that this will happen in the next six months. But three years from now? Maybe not so crazy after all. Please follow SAI on Twitter and Facebook.
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