Blowback on Eric Schmidt

When Google (GOOG) CEO Eric Schmidt made the keynote speech at the Newspaper Association of America this week, proclaimed the newspaper model a dying hulk, and gave the assembled editors and publishers a bumper crop of advice on how to revive their fortunes, it was perhaps only natural that some in the industry would take umbrage at his chutzpah. Even before Schmidt took to the podium, Wall Street Journal managing editor Robert Thomson denounced Google News as nothing but a parasite sucking the life out of the Fourth Estate. To be precise, he told The Australian, "There is no doubt that certain websites are best described as parasites or tech tapeworms in the intestines of the internet."

And that was from an editor at the relatively staid Wall Street Journal. Here's what journalism professor Tim Luckhurst had to say in the UK Guardian. "Google's conduct is the sort of favour crystal meth does for an addict," he wrote. "Google aggregates stories written by expensive, professional reporters and blithely overlooks how much these people cost to train, hire and deploy. The tiny pittances it remits to news organisations will not pay for a fraction of the political, business, foreign and investigative reporting we are accustomed to. But Google does not care.

"Google's technology is modern, but its rapacious conduct is as old as unfettered market capitalism. It wants to fill its coffers at minimum cost just as Victorian factory owners wanted to manufacture without trade unions and statutory working hours. It must not be allowed to get away with a ruthless economic model that will destroy ethical, fact-based journalism."

Got that, Mr. Schmidt? You're handing out meth bindles to the luckless chumps who trudge into your dark satanic mills. When you're not busy latching your suckers onto our colons.

Over at Silicon Alley Insider, Joe Weisenthal was prompted to ask whether Schmidt even deserves any credit for Google's success, or was just lucky enough to get a gig at a company that was already destined for greatness. Wiesenthal examines six areas in which Schmidt had significant influence and concludes that unless he does something particularly clever to transform Google in the down times, history will judge him nothing more than an executive placeholder who had a hell of a good ride.

For all its success, Google is still just a one-trick pony, selling ads next to search results, and to a lesser extent blogs and Web sites. Every other attempt to create new and lucrative Web products has flopped, and Google has spent a fortune in the process. YouTube, Dodgeball, Jaiku, the partnerships with MySpace and AOL—none of these ventures has paid off, especially when compared to the billions the company sank into them. The only reasonably successful venture Google can point to is DoubleClick, a display ad company that had already taken off by the time Google bought it. "After 8 years on the job, Eric has not yet built a meaningful revenue-generating product that didn't exist when he got there," Weisenthal writes.