Q&A with Google CEO hints at strategy

After having read this Q&A with Google Inc.(NASDAQ:GOOG) CEO Eric Schmidt, I am convinced that the company he leads still wants to become the largest advertising network in the world in all channels that it can, even though it was not mentioned in the interview at all. The largest question is how successful its ambitions can end up being outside the web search market. That's a billion-dollar question, my friends.

Google's Eric Schmidt talks quite a bit about how Google's "Google Apps" will take on a portion of the Microsoft Office crowd (in effect, becoming a larger competitor than it already is) along with how Google is going to use YouTube in the future for running advertising around certain socially-networked video files (not clips, which are limited in length).

When Schmidt says the following in response to Google being called a "one trick pony" by Microsoft Corp.'s (NASDAQ:MSFT) CEO Steve Ballmer, something has to be read into it: "But there are some new revenue models on the horizon. The most interesting is probably Google Apps, where we're already beginning to get some significant enterprise deals."

Will Google Apps really bring in that much enterprise revenue in the future? Unless Google gets quite a few large companies using it with a decent subscription model, I don't see Google Apps being anywhere near what Google pulls in with web search advertising. It probably does not need to be that way -- yet.

One thing is for sure -- Google is one of the better companies in recent memory that can say quite a lot about what it does and where it is going without spilling many beans on specific strategies.