TelecomRedux: What is your role within Google?

Shannon Maher: In addition to my role as site director here in London I am also responsible for the co-ordination of mobile engineering throughout Google. In that role I have people working for me in eight different locations on mobile technologies.

TR: What are the differences between the fixed and mobile worlds?

SM: If you look at the problems and challenges of the fixed and mobile world they are very different. The information that we might want to bring to the mobile phone is significantly different than in the desktop world. The content that is targeted and authored to be consumed by the mobile user is very different. The method of delivery and the constraints of the device have a significant impact.

TR: The display is the obvious one. You are talking about going from a TV size screen to a 2.5-inch screen.

SM: This is the obvious issue but there is also getting access to and understanding users, carriers and handset manufacturers. Many carriers for example are pursuing the walled garden approach through their portals, which makes indexing this information impossible without a relationship.

TR: I can understand that as the operators need Google and its global brand, you can do things that they can’t do alone.

SM: Together we think we can deliver a lot of value to the end user. There are certainly some aspects of these relationships that require mutual accommodation. We take a very deep partnering stance and we are working with the major carriers around the world to ensure that their customers and our customers can get access to our value and that it is valuable to all parts of the value chain.

TR: The number of mobile phone users now exceeds two billion, one third of the people on the planet, but probably half the people on the planet use Google on a regular basis. What is Google’s motivation for addressing the mobile market so strongly?

SM: There are a lot of answers to that question. The first answer is that we believe that it is valuable to be able to give people access to information that they need and desire at all times and mobile is all about accessibility and being always on and always connected. We also believe that information consumption is moving from the desktop to the mobile world, and over time this migration will continue - although it will never completely go that way because there is something very valuable in having a deep immersive experience such as you have on a desktop.

The value in delivering specific, needed, desired information at a point in space where I have my mobile and I really need to know something is often more valuable than delivering the same info to the desktop. It is much more valuable for a user to be able to find a police station or a taxi rank when he is out and about rather than having to research it in advance. There is a different value equation in the delivery of information to our end users via the mobile phone.

There is also a whole different class of things mobile users want. In addition to information they are looking for media like ringtones, video clips, full track downloads, that kind of thing. The consumption of media is moving to personal devices and people want to discover what might be available for their phones - media, games etc. So that is a whole different class of information which people want access to. It is our job to deliver this to them. Our mission statement says what we want to do is to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. And mobile is a way for us to do that. It is not the only way but it is an important way.

TR: What about the screen size issue?

SM: We have the ability to take the data that was authored and meant to be consumed on the desktop and re-deliver it in a form that is suitable for the mobile screen. Even the data that is fairly broad and large we can format for the mobile. So we have access to this huge amount of information - more or less the entire web - on our mobile phones. We have this content, we have public mobile content, and in many cases working with our operator partners we have proprietary content from the walled garden and we index that content, which is formatted for the small screen, as well.

TR: The biggest problem is surely the user interface. The mobile phone keypad was copied from a 1960s public phone and it is a major hindrance to the uptake of non-voice services. It takes for example, on some phones, nineteen key presses to send an MMS.

SM: I am very aware of that. With the design of the user interface of a mobile application you can minimise with text input (to some extent). With some understanding of what people want on their mobile phones we can optimise both the queries and the answers. It is easier to do this on more capable phones, like smartphones or Blackberrys.

The three primary UI issues are text input, screen size and the application model, and we have to be aware of all of those in the design of our user interface. We have tried to optimise our approach for all the major different mobile user browsers.

TR: People will tend to fall into patterns in their usage and this might be helpful if you could introduce some heuristic elements, to make each interface self-learning.

SM: The search technology is sufficiently young that the whole industry has not yet been able to spend all that much time on these kinds of heuristics but those are the types of things we will be looking at to optimise both the input and the results. We do understand a reasonable amount of what people want. However, on a mobile it is very hard to track when you deliver a result what happened. We just deliver it, we don’t always know if it is what the user wanted or not. Our goal is to be the best intermediary so that people have just one click after us. We can infer some and, after looking at the clicks, we think we are doing OK. There is a lot of work still to do.

TR: One of the major problems is not going to be technology, if you track the development of mobile content in the mobile phone, the users by and large have rejected anything but voice and basic messaging.

SM: It has to be all about the end user experience. If the end users don’t find value in a product and adopt it none of this evolution of the product (say search) will happen. I have been in mobile almost ten years now so I predate WAP and even CDPD and Mobitext. There have always been revolutions around the corner but the trouble was that the user experience and the discovery mechanisms were not good enough to jump start markets. Also there was no incentive for the innovative little guy to go out and create something because he had to sell it to the carrier and the whole process was just too hard. Is this process changing now? Is it going to change overnight? I don’t believe so. Is it going to yield itself to constant innovation and more value to the end user? I absolutely believe so. I can’t tell you what the time line is though, it is likely to be longer than I would have thought, it always is.

TR: There has been significant resistance by the carriers to any business model which does not have them at the centre and which they do not control. One of the constants in this business is the reference to the Internet model. If you look at this all you have to do is understand HTML and you can put anything you like out there. And if you look at NTT DoCoMo, also much referenced, if you sign up with them they will tell you how to develop applications for i-mode. But the bottom line of the NTT DoCoMo story is the revenue sharing model and that is what operators worldwide have resisted.

SM: Yes there has to be an economic incentive for people to create apps and publish things. There was not in WAP. I contend that the problem with WAP was not just bad specs nor the fact that the phones came out with incomplete support. It was also that no one had any reason to do interesting things and push the envelope and involve the space because they couldn’t make any money.

In our case we are working deeply with the carriers as partners. Why would carriers work with us? Google gives you information from on the web and off the web, carriers realise the usefulness of this. So the operators are getting there. It takes time and it has taken at least one round of failure for them to get there.

TR: They are still being dragged reluctantly into accepting that if they are going to go forward with this bright new world of mobile multimedia, they are going to have to come up with some incentive for people to actually create compelling applications for delivery by mobile.

SM: Some of them get it, some of them don’t - but competition will drive this market. The carrier has a huge amount of value to bring to the system, they have the relationship with the customers, they have the distribution mechanisms, they have the spectrum. They are not going to go away, they are important critical partners. But there is still going to have to be some innovation and some changes on their part.

TR: In fifteen years most major mobile operators have gone from dashing go-ahead innovative players to being like the old wireline incumbents they used to despise.

SM: This is a difficult space. We want to pursue this space with our carrier partners and OEMs and deliver end-to-end value to the user. Carriers are very smart people, they have some entrenched opinions but they are also very smart and I believe that they will ultimately see what is important for the company.

TR: You have the advantage of coming at them as equals.

SM: This helps but it is a dance and there are some difficult conversations trying to figure out how best to do the dance! Hopefully when you have finished the dance you still have a deep relationship.

TR: Apart from a general desire to spread its wings into the mobile space, what is in this for Google? What would it mean in monetary terms if you made a breakthrough in mobile? Would it open up a whole new market?

SM: Google is a very interesting company. Many times we value innovation more than we do short term monetary return because we believe that by adding core value at some time in the future we can monetise it. This is what happened with desktop line search. Our search was far better than our peers well before the understanding of how to monetise it.

So the bottom line for us is creating value with some number of end users actually experiencing Google on a mobile phone and finding it valuable so they come back. That, for us, is the key issue. Now for our partners, they want to make incremental revenue and increase ARPU, so we have to ensure that as we get to this point of delivering end-user value, that we do have a way we can monetise, because we do share some of the revenues that comes in to our partners - which keeps them interested in the partnership.

So there is our intrinsic desire which is to deliver value to the end user and to innovate, then there is the extra desire that we are useful and helpful to our partners such that everybody has a more valuable business.

TR: So where are we now in realising this vision? How far are we along the road?

SM: I don’t know what the terminal point is so I can’t tell you where we are on the road to that point. I can tell you that our traffic is increasing greatly, that we have fundamental products launched that people are loving, particularly in some of the more evolved mobile markets. We have for example huge uptake of our new products in Japan, with very good response. We are pretty comfortable that we are on the right track.

So where are we? I don’t know but it’s going to be a long journey. It is important to work with all parts of the value chain. We as Google cannot make, for instance, a Motorola handset behave better but we can work with Motorola to optimise certain portions of the process to provide a better mapping experience or a better search experience. So there are things we can do with all our partners to help evolve the whole system. That is good for us - and as a rising tide lifts all ships it will be good for Yahoo, it’s good for everyone else - especially the end users.

The alternative for us is we stay confined to the desktop, which is certainly not my plan.

TR: Thank you