Speaking on In Good Company, the podcast hosted by Norges Bank Investment Management CEO Nicolai Tangen, the 71-year-old said Google briefly led the space during his time in charge.
Losing that lead, he said, was his biggest mistake as CEO. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt has once again named social media as the one that got away.
He ran Google from 2001 to 2011, and weeks after handing the top job to co-founder Larry Page, he admitted he had seen the Facebook threat coming. Built by Google engineer Orkut Büyükkökten in his 20% time, the invite-only network went live in January 2004, a month before Facebook.
“I clearly knew I had to do something and I failed to do it,” he said at a tech conference that year. It was fairly short,” Schmidt told Tangen. It is a regret Schmidt has voiced before. “A CEO should take responsibility. I screwed up. “There was a moment when Google was ahead of everybody else in social media. “I was CEO at the time. I take responsibility for not getting ahead of that. That was a big error. That early lead belonged to Orkut. In its first few months, more than half its traffic came from the US, with Japan a distant second.
It arrived in June 2011, about three months after Page took over, and drew 10 million users in its first two weeks while still invite-only. That was barely 1% of Facebook’s 750 million users at the time, but the company pushed on, crossing 90 million registered users by January 2012. After a bug exposed data from up to 500,000 profiles, the search giant closed the consumer version of Google+ in April 2019, citing low usage.
Google+ was the bigger, more aggressive attempt. Sign-ups never turned into lasting engagement. Smaller efforts such as Buzz and Friend Connect had already been wound down.