Google's CEO Terms Twitter As 'poor man's email'

Google CEO Eric Schmidt expects 2009 to be a "tough, tough" year and he warned that the search giant is "not immune" from the worsening economy. "It obviously will affect the online advertising market because our systems are so tightly tuned. If customers are buying less, it will eventually be reflected in CPCs and CPMs," he said.

He talked on a wide variety of topics during an on-stage chat with tech analyst Mary Meeker during the Morgan Stanley Technology Conference held recently in San Francisco. He focused mostly on the economy, calling the current situation "pretty dire" and adding that he doesn't expect it to improve until next year.

Schmidt also said that Google "was pretty inactive right now" on the M&As front, blaming unfavorable prices.

"The good news is we have lots of capital," Schmidt said. "The bad news is we're still trying to get everybody into the model that we really want in terms of M&A. And I think it'll start soon, but it's pretty inactive right now."

When asked about Twitter in a question-and-answer session, Schmidt said Google "was in favor of all these new communications mechanisms. Speaking as a computer scientist, I view all of these as sort of poor man's e-mail systems. They have aspects of an e-mail system, but they do not have a full offering."

It would have been really great and interesting to hear from this search giant’s chief not about the year 2009 but about the year 2015 rather. Everyone now knows that 2009 will be tough.

Moreover, Twitter is much talked about in the internet media and is being used by masses, but the irony is Twitter is yet to find a way to make money. Not only Twitter is poor man’s email system, but still Twitter is poor. More so if Twitter is poor man’s email system, then why has Google signed up for it?

If Twitter has to take Schmidt comments positively and try to develop on those lines, then I guess it will become more powerful. Does it want to be just an instant status informer or a storage based mechanism with more additional or premium features which an e-mail system has? Really do not know what Twitter has in its plan for the future.