Fail: Google CEO Calls Twitter a “Poor Man’s E-mail System”

epic fail train Fail: Google CEO Calls Twitter a Poor Mans E mail System

From the "what is he smoking?" department:

Google's CEO Eric Schmidt gave us some insight on his opinion of Twitter on Tuesday.

It’s “a poor man’s email system,” said Schmidt at an investor conference in San Francisco.

"Speaking as a computer scientist, I view all of these as sort of poor man's email systems. In other words, they have aspects of an email system, but they don't have a full offering.

To me, the question about companies like Twitter is: Do they fundamentally evolve as sort of a note phenomenon, or do they fundamentally evolve to have storage, revocation, identity, and all the other aspects that traditional email systems have? Or do email systems themselves broaden what they do to take on some of that characteristic?

I think the innovation is great. In Google's case, we have a very successful instant messaging product, and that's what most people end up using.

Twitter's success is wonderful, and I think it shows you that there are many, many new ways to reach and communicate, especially if you are willing to do so publicly."

I'm really too tired to even comment on this at the moment. I'm going to sleep on it and try and figure out how status updates are remotely comparable to e-mail and instant messaging.