Google’s former CEO and current executive chairman Eric Schmidt has revealed what he calls his biggest mistake at the company.

In an interview with Bloomberg, Schmidt said, “At Google, the biggest mistake that I made was not anticipating the rise of the social networkingphenomenon.” He also said that this is a mistake that Google is never going to make again.

As for the reason for such a big miss, Schmidt says, “In our defense, we were working on many other things, but we should have been in that area.”

But even before Facebook became a global phenomenon, Google had its Orkut, though its popularity was limited to India and Brazil largely. Its next social network, Buzz, failed to gain traction. The latest, Google+, is the company’s most aggressive push into the social networking domain, with free online photo storage as well as integration with YouTube and Search.

Schmidt also predicted that the smartphone segment will continue to grow at a rapid pace in 2014. He said, “The biggest change for consumers is that everyone is going to have a smartphone. The fact that so many people are connected to a super computer means, essentially, a whole new generation of applications around entertainment, communication, socializing.”

He also said that Big Data and machine intelligence will create new services and change the way businessesare run globally.