Google: Apple is not our main competitor

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal’s Alan Murray, the CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, discussed how and who Google now needs to compete against and it’s clear that the foundation of the company, search, is still its main focus going forward.

In the interview, Schmidt described Microsoft’s search engine as their main competitor, describing it as a “well-run, highly competitive search engine.”

He said that Microsoft need to be watched and implied that they had perhaps been written-off prematurely by the media, especially where Bing is concerned.

The Bing search engine now also powers Yahoo! search and Bing recently overtook Yahoo to take second place in the search engine rankings.  This isn’t bad for a search engine that comes from a family of search engines that had awful reputations, and that’s achieved this in less than 18 months.

It was also clear that Google’s smartphone and tablet operating system, Android, is a secondary concern and that Apple, as a result, isn’t the main competitive focus of the company.

This is not really a surprise as search and advertising provide Google with almost all of its revenue.  The free Android OS must be a drain on resources and is really only a way to help market the Google name and maintain consumer goodwill towards the company.

You can view the entire interview on the Wall Street Journal’s website.

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Author: Mike Halsey MVP, Saturday September 25, 2010 -
Tags:advertising, android, apple, bing, Google, iPhone, microsoft, search, windows phone 7

Responses so far:

1. Ruben Parati says:

   September 27, 2010 at 4:04 pm

   Although Bing appears to be Google’s main threat as reported by Schmidt, what if Facebook could monetize time spent on its site as well as Google does ? For first time ever, Facebooks passes Google in time spent on site. Will Google launch something new in Social Network very soon? Is it social-xxl.com ?

   Reply