A Reuters report featuring Google Inc.’s Chief Executive Eric Schmidt gives us some enlightening information about the Apple/Google saga, and some insight into the Google mind-frame as he spoke to reporters in a one-hour briefing on Thursday at Sun Valley. Schmidt was a member of Apple’s board of directors up until last year when he stepped down due to the overlap of Google and Apple. Apparently Jobs stated recently that Google changed the relationship with the two companies when when they started competing with the iPhone in the mobile OS world with Android.
Larry Page (Google co-founder), however, claims that Jobs was “rewriting history”
“We had been working on Android a very long time, with the notion of producing phones that are Internet enabled and have good browsers and all that because that did not exist in the marketplace… I think that characterization of us entering after is not really reasonable.”
Schmidt mentions that Google and Apple still have partnerships in various business, and did mention that the market was big enough for both iOS and Android to find success.
Sergey Brin (Google co-founder), also mentions that along the consideration that Facebook is a threat to Google:
“The indications that we have show that when Internet users become Facebook users they actually do significantly more searches on Google,”
The battle between Google and Apple will continue as we all know, and if the iPhone hits Verizon like reports are speculating, then the war will only exacerbate further. When Windows Phone 7 hits the scene we may have a 3-way war again too!
(image Credit: Daniel Adel/New York Times)