Mountain View, California — Despite harsh rivalry between Apple and Google in the mobile space, as each vying for supremacy in the emerging markets, the companies have “recently extended” its search deal, according to Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
In an exclusive interview conducted by US TV personality Charlie Rose in the pages of BusinessWeek, Schmidt said the extended deal in passing: “Apple is a company we both partner and compete with. We do a search deal with them, recently extended, and we are doing all sorts of things in maps and things like that. So the sum of all this is that two large corporations, both of which are important, both of which I care a lot about, will [remain] pretty close.”
The executive smartly downplayed and scraped any traces of enmity from Steve Jobs, following Schmidt’s departure last year from Apple’s board of directors as Google continued its push into the mobile arena.
The executive’s statement appear to have discredited earlier rumors claiming that Apple was working to replace the default search engine on iOS devices. Alleged attitudes between Google and Apple were credited with driving the latter company to consider Bing as the default search service on the iPhone. Rather than replace Google with Bing, Microsoft’s search engine is now offered as an option alongside Google and Yahoo.
Moreover, like Google co-founder Larry Page before him, Schmidt also maintained that Android predated the Apple iPhone. “Android was around earlier than iPhone,” he said.
Apple rolled-out the first iPhone in January 2007, and it arrived in stores that summer. Google announced its Android mobile operating system the following November, and the first Android handset appeared from US carrier T-Mobile almost a year later, in September 2008. But in 2005, Google purchased mobile startup Android Inc., whose work played a role in the company’s mobile OS.
The iPhone and Android competitiveness has already made its adverse effect on the companies, as Schmidt had to step down from the Apple board because the companies compete in multiple areas including phones, browsers and music (soon).
In another interview with the Wall Street Journal, Schmidt mentioned that Apple is not Google’s competitor. It is not Facebook either, he says. The company’s biggest competitor, he claims, is Microsoft Bing. “We consider neither to be a competitive threat,” he claims of Apple and Facebook. “Our competitor is Bing.”
Asked if he was seriously admitting that Bing is a bigger long-term danger to Google than Facebook or Apple, Schmidt said that with Facebook, “it is too early to tell,” and he pointed out that Apple is a Google partner. But he repeatedly referred to Apple as a “closed” company while insisting that Google is “open.”
“Apple is the extreme expression of a closed system and they are doing a very good job of it,” he said.
He declined to discuss Google’s specific plans to expand its social-networking efforts. But he acknowledged that it wants Facebook-like access to who your friends are. “Everything that Google does can become better if we have more information about who your friends are and what they are doing,” he said. He indicated that Google may be able to garner such information via Zynga, the Facebook-friendly gaming outfit in which Google has invested.