Microsoft is Google's main contender, says Schmidt

Google’s Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt has revealed that the company’s most cutthroat rival was not Facebook or Apple, but it was Microsoft.

In an interview with Fortune’s Adam Lashinsky, Schmidt admitted, “We have a competitor called Microsoft. Microsoft has more cash, more engineers, more global reach. We see competition from Microsoft every day.”

Microsoft’s Bing is main competitor
But, analysts claim that nothing is predictable in the digital world and Facebook has been dangerously up surging to become the most-visited website, if the results of a recent survey are believed to be right.

Then, there is Microsoft’s Bing, which is the Google-dominated search domain’s main rival.

Schmidt said, “Google partners with Apple, he said, on search, maps and YouTube. It competes, of course, on phones. Google also might in theory compete with Apple’s Macintosh computer business with its Chrome OS hardware that Google hopes “to announce later this year.”

Google to attempt a different approach?
Talking about the iPad and iPhone arena and the various mobile operating devices on which these popular applications operate, Schmidt said that these operators have been successful in building an ‘elegant, scalable, closed system’.

“Google is attempting to do something with a completely different approach,” said the CEO, who is going to hand over the search and online advertising giant to Larry Page on April 4. Larry Page is the co-founder of Google.

“This will free him to concentrate on all the external stuff: customers, partners, deals, M&A, government, press, publicity and marketing. It was misinterpreted [sic] by many people who didn’t understand what I was doing,” said Fortune’s Adam Lashinsky, while stating that Schmidt has contributed a lot to the firm.