While Google’s Eric Schmidt may have once served on the board of directors at Apple, that apparently hasn’t affected his impartiality. The search giant’s executive chairman took a direct shot at Apple today in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, sending the Cupertino company a personal message, letting them know that the current way they are conducting business is laughingly based on a “teenage model of competition,” as the press would like to put it.
Schmidt also expressed his dismay with Apple’s choice to drop Google Maps in iOS 6, a choice that inevitably proved embarrassing for Tim Cook and co.
“Obviously, we would have preferred them to use our maps. They threw YouTube off the home screen [of iPhones and iPads]. I’m not quite sure why they did that. The press would like to write the sort of teenage model of competition, which is, ‘I have a gun, you have a gun, who shoots first?’
The adult way to run a business is to run it more like a country. They have disputes, yet they’ve actually been able to have huge trade with each other. They’re not sending bombs at each other. I think both Tim [Cook, Apple’s CEO] and Larry [Page, Google’s CEO], the sort of successors to Steve [Jobs] and me if you will, have an understanding of this state model. When they and their teams meet, they have just a long list of things to talk about.”
When asked about the countless legal issues that are currently taking place across the globe, Schmidt told reporters:
“Apple and Google are well aware of the legal strategies of each other. Part of the conversations that are going on all the time is to talk about them. It’s extremely curious that Apple has chosen to sue Google’s partners and not Google itself.”
Eric Schmidt is quite the character, and it’s not all that surprising that the long-tenured chairman was so thoroughly outspoken during the interview. He has been known to “tell it how it is” in the past which, in all honesty, is something that can be admired from a high-ranking executive.
Now, let’s just hope for the sake of our frenemy iPhone users Google is working on bringing its Maps application to iOS sometime in the near future, so those who chose the wrong OS don’t have deal with Apple’s pathetic excuse for a mapping service.
Source: WSJ
