Eric Schmidt's Favorite Google Product? Chrome!
What's Google CEO Eric Schmidt's favorite Google product at the moment? When I asked him that this week, I expected a “I love all my children equally” answer. Instead, Schmidt surprised me answering without hesitation: Google's Chrome browser.
Context & Ripple Effects
Schmidt has been unusually accessible this year — a Financial Times appearance in May followed by a wide-ranging TechCrunch interview at the end of August — and this answer arrives mid-stretch. Asked to choose a favorite Google product, he skips the diplomatic all-my-children reply and names Chrome, a browser barely a year old.
The endorsement lands during a bruising stretch on Google's other fronts: on September 19 alone the company published a redacted FCC filing over the Google Voice dispute while publicly accusing Apple of lying to regulators, and opposition continues to mount against its digital-books settlement plan. Meanwhile the favored browser still has no Mac build, leaving Apple-platform users waiting.
First-order effects
- Chrome takes top billing from the CEO heading into its first anniversary — a clear signal of where internal prestige sits — even though Mac users still have no native build to run it on.
- The quote hands Google a talking point for positioning Chrome as core strategy rather than side project, at a moment when the company's regulatory exposure (the FCC Voice filings, the contested books settlement) is peaking.
Second-order effects
- Coming days after Google framed its new display ad exchange as a broadside at Yahoo's display business, the CEO's Chrome favor confirms that capital is flowing toward owned client surfaces that deepen engagement across both the ads and search businesses.
- Naming Chrome the favorite while publicly fighting Apple over Google Voice puts the browser on a collision course with Safari's home turf — Google is choosing to compete inside Apple's platform at the same time it accuses Apple of regulator-facing misstatements.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the browser becomes the strategic asset search companies fight over, displacing the results page as the surface that matters — and with regulators already probing Google's Voice filings and books settlement, scrutiny could eventually extend to the browser layer itself, though when and how remains genuinely open.
The trend: Search companies are shifting value creation from the results page to the browser client itself, turning the browser into the next battleground between major platforms.