Eric Schmidt: Android-Apple Is the Defining Fight in the Industry Today
The fight between Google and Apple over mobile devices is great for consumers, but the patent wars that have resulted are awful, said Google Chairman Eric Schmidt, in conversation tonight with our own Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher.
Context & Ripple Effects
Eric Schmidt has spent the past year building this argument piece by piece: telling US senators in November 2011 that Apple's Siri could pose a 'competitive threat' to Google, and insisting days later that Android started before the iPhone effort. His own company's lawyer had already gone public arguing the patent system is broken.
Tonight's conversation with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher ties those threads together into a single frame — Android-Apple as the industry's defining fight — and the pickup was broad, with Gizmodo, Forbes, The Register, CNET and others all running versions of the same appearance, in which Schmidt also waved off Microsoft and professed wariness toward Facebook.
First-order effects
- Schmidt publicly elevates Apple from rival to existential competitor, a rhetorical escalation that puts both companies' device roadmaps and app ecosystems at the center of the industry narrative rather than any other pairing.
- By calling the fight 'great for consumers' but the patent wars 'awful,' Schmidt separates the product competition Google wants from the litigation costs it doesn't — pressure aimed squarely at the courtroom strategy both sides are funding.
Second-order effects
- Rivals reading the duopoly framing have to pick sides or differentiate: handset makers and carriers face a market where Google and Apple set the terms, echoing the gatekeeper leverage each platform already exerts over developers and distribution.
- If the patent wars are 'awful' enough to draw complaints from a winner like Google, expect continued lobbying and legal-reform advocacy — the position Google's own lawyer staked out publicly a year earlier.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points toward a two-platform mobile structure in which ecosystem control — apps, services, voice assistants — matters more than hardware share, with everyone else licensing into one camp or the other.
- Sustained litigation between the two camps keeps patent regimes under political scrutiny, making mobile the test case for whether software patents help or hinder competition.
The trend: Mobile computing is consolidating into a two-platform contest between Android and Apple, where ecosystem breadth and patent posture — not individual devices — determine who sets industry terms.