Google Chairman Eric Schmidt: Competition Between Apple and Google is More Brutal Than Ever
Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt and former SVP of products, Jonathan Rosenberg, recently published a new book entitled “How Google Works, which explores topics like corporate culture …
Context & Ripple Effects
Eric Schmidt's 'more brutal than ever' line lands mid-book-tour for How Google Works, the corporate-culture volume he wrote with Jonathan Rosenberg, and it walks back the softer note he struck in July 2013, when he said Google's relationship with Apple had improved. The through-line runs back to his 2012 claim that Android-versus-Apple was the industry's defining fight.
What makes the remark more than promo talk: two days earlier, leaked documents showed Google requiring partners like Samsung to pre-install and prominently display up to 20 Google apps while working to limit Samsung's grip on Android — the machinery of exactly the competition Schmidt describes.
First-order effects
- Samsung and other Android device makers read the chairman's 'brutal' framing alongside this week's leaked app-bundling requirements, sharpening tension over who controls the Android home screen and which apps ship by default.
- Schmidt and Rosenberg convert the rivalry into book publicity, giving both companies' competitive posture a public narrative just as fall product launches put Apple and Google head-to-head again.
Second-order effects
- Microsoft, the antagonist of Google's 2007 showdown era, now fights a two-front war against ecosystems that each control an operating system and a default app layer — squeezing the third platform's distribution options further.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, mobile competition settles into a two-ecosystem structure where the decisive battlegrounds are default placement and service distribution rather than hardware — a dynamic regulators have already probed, as in the 2011 Senate hearing where Schmidt flagged Apple's Siri as a potential competitive threat.
The trend: Platform competition is migrating from devices and OS market share to control of defaults and app distribution inside closed ecosystems, with each player's leverage measured in what ships on the home screen.