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The Schmidt hits the brand: Apple's iPhone 6 is a year late, scoffs smug search supremo
Google boss admits competition in phone market 'brutal'
With Apple under fire for its bendy, broken iPhone 6es, Eric Schmidt at arch-rival Google is only too happy to put his boot in Cupertino.
In an interview with Bloomberg TV, the Google chairman and former CEO needled his competitor down the peninsula. When asked what he thought about the hyped up iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, Schmidt smugly offered: "I think Samsung had those products a year ago."
Next, Schmidt, who once served on Apple's board, acknowledged that Google was locked in a fierce battle with Apple in the smartphone space, calling the competition between Cupertino and the Chocolate Factory "brutal" but necessary.
One group that hasn't benefited from that competition, however, is the Android hardware makers and mobile networks. When faced with the question of whether Google was leaving its phone, tablet and carrier partners scratching out meager profits from cheap retail prices, Schmidt offered:
"You can make a small market share with a lot of profits or you can make the same amount of money with a larger market share and less profits."
That sentiment works well for Google, which enjoys the fruits of the entire Android ecosystem, but will these comments provide any sort of encouragement for the vendors and small carriers themselves that fending off not only Apple but other Android vendors to differentiate their models and carve out a share of the Android space?
According to a report from IDC in the second quarter of 2014, while Android has an 84.7 per cent piece of the market, hardware vendors don't fare so well.
Just one Android vendor, Samsung, holds more than 10 per cent of the smartphone space at large. Apple and its healthy profit margins remain second with an 11 per cent share of the global market, and Huawei is third with a modest 6.7 per cent share.
Those companies, it seems, aren't benefiting so much from the low cost, high share model of Google. ®
Spat-note
Google has today written to media mogul Rupert Murdoch after the rubbery publisher's News Corp accused Google of being a "platform for piracy and the spread of malicious networks."
"Google has done more than almost any other company to help tackle online piracy," the web advertising giant shot back.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
