Google Drops A Red Herring, Says Bing Key Threat
Google CEO Eric Schmidt escaped intense scrutiny over competition provided by Apple and Facebook by dropping a red herring to distract WSJ executive editor Alan Murray interviewing him. The veteran analyst had the Google boss groping for replies initially, even a bit ruffled as Schmidt tried to say that he was not unduly worried about the two competitors in a face to face talk last week.
Then, in an inspirational afterthought, the suave Schmidt turned the conversation away to its old and conventional adversary Microsoft, and dropped the unexpected red herring that Bing was the main competitor of Google, despite having a sixth of Google’s market share in the search category. The Bing connection with Microsoft made it impossible for Murray to refute the statement outright, as he was least expecting such a response from Schmidt. The fact is that Bing, with 11.8% market share in Internet search, is third placed after Yahoo at 17.8 %, and none of them are a patch on market leader Google which has managed to stay far ahead with 64.4% of market share.
Google, however, is visibly concerned by competition from both Apple and Facebook, a fact that Schmidt does not want to admit publicly. In January this year Google left its age-old strategy of ‘solutions only’ to enter the smart phone sales market with a first time product Nexus one, manufactured by HTC of Taiwan. This was ample proof that the web search giant was willing to change its strategy and enter the dog-eat-dog mobile markets to push its Android OS which was not making much headway before January 2010. Google’s push into direct sales encouraged fringe players like LG, Samsung and others to go in full throttle with the Android operating system. This strategy could pay off making Google's Android, today placed behind Nokia, Apple and BlackBerry, the second largest seller of smart phones by 2015 as per Nielsen analytics.
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