Google's Schmidt perplexed by Facebook blather, still fears MS

Outgoing Google boss Eric Schmidt is perplexed by people who keep suggesting that Facebook is now Mountain View's biggest rival. It's not – Microsoft is, says Schmidt.

We at Vulture Towers think that's a pretty obvious statement of fact, but Uncle Eric is a bit narked that Facebook is stealing so much thunder from Google's arch-enemy.

According to Forbes, Schmidt said that his decision to ditch his CEO role in favour of becoming Google's chairman had nothing whatsoever to do with Facebook's efforts to put a dent in the Mountain View Chocolate Factory machine.

Nor were the company's top three men arguing over Google's somewhat strained China affair, he said.

"This has nothing to do with competitors," said Schmidt. "I publicly said the next 10 years will be as successful as the past 10. We're going to run this way for a while."

The Google boss will step aside for the company's co-founder Larry Page to take over the CEO role in April.

He said he was baffled by the idea that Google was battling for interwebs supremacy with Facebook.

"We have a competitor called Microsoft," he said. "Microsoft has more cash, more engineers, more global reach. We see competition from Microsoft every day."

He then went on to point out that Facebook "has clearly stated they don't want to get into the search business. Facebook users tend to use Google search. Facebook's ads business does not displace our advertising. I'm somewhat perplexed by the obsession because I don't think the facts support it. Things are going great for Google."

As an aside, Schmidt's assertion about Facebook users searching via Google is a strange one, given that Zuckerberg's site has a pretty cosy relationship with Microsoft's Bing.

But we think the Google man and TV host wannabe is referring to searches outside of the hallowed social network, which are normally carried out by those people too lazy, or dare we say stupid, to simply type "Facebook.com" in the url field. ®