The former CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt has reportedly made a comment at this week"s D9 conference in California by stating that Microsoft is not in the "gang of four" high tech companies leading innovation in the industry. Interestingly, Schmidt claimed those being the big four were Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google.
The comments come as all four companies, in his view, have shown interesting ideas that have managed to take them through to implementation. In his words, he counts Amazon for being the world"s largest bookseller, Apple as designing attractive products that consumers buy, Facebook who are able to link a person"s friends together in one place, and Google for organizing the world"s information on the internet.
Paul Thurrott wrote though that Schmidt also believed there were a few up and coming companies that could boost themselves into the top tier of innovative companies in his view. Companies such as eBay and Twitter as well as PayPal were those that he mentioned during his interview.
When it came to talking about Microsoft specifically he stated that "Microsoft [has] not driven the consumer revolution in the mind of the consumers" and instead has locked consumers in the corporate arena. He claims that all technology based companies eventually become "boring and middle aged" but for Microsoft, they"ll still continue for decades to come due to their legacy products such as Windows, Office, and Xbox.
News has been spreading recently though that Google itself missed an opportunity not too long ago to potentially work with Facebook. Now the two companies are bitter rivals as the former CEO admitted for not taking the increased competition seriously enough.