In an interview with the Wall Street Journal’s Alan Murray, Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt talked a little about his company’s competitors, and its "partners". Whilst the Wall Street Journal asked some rather strange and seemingly uneducated questions, Google’s CEO was more than happy to name Bing as a major competitor without the interviewer even mentioning Bing.
Schmidt refers to Bing as a "well-run, highly-competitive search engine" and thinks that the press have wrongly forgotten about Microsoft. With the recent "innovation" that’s been happening over at Google’s labs, it’s quite clear that they’re watching Bing very closely.
It seems that despite all the hype surrounding Google’s Android platform, Google is not (publicly) naming Apple as a competitor, instead they claim that the consumer giant a major partner. This is quickly explainable, as during the interview, Schmidt talks about the deals that they have in place with Apple and having search on the iPhone is obviously an important deal for Google to have. However, time will likely see this relationship deteriorate as Google further moves into Apple territory with Google TV and other pending products. When asked about the applications market that Apple pioneered, Schmidt thinks that HTML 5 and other web-technologies will eventually spell the end of closed, platform-specific applications, a view that many others agree with.
Source: WSJ: The Big Interview (via LiveSide.net)