Chatting Schmidt

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt spends his webcam chat for the Wall Street Journal Tech Live event insisting we should all be grateful to the tech giants, despite the fact they’ve become, by his own admission, “amplifiers for idiots and crazy people”.

Framing himself as some wildcard Mountain View renegade, Schmidt insists his musings on Google’s dominance – or “excellence”, as he calls it – come from a place of total impartiality.

“Someone needs to say this,” declares the billionaire livewire who incidentally still owns over four million shares in Google’s parent company. “I’m unfettered by the corporate rule now; I’m no longer a board member or employee. I can say what I actually think, and this is what I actually think.”

With that cleared up, rest assured there’s no bias at play when he dismisses the idea of his old pals dominating the market. After all, he astutely observes, “Google’s market share is not 100%”. And who better to set the criteria for scrutinising Google than someone so disenfranchised, so far removed from the interests of the company, as Eric Schmidt? He’s practically an outlaw.

So, you heard the man: as long as at least one in 7.8 billion people on Earth continues to use Safari, Google can only ever be fairly described as a plucky underdog.