Siri may pose ‘competitive threat’ to Google, Eric Schmidt tells Senate subcommittee

Back in September, Google chairman and previous CEO Eric Schmidt sat down before a Senate antitrust subcommittee to debate his company’s competitive practices. As you could possibly expect from anyone in his situation, Schmidt spent much of his time defending Mountain View’s position atop the hunt industry, and cited several competitors as evidence of its fair play. The exec’s list of “threats” featured many of the usual suspects, including Bing, Yahoo and Amazon, in addition to Siri . “Even within the few weeks because the hearing, Apple has launched a completely new method to search technology with Siri, its voice-activated search and task-completion service built into the iPhone 4S,” he wrote, pointing to a handful of publications that characterized Apple’s voice assistant as a “Google Killer” and Cupertino’s “entry point” into the hunt market. “Apple’s Siri is a big development — a voice-activated technique of accessing answers through iPhones that demonstrates the innovations in search,” Schmidt explained. “Google has many strong competitors and we sometimes fail to anticipate the competitive threat posed by new methods of accessing information.” Granted, it is not terribly surprising to listen to Google talk up its competition — especially before a panel of politicians dedicated to rooting out anti-competitive practices. Yet Schmidt’s comments do mark a noticeable shift from the stance he assumed last year, when he denied that Apple and Facebook posed a “competitive threat” to Google’s search operations. As he admitted, “My statement was clearly wrong.” Take a look at the complete hearing on the source link below.