Speaking at the opening interview of the All Things D conference in southern California, Schmidt seemed determined to sideline the world's largest software company as an enterprise play. He said Microsoft was "not driving the consumer revolution in the minds of consumers," and claimed that the majority of its profits came from corporate sales. The Xbox gaming system didn't count as it was "not a platform at the computational level," Schmidt said.
And Schmidt sounded a warning that Microsoft shouldn't feel safe from Google in the enterprise space either. The former CEO said we were seeing "the death of IT as we know it," as more and more companies move their data off local servers and online. Google and Microsoft are competing aggressively in the cloud-based services market.
Schmidt had a mixture of praise and criticism for Apple, a partner in some things (search, maps) and a competitor in others (the increasingly brutal Android vs. iOS war in the mobile space). Schmidt called Apple a company that makes "beautiful products" -- but also one that clamps down too harshly on iOS developers. Android developers have much more freedom to launch apps, he said.
"The Apple model is the reverse of the Google model," Schmidt told interviewers Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg. "The Google model is, let the market decide."
When it came to Facebook, Schmidt made his admiration clear. "For years, we missed something: identity," he said. "The industry missed it and Google missed it ... Facebook is the first general way of disambiguating identity, and that allows you to build a platform." He also admitted that Google "screwed up" in some of its early social media efforts, specifically the much-maligned and short-lived Google Buzz platform.
At the same time, Schmidt said the industry could "benefit from having an alternative platform" in social media. Google plans to officially launch one such small alternative, the +1 system, on Wednesday. Yet Schmidt seemed to downplay the importance of +1, saying that Google's search product was "good enough" to fight back waves of SEO optimizers without needing the social layer.