When You're Asked About Your Competition

By Eric Seidel, CEO
The Media Trainers®

When your name is both a subject and a verb, you just might find others trying to bring you down to size.

So it goes for Google. The seemingly ubiquitous search engine does have competitors still trying to emerge from Google’s dust. Yahoo and Microsoft’s Bing want a much larger piece of the action. The result is intensive focus on the king of the hill and how it will fend off these attacks.

So it’s been for Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Sitting down with Fox Business Network’s Liz Claman recently at his corporate headquarters (click on the video below to hear/see the full interview), the unflappable Schmidt fielded questions about the assault with ease, respect, dignity and more than one clever retort designed to help differentiate Google and its continuing advantage.

Some examples:

Claman: “What do you think about Microsoft’s entry?”
Schmidt: “Well, it’s not the first entry for Microsoft; they do this about once a year.”

Claman: “So you predict that you will hang onto the number one position here.”
Schmidt: “Well, I certainly hope so. Google is about innovation and we’re not done with search.”

Claman: “I look at Google and I say, well, it’s really hard to knock the top entity off, but Google did it with Yahoo many, many years ago.”
Schmidt: “But you earn that. You don’t buy it with ads, you earn it and you earn it customer by customer, search by search, answer by answer. We believe today we beat our competitors because we’re so focused on comprehensiveness, speed, freshness and having the depth that people really care about.”

The entire interview (below) contains these and additional concisely articulated responses from Schmidt, who welcomes the competition but makes it understood Google’s hold on the hill remains solid and long term.