Google’s Andy Rubin has made his opinion sound public when he stated that your phone shouldn’t be an assistant, talking about Apple’s new voice-enabled digital assistant, Siri. Now Eric Schmidt, Google’s chairman and former CEO, tells the U.S. Senate that Siri might actually be a “competitive threat”.

Following up on a September’s hearing, Schmidt told the U.S. Senate antitrust subcommittee that Apple’s Siri is a “significant development”, one which might actually be a threat to the Google search business. To sustain his point of view, Schmidt even quoted two publications that referred to Siri as a “Google killer” as well as Apple’s “entry point” into the search engine business.

Trying to paint Google as “just another competitor”, the Chairman of Mountain View quoted a comScore report where “Android operates on only 34.1 percent while Apple’s iOS runs on 43.1 percent”. Clearly, the report places Android comfortably on the first sport with a market share of 44.8% in September.

“Google has many strong competitors and we sometimes fail to anticipate the competitive threat posed by new methods of accessing information,” Schmidt said. Senators still consider Google’s 65% market share of all U.S. Internet searches, 94% share of the European market, and 97% share of all smartphone searches being fairly close to a monopoly.

Source: AppleInsider

Via: PhoneArena