The Hindu Business Line : Asian countries are not friendly to US competitors: Google

Google is not only taking on Microsoft as a competitor, it's taking on television too! The company plans to run video advertisements, putting the Web search leader in direct competition with television for the biggest chunk of ad spending.

Eric Schmidt, CEO at Google, believes competition is healthy. When it comes to competition from Microsoft, Schmidt says first they need to shape the products that are comparative in this space.

Discussing competition in the Asian countries, he says in general, Asian countries have not been as friendly to US competitors as they have strong local competitors in search.

"Our fundamental strategy is to build products that are specific to the market. They do unique and better things than the local competitors in those products and developments," he says. Excerpts from CNBC-TV18's exclusive interview with Eric Schmidt:

Could you tell us more about Google?

Google is really focused on a mission. A lot of people talk about competitors and what they are up to. I think the competition is very healthy. However, people miss that this is a much bigger space than the IT industry for example, so multiple choices, multiple approaches may be successful. So we believe that our strategy is going to be very successful. It may also be true that our competitors' strategies would be successful, at least for a while.

How worried are you that Microsoft is now aggressively trying to take market share getting into search?

First, they need to shape the products that are comparative in this space. And as they do, we will see. But remember, we are not standing still either.

Is your goal to become a portal ultimately?

It depends on what you mean by portal. Many people use the word, but mean different things. We prefer to think that we want to get information to you as quickly as possible. A lot of information is personal and it turns out that personal information such as e-mail, calendar, and so forth is also very searchable.

Your competitors are not necessarily just the search companies; they are also the portals, the media companies, content companies.

Well, we do not compete with content companies, because we do not produce content ourselves. We take our end users, who are busy spending a lot of time in Google to the content companies as quickly as we possibly can.

Two-third of the world's population speaks languages other than English. You dominate in Europe. So that is just a terrific position you are in, but not as strong a position in Asia. What is your strategy for cracking that market?

We have gone ahead and entered China and we have a strong position in Japan and the other Asian countries are coming along. Asian countries, in general, have not been as friendly to the US competitors as they have strong local competitors in search. In each case, our fundamental strategy is to build products that are specific to the market. They do unique and better things than the local competitors in those products and developments.

Geographically speaking, is that your biggest opportunity in Asia?

For long-term, absolutely.