Why are Google execs so negative about Microsoft?

Last week Google’s Vice-President of Engineering hit out at Microsoft’s new smartphone operating system, Windows Phone 7, saying that “the world doesn’t need another platform…I think the only reason you create another platform is for political reasons.”

Now it’s the turn of the company’s CEO Eric Schmidt who has said “The hours I spend reprogramming my PC in Windows 7 is not a very good use of my time”.

So why are Google being so negative about Microsoft when other companies like Apple are sitting quietly aside?

Clearly Micorosoft is a hugely profitable company with a great many products and product areas that directly bring revenue into the company.  Apple is the same with a great many product areas from servers to MP3 players that again bring in revenue.  They may not have as many product lines as Microsoft or the same market share but they’re doing extremely well.

Google on the other hand have a great many products that don’t bring in any revenue whatsoever, in fact almost all of Google’s revenue still comes from advertising.  It’s no great surprise then that Google’s executives are worried about some of the recent projects from Microsoft that clearly and directly threaten them.

When Windows XP muscled Linux off netbooks Google, quite correctly, saw an opportunity to bring in a netbook-focused operating system.  The problem here is that they’ve taken so long to produce it that the netbook market is now on its way out and has already begun evolving into a new tablet market, for which their Chrome OS isn’t quite so well suited, not without yet more work anyway.  In the time it’s taken for them to produce pretty-much nothing, Microsoft has very successfully moved Windows 7 into their target market and is doing very nicely out of it too, with all netbooks now shipping with the latest Microsoft OS.

Then there was the launch of Bing which has been gaining market share steadily since it’s launch just over a year ago and that now threatens Google in such a significant way that Google have had to attempt to copy some of Bing’s features in order to try and hold on to market share.  Bing will soon be launching an HTML5 search engine too and Google simply don’t have anything to compete with it.  They’ve just stood still in search.

Now there’s the launch of Internet Explorer 9 which is very reminiscent of Google’s own Chrome browser but do Google have anything to compete with it?  Quite the opposite, changes to Chrome are now few and far between and more people than ever are complaining about bugs in the software.  Unless something major happens here Google will lose out here too.

Let’s compare and contrast with Apple who over the same period have been innovating, exciting consumers and the press and launching wave-after-wave of fantastic new products in both new and existing markets for the company.  Clearly Apple have nothing to worry about.

You can probably guess where I’m leading with this by now.  The negativity coming from Google Executives has nothing to do, frankly, with any of Microsoft’s products and everything to do with Google’s complete inability to innovate, motivate and excite.  They have even missed an opportunity to scupper the Windows Phone 7 launch with Chrome OS news, something the tech-press would have been much more interested in.

So please, unless you have something new, exciting or interesting to say, shut up Mr Schmidt!