Former Google CEO: Siri Could Hurt Company's Search Business
November 7, 2011
The former CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, suggests that Apple’s new voice recognition assistant, Siri, could pose a “competitive threat” to his company’s popular search business. Schmidt made these comments during a meeting in September with U.S. Senators. However, those comments were just made available this week in written form, according to Cult Of Mac.
First created at Stanford in 1996, Google search is the most popular such product in the world. As such, most of Google’s revenues come from the advertisements that appear alongside its search results. Therefore, the more mobile users move away from Google and towards Apple’s Siri-based voice system, the less business Google will generate.
“Google has many strong competitors and we sometimes fail to anticipate the competitive threat posed by new methods of accessing information,” Schmidt writes. A recent study of 40 Siri users by The Arora Report found 27 reported conducting no Google searches after obtaining the iPhone 4S voice-recognition system, while 13 had sliced the number of Google searches conducted to just two, down from a previous 10.Although, as stated previously, Siri is only available via the iPhone 4S, we expect it to expand to the iPad and other Apple products at some point. In fact, a recent report suggests that an Apple iTV will arrive in 2012 with Siri preinstalled. Therefore, we believe its threat to Google is very real. What do you think? Should Google be worried about Siri? Let us know by using the comments below.