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Mar 14 2008 10:16AM EDT

Eric Schmidt, Still Seeing the Devil in Microsoft

Eric Schmidt has had an amazing journey in his six-plus years as Google's CEO, and he could feel like he's on top of the tech universe. I found it fascinating that he still carries around what seems like a never-ending, dark fascination with Microsoft. It's as if Bill Gates inflicted a childhood wound that won't go away.

Here's Eric's exchange with my colleague, Russ Mitchell:

Why does a merged Microsoft-Yahoo pose such a threat to Google? It's an unstable situation. But the theoretical issue is the concentration of Microsoft's resources and its history, combined with the very large share that it would have in certain applications--like instant messaging and email--that could be used essentially to break the internet and diminish choice.

Break the internet? All internet-based systems today are highly interoperable, open systems. The whole antitrust trial that Microsoft went through was really about it breaking that.

Wow. Eric still worries that Microsoft still has that much power -- a concern not shared by many people anymore, outside of the European Commission.

But, consider Schmidt's history. He was an officer from 1983 to 1997 at Sun Microsystems, which then had a culture of viciously bashing Microsoft. Sun saw itself as the last defense against the dominance of Gates' alleged evil empire. Then Schmidt became CEO of Novell, a company founded by one of history's deepest Microsoft haters, Ray Noorda. Now he's at Google, which these days certainly is Microsoft's chief competitive concern. Schmidt is also on the board of Apple, which of course takes slaps at Microsoft thousands of times a day in its TV commercials.

I doubt Eric thinks of it this way, but it almost seems like he's made a career of battling Microsoft. I wonder if he fully realizes that -- between Google and Apple -- he's finally won.

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