Google’s outgoing CEO Eric Schmidt said he was disappointed that Nokia elected to adopt Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 over Android, but that Google was still keen on a future deal.
“We’d like them to adopt Android, and we certainly tried,” he said during a Q&A session following his keynote speech at Mobile World Congress Tuesday.
Schmidt also said that “the offer remains open” should Nokia change its mind.
Schmidt – making his second consecutive appearance at MWC, and his last as Google’s CEO – acknowledged Microsoft as being Google’s biggest competitor, albeit still mainly in the search engine space with Bing.
“Bing is a good search engine – almost too good,” he joked in reference to recent reports that Bing had allegedly copied Google’s search algorithms.
ComScore announced earlier this week that Bing’s search share grew to just over 13% in January largely at the expense of Google, whose search share dropped to 65.6%.
Schmidt denied that Facebook was shaping up as a formidable competitor in the advertising space. “There’s no evidence I’m aware of that it’s hurting our ad business,” he said.
Schmidt also addressed developer complaints of Android being too fragmented between different handset vendors.