Gizmodo Australia is reporting that Eric Schmidt believes that Apple's Siri poses a serious threat to Google. Talking to a senate subcommittee Eric Stated:
"As I noted this past June, my statement last September was clearly wrong. The Internet is dynamic and has changed significantly. The importance of social networking to consumers’ online experience has changed remarkably-even over the past year. Consumers are looking for answers when they conduct searches online, and social search has become a serious competitor in helping people find those answers online. Similarly, Apple’s Siri is a significant development — a voice-activated means of accessing answers through iPhones that demonstrates the innovations in search. The tech industry is one of the most competitive and dynamic spaces in the entire economy, with small companies as well as larger companies competing hard against each other in lots of areas. Google has many strong competitors and we sometimes fail to anticipate the competitive threat posed by new methods of accessing information. We compete against a broader array of companies than most people realise, including general search engines."
Google has been slammed for some of it's privacy breaches and Steve Jobs actually believed they were in danger of becoming another Microsoft by trying to be involved in everything as opposed to focusing on it's core assets and executing them flawlessly.
Time will tell but my feeling is that people are starting to become weary of players like Google and Facebook which have let us down in recent times with some major breaches of users privacy.