Google boss admits 'I screwed up over Facebook'
His biggest mistake as CEO was not reacting quickly enough to the social network phenomenon, says Eric Schmidt
Schmidt told the D9 conference at Rancho Palos Verdes in California that he realised four years ago that Google needed to counter Facebook and even wrote memos saying that .
"I did nothing about the memos I wrote," Schmidt said. "The CEO should take responsibility. I screwed up."
Schmidt's comments came in a wide ranging conversation with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, reporters for the Wall Street Journal's All Things D Web site, which puts on the D conference.
The conversation with Schmidt was the first session of the conference.
Schmidt also discussed everything from privacy to Google's relationship with Apple and other big tech companies - to his fears on how governments will try to regulate the Internet.
There have been government inquiries into the data Google collects and what it does with it.
Schmidt said that the company tries to be transparent with users about how its using their data. It collects users' location data for certain applications such as Google Latitude which users opt into using. It also is specifically designed to share locations with other consumers. The company also collects anonymised location information but doesn't retain it, he said.
Schmidt recently stood down as Google CEO and was replaced by co-founder Larry Page. Now as executive chairman, he spends a lot of his time on the road making sales calls, he said - not always successfully.
Google recently launched a cloud-based music service that lets users store their digital music files on Google's servers. But they did so without the support of the major music labels.
The reason the labels resisted, Schmidt suggested, was that they, like other traditional media companies, find difficulty in moving to the online world where business models depend on selling large quantities of goods for low prices.
"We've been attempting to convince the music industry"to work with Google. We haven't been successful," said Schmidt.