Eric Schmidt's hypothetical "evil room"
Imagining life at Bizarro Google.

Schmidt says consumers would revolt if Google started acting evil. Photo: Google
On Wednesday morning Google (GOOG) CEO Eric Schmidt and co-founder Sergey Brin met with a group of reporters and talked about a number of issues, from the outages its Gmail service has experienced to its efforts to digitize books to the company's culture.
Schmidt repeatedly deflected questions about the competition, saying Google prefers to focus on, well, Google. (In response to a question about Microsoft (MSFT) CEO Steve Ballmer's assertion that adoption of Google's Chrome operating system amounts to little more than a "rounding error," Schmidt quipped: "I don't respond to Steve Ballmer questions.")
But Schmidt did offer a long explanation of why Google isn't Microsoft — like when it comes to hemming customers in to its technologies and systems. More


