Google had tried to partner with Mark Zuckerberg’s phenomenally successful Facebook, but was rebuffed, Google chairman Eric Schmidt told a new-media conference overnight.
“We tried very hard to partner with Facebook,” Schmidt said at the D9 conference organised by Web site All Things Digital. “They were unwilling to do the deal,” he added, noting that Facebook had traditionally partnered with Microsoft.
Schmidt, recently replaced as CEO by Google founder Larry Page, said Facebook is the first generally available way of “disambiguating” identity – and he believed that such a fundamental service on the Internet shouldn’t be owned by a single company.
He blamed himself for not pushing Google into a similar service, saying that he recently looked up memos he wrote four years ago about Google needing to address online identity. “I clearly knew that I had to do something, and I failed to do it,” he said. “A CEO should take responsibility. I screwed up.”
