Was proud to have served on Apple board

Eric Schmidt, a former Google CEO who resigned and then became Chairman of the company, praised former Apple CEO Steve Jobs -- who also recently resigned as CEO and become the chairman of Apple's board -- as having given "the best performance by a CEO in 50 years, maybe 100 years." The remark was part of an interview on stage at Dreamforce, the annual conference of the enterprise-level CRM software company SalesForce. Schmidt was also a former Apple board member.

Although he added that he was "proud" to have been on the board of Apple, Schmidt resigned from Apple's board two years ago because of conflicts of interest as Google began competing more directly with Apple -- including the Android OS for smartphones and tablets as well as the ChromeOS, which so far has largely been limited to netbooks. Media reports painted the situation as a fractious relationship between the two CEOs, but they were photographed having a friendly lunch in Palo Alto a few days after the initial reports of arguments and pressure for Schmidt to resign. Officially, Apple said simply that Schmidt's increasing conflicts of interests made it impossible for him to serve effectively on Apple's board.

Regardless of any tensions between the two men, Schmidt has been very consistent in his praise of Jobs, repeatedly referring to him as "the best CEO in the world." At the Dreamforce conference, Schmidt explained his "best performance" remark by explaining that Jobs had not only built Apple into a major force in computing the first time around in the 70s, but had re-built the company into a global force after returning to the troubled tech giant in 1996.

When asked about the differences between "the two Steves," meaning Jobs and Ballmer, Schmidt dodged the question with the quip "there are differences in ability."

Schmidt expounded on other topics during the interview, including his time at Sun Microsystems and Novell. Asked for a prediction on the future of computing, Schmidt said the industry had "exhausted" the possibilities of desktop computers as a platform and that the future of leaders and startups would be fueled by the priorities of mobile, local and social.

by MacNN Staff