Eric Schmidt told an interviewer from the Associated Press that Google is absolutely not going to release an electronic payment system to compete with eBay’s PayPal.
We do not intend to offer a person-to-person, stored-value payments system.
That’s one straightforwad quote. I hate it when someone outright lies to the media, so, with a statement like that, I hope Eric is being straight. Otherwise, gotta call him out on that. You don’t want to comment? Say “No comment”. We’ll see when the word comes down.
Oh, and thanks to Brock for “G-Money”. Best one so far.
Meanwhile, this story still getting a lot of press. Charlene Li suggests Google create a micropayment based system to supplement it ads network, allowing you to buy premium content on the fly for little money on AdSense sites that sign up for it. A very compelling idea.
Silicon Beat notes Schmidt has been calling media outlets to deny the story, while eBay’s CEO Meg Whitman told them that Google could never hope to compete with PayPal:
We do a lot of business with Google and we typically don’t comment on rumors. What I can tell you is that PayPal has been around since 1999. We’ve got 70 million acocunts. Talk about the ability to manage a new payment service. Think about the infrastructure that we’ve built up over those six years in terms of customer support, fraud mitigation, the ability to really understand and comply with all the laws that have gone into place since 9/11. This is a highly regulated space now, and something we’ve developed a real expertise in. So we feel pretty good about our competitive position and the fact we that we have critical mass here. But we actually don’t mind competition; it makes us better.
Nathan Weinberg writes the popular InsideGoogle blog, offering the latest news and insights about Google and search engines.
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