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Schmidt told the Financial Times that Google was concerned that Microsoft might leverage the estimated 75% market share of its own Internet Explorer browser to hamstring Google’s online applications in favour of its own web tools.

“Microsoft

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has a history of favouring its own applications and I can give you 500,000 pages of court testimony, document web blogs and so forth and so on about that,” he said, though it should be said in Microsoft’s defence that its chief executive Steve Ballmer said recently that those days were behind it.

Schmidt also echoed what others from Google have said, that whatever Microsoft’s intentions, Internet Explorer is simply not up to the job of running modern web applications (or at least Google’s web applications).

“There is an opportunity for a platform and that platform for running these new applications is something that you can’t really do on IE7, and that’s the argument,” he said.

[photo: Eric Schmidt! WOW! Welcome Google to Argentina! =) by TheAlieness GiselaGiardino²³]