Mr. Schmidt. (Photo: flickr.com/jolieodell)

Google chairman Eric Schmidt recently sat down for a brief chat with the Wall Street Journal. Perhaps hoping for a bit of good old off-the-cuff Schmidt, the Journal inquired as to how the relationship with Apple was faring these days. But it seems it was elder-statesman Schmidt who showed up.

"It's always been on and off," Mr. Schmidt admitted of relations between the two companies. But rather than publicly reveling in his rival's disgrace re: maps, he made the very mature point that tiffs between massive companies aren't really the simple barroom knife-fights that those of us in the tech press so dearly love depicting. Think along the lines of a disagreement between the U.S. and China:

The press would like to write the sort of teenage model of competition, which is, 'I have a gun, you have a gun, who shoots first?'

The adult way to run a business is to run it more like a country. They have disputes, yet they've actually been able to have huge trade with each other. They're not sending bombs at each other.

Very mature! However, just a few lines later, he slips in a bit of baiting:

It's extremely curious that Apple has chosen to sue Google's partners and not Google itself.

There's that trollface!