Apple vs. Google

Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s departure from Apple’s board of directors may be the first salvo, said Peter Burrows in BusinessWeek, in the newest of the tech world’s key “titanic rivalries”—Microsoft vs. Apple, IBM, Netscape, then Google. With Apple vs. Google, the fight isn’t just iPhone vs. Android, or Mac OS X vs. Chrome OS; it’s over “this era’s central technological question”—should computing happen in Google’s “cloud” or on PCs and mobile devices?

Yes, the Apple-Google “battle has now clearly begun,” said Alex Salkever in AOL’s Daily Finance, but it’s more about Google’s “open” approach to technology—open standards, open source, open Web—against Apple’s tightly controlled and curated “Walled Garden.” The emblematic last straw was Apple’s rejection of the Google Voice iPhone app, which the FCC is looking into.

What’s the FCC, and thus the government, doing “taking sides” in this new rivalry? said Sascha Segan in PC World. Apple’s rejection of the Google Voice app was a dumb business move, but it wasn’t illegal and doesn’t pose any monopoly threat in the hyper-competitive smart-phone market. The only “rational explanation” for this “bizarre” inquiry is that Google has weight in the government, and it’s throwing it around.

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Now that Apple is “swimming with piranhas,” perhaps the “biggest shock,” said Bobbie Johnson in Britain’s The Guardian, is that it "ever seemed like a good idea" for Schmidt to sit on Apple's board. The two trendy tech giants might once have had common cause in their common enemy, Microsoft. But as Apple is finding out, to its dismay, “your enemy’s enemy is not always your friend.”