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Nickdfresh
08-31-2006, 12:31 PM
August 31, 2006
An Apple-Google Friendship, and a Common Enemy
By JOHN MARKOFF

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 30 — When Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, was named to Apple Computer’s board this week, it did more than signal a potential alliance between powerful companies. It touched off a wave of speculation about the motives of the man behind the move: Apple’s co-founder, Steven P. Jobs.

“The old social networks in Silicon Valley run very deep,” noted AnnaLee Saxenian, a leading scholar of the industry and dean of the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley. “And this reminds us that Silicon Valley has a common enemy to the north.”

She did not even need to name the enemy she had in mind: Microsoft, the leading rival to both Mr. Jobs and Mr. Schmidt through most of their careers. Now, with the Internet era remaking the competitive landscape, their prospects for outdueling Microsoft’s Windows empire may be better than ever.

Even in a valley where careers leave few degrees of separation between any two companies, the Apple announcement was remarkable. Mr. Schmidt, brought in five years ago to guide Google and its young founders to a stock offering, is Silicon Valley’s consummate insider. Mr. Jobs, who spent years in the industry wilderness before retaking the helm of Apple, is its defining outsider.

But Mr. Schmidt and Mr. Jobs, both 51, share a common outlook: that computing technologies can be remarkably disruptive forces in business and in society at large.

There are many possibilities for a complementary strategy between their companies. This week, for example, Google announced that it was beginning to weave together a number of services that could be a Web-based competitor to Microsoft Office. And Mr. Jobs has skillfully driven a wedge into the dominant PC computing standard established by Microsoft’s Windows software and Intel’s hardware — the so-called Wintel alliance — by recently adopting Intel’s processor for Apple’s Macintosh computers.

Mr. Schmidt’s appointment set off chatter about linking the Google search engine to iTunes, Apple’s online music service — reinforcing Apple’s pre-eminence in a category where Microsoft is seeking a grip.

That would also have broader implications for the entertainment industry, an industry repeatedly put on the defensive by both Apple and Google.

“The studios, and for that matter, all the copyright owners, don’t want to see only one place become their sole retail outlet — whether it is Google or Apple or Sony,” said William Randolph Hearst III, a veteran Silicon Valley executive and investor.

At Apple and at Pixar, the digital movie studio he founded, Mr. Jobs has forced the recording industry and Hollywood to follow his lead in selling products in the digital world. His alliance with the Walt Disney Company — whose board he joined this year after Disney bought Pixar for $7.4 billion — has given him added leverage.

Now, by moving Apple a step closer to Google, with its command over online advertising, Mr. Jobs may be positioning Apple to play an even more influential role in the converging worlds of media and computing.

“Clearly what Disney was for Pixar, Google could be for Apple,” said Tony Perkins, an entrepreneur and editor of AlwaysOn Network, a Web site for Silicon Valley insiders.

Mr. Jobs and Mr. Schmidt refused to comment on the appointment, announced Tuesday, beyond prepared statements that they were looking forward to working together.

The appointment is Mr. Schmidt’s first move to broaden his role since coming to Google. Earlier in his career, Mr. Schmidt was a prominent Democrat and outspoken on the industry’s political agenda, but he abandoned that role when he joined Google. Now it appears that he is beginning to play on a broader stage again.

“Eric has clearly arrived as one of Silicon Valley’s new power brokers,” said William V. Joy, a partner at a leading venture capital firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and co-founder of Sun Microsystems, where Mr. Schmidt was long an executive.

Mr. Schmidt and Mr. Jobs have their roots in Silicon Valley’s second generation, the engineers and innovators who came after the early era of semiconductor pioneering. Their acquaintance dates from the early 1990’s, when Mr. Schmidt, heading software at Sun, approached Mr. Jobs, then running Next Computer, about technical cooperation between the companies.

While Mr. Schmidt’s credentials include a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, his early outlook on the industry was shaped when he worked at the Palo Alto Research Center, the legendary Xerox outpost known as PARC, where the first personal computers and modern networks were created in the 1970’s.

In contrast, Mr. Jobs, a college dropout, started out as a brash hobbyist who in the mid-70’s foresaw a market for the cobbled-together computer that his friend Stephen Wozniak had built to show off at the Homebrew Computer Club in Palo Alto. The result was Apple, which they founded in 1977. PARC was also a touchstone for Mr. Jobs, whose visit there in the late 70’s exposed him to the graphical user interface and the computer mouse, two concepts he eventually brought to market with the Lisa and then the Macintosh.

Both men experienced long periods of relative adversity outside of the limelight of computing. Mr. Jobs was forced out of Apple in 1985 by his handpicked chief executive, John Sculley. He then founded Next, which he ran without great success until he sold it to Apple in 1996 and rejoined the Apple fold.

Mr. Schmidt left his position at Sun Microsystems in 1997 to take over as chief executive at Novell, a network computing pioneer that, like Apple, had been a victim of Microsoft’s rise to dominance in desktop computing. After four years of trying to turn the struggling company around, he left to become chief executive at Google, where his experience was meant to offer balance to the two young founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

Now Mr. Schmidt will bring his experience into play at Apple, in part helping Mr. Jobs add to the independence of his board while the company investigates possible irregularities in stock option grants to Mr. Jobs and other Apple executives.

Executives who know the two men say they have not been close in the past, but are part of a tightly knit fraternity that draws their companies together at the executive level. Former Vice President Al Gore is a special adviser to Google and also holds a seat on Apple’s board. Another link between the companies is William V. Campbell, chairman of Intuit, the financial software company whose Quicken and TurboTax products have prevailed against Microsoft’s challenge.

Mr. Campbell was an early and close behind-the-scenes consultant at Google and is a former Apple executive and current board member. He has long been a confidant of Mr. Jobs, and visited with him while Mr. Jobs was recovering from cancer surgery two years ago.

While Google’s and Apple’s strategies are aligned in many ways, there are also potential areas of conflict. Both companies are rumored to be developing hand-held devices known as smart phones that would potentially compete. If the two companies do cross paths, it will be part of a local tradition.

“It’s part of the classic yin-yang competition in Silicon Valley, where innovators cross-fertilize each other’s thinking and then go out and clash in the marketplace,” said Paul Freiberger, a Silicon Valley historian.


Copyright 2006 The New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/31/technology/31valley.html?hp&ex=1157083200&en=26dae55b27ab5257&ei=5094&partner=homepage) Company

VAN HLN CA
09-06-2006, 03:49 PM
Imagine the clusterfuck of a device we would see if the Windows smart phone came out! You would need an extra power source and external drive beltpack.

Nitro Express
09-07-2006, 02:02 AM
I had to pay over $300 for Microsoft Office for my MacBook laptop. Needed to be compatable with clients you know. It's such a piece of shit it slows my computer down everytime I run Word or Excel. Can you say spagehti code? Then it always makes a pop up for updates when I sign onto the internet.

With the price difference closed, Apple is going to make a killing. My MacBook was actually cheaper than the equivalent Dell or HP notebook if you count the extra software needed to try and match the out of the box Apple capabilities.