Apple’s Spat With Google Is Getting Personal (via...

8:14 pm - Mon, Mar 15, 2010: 53 notes

Apple’s Spat With Google Is Getting Personal (via David Kaneda)

According to interviews with two dozen industry watchers, Silicon Valley investors and current and former employees at both companies — most of whom requested anonymity to protect their jobs or business relationships — the clash between Mr. Schmidt and Mr. Jobs offers an unusually vivid display of enmity and ambition.

At the heart of their dispute is a sense of betrayal: Mr. Jobs believes that Google violated the alliance between the companies by producing cellphones that physically, technologically and spiritually resembled the iPhone. In short, he feels that his former friends at Google picked his pocket.

It is remarkable how similar this recent Apple-Google feud is to Apple’s highly publicized battle with Microsoft in the past decade. Apple still believes strongly in tight, vertical integration, abstracting away the difference between hardware and software. Google, on the other hand—much like Microsoft before it—believes in merely providing the software or service for countless partners to adopt and use in their own devices.

Apple is clearly winning the smartphone war, even with only one new model in the past year, but I fear that their pigheaded stubbornness in refusing to relax control over its businesses will erode their significant technological edge and cut into their accumulated public goodwill.

The tide is turning, Apple. Learn to adapt or lose to Microsoft/Google once again. The Cold War of computing has begun…