As you should’ve heard, Google CEO Eric Schmidt was invited this week onto Apple’s Board of Directors.
This comes after Apple completed one of the last phases of their year-long transition from IBM’s PowerPC to Intel’s x86 processor with the replacement of the PowerMac G5 by the Mac Pro.
So….why was Google’s CEO invited to their BoD?
Now that they’re just about done with getting onto the same level as most other PC makers (HP, Dell, Lenovo), what else are they going to do in order to keep themselves attractive (or make themselves more so) with potential customers?
I mean, they’ve done everything with the Mac OS X platform since its introduction at the turn of this century. They now have the hardware that they want, and they’ve had the software downpacked for years (even though, with the transition, more is to be expected from it), so what’s next for Apple?
I think that they’re planning upon launching a foray into the Web.
Their first partnership with Google was with the creation of Safari’s upper-left search bar (similar to the one in Firefox) back in 2003. However, apart from iTunes and iWeb, they haven’t been doing significant with the Web ever since (except for those goddamned embedded Quicktime videos).
Ironically, it was upon one of Steve Jobs’ NEXT workstations that (Sir) Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web (HTML, URL, and HTTP) back in 1989-1991.
But honestly, I think that Steve and Apple are going to launch a web platform, by themselves or with others like Google, after Leopard begins to be preinstalled on all Intel-based Macs (which, if the scheduling for Mac OS X 10.1 was any indicator, should begin within a year of the announcement at WWDC).
What could it look like? How will it work?
What changes will be made by Apple in order to make the Mac “web-ready”?
I don’t think we’ll know until at least next year’s WWDC.
That is interesting. It’ll probably be something to do with Leopard… but first off, what do you mean by web platform? =/ But… it’s really interesting. Maybe they’ll use it for Mac to Mac communication, but why involve Google?
Something scary, possible, but unlikely… would be the ability for Apple to, in realtime, see and search through connected users’ machines. Uber privacy violation, but when it comes to “securty”, privacy doesn’t exist anymore.
Oh well, just a thought~
Good points.
What I mean by web platform is, besides what they’re already doing (iWeb, .Mac), such key areas as web graphics. Adobe, with their Photoshop/CS2 and (since ’05) Flash, already owns the web graphics scene, and has a long history with Apple (Photoshop was first released for Mac OS System 6, preceding a Windows premiere by two years; the PDF was the design paradigm for OSX’s graphics-rendering layer, Quartz, and Adobe’s Display PostScript served a similar purpose for NeXTstep). But with Adobe’s purchase of Macromedia (a web-graphics specialist), and with the ever-increasing rise of Flash as a prime medium of graphic/video communication on the web (a la Newgrounds and Youtube), Apple could be seeing this as threatening.
I mean, have you ever *seen* Flash on Apple’s website? Even the video swivels for the iMac display are made in that cludgy Quicktime that no one really wants (except for video editors).
So web graphics is one hypothetical field that Apple could be going into. As I’ve mentioned before, Microsoft’s been planning their own move against Adobe’s hegemony with Vista (although I’m sure that, like most of MS’s Vista-related aspirations, it probably was pulled at the last minute). However, how Google would be involved with that is just as beyond me as it is with you, apart from Google Video (which is Flash-based, browser-wise).
But see, search and spy by Apple? I think that’s already being done with iDisk, which is akin to something that Google was rumoured a while back to be trying out, GDrive (.Mac can go up to 4GB, while GDrive was to be unlimited).
You mean the see, search, and spy being what I said about the realtime sight into people’s drives, right? Meh. I don’t know what they’d want with my stuff. Anime, Fanfiction, etcetc. 😉