Schmidt's long-time coming resignation

05-08-2009

by Ralph Averbuch

The surprise over the Google boss's resignation is why it took this long to happen?

It's not going to come as entirely surprising that Google's boss, Eric Schmidt, has finally resigned from the board of Apple. If anything, people will be wondering just how he managed to justify his presence there for so long. When he first took on the role of a board director at Apple things looked very different indeed. Apple hadn't yet moved into the mobile phone and apps business. For that matter neither had Google. Now we have the iPhone in one camp and Google's mobile OS Android in the other. Then there's browsing. Apple is serious about leveraging its existing customer relationships to get people to take up its perfectly good Safari browser. Ditto now for Google since its surprise launch of the Chrome browser. And now that Google has made its intention to launch a full-blown computer OS clear (also to be called Chrome), it's really very hard to see any areas where there will not be a clear conflict of interest. All Google need do now is declare its intention to actually build its own branded computers and we will have come full circle. And in case you doubt that possibility, Google is widely known to build its own server solutions, thus has a level of expertise in this arena too. Of course, that's not to seriously suggest that Google is going to go into the hardware business. It doesn't need to. All the far eastern handset and PC box-builders will do that heavy-lifting for it. But the fact is that Eric Schmidt and everyone at Apple could see the writing on the wall a long time ago. The question is, why resign now and not a year ago? It will be fertile ground for all sorts of conspiracy theories for years to come.

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