Apple+Google?
On Monday Steve Jobs is taking the stage at Apple's worldwide developers conference to tell us all about Apple's latest products. He'll probably announced a new Ipod, tell us more about the iPhone etc etc. One announcement I'm almost sure of, however : A far reaching, cloud computing partnership with Google. Both companies have been hinting about it for months, and it makes perfect sense.
In a recent stockholder meeting, Steve Jobs admitted that .Mac has hasn’t achieved its full potential, but said the company was working on it.
Cloud computing is the hot new thing in the world of technology right now; Apple is a complete laggard; and it knows it needs to fix it. Apple makes beautiful hardware, but it hasn't improved on .Mac, its cloud based storage offering, in years. You get 1GB of storage on .Mac for $100. That's laughable in an era where you can get double that for nothing.
Eric Schmidt, Apple Board Member and Google CEO, said that there are going to be a lot of Apple-Google partnerships because they have "common competitors". Common competitors==Microsoft. Microsoft's bread and butter==Office. We've already seen a flurry of Google Applications for Macintosh, the GMaps and Gmail on the iPhone, but why not Google Docs and Spreadsheets integrated into .Mac? Seems like a perfect fit.
Google is SPENDING $5/domain for Apps users through its Adsense subsidiary. They WANT more non-paying users. Apple would be happy to offload the .Mac users on Google. Apple’s $100/year customers could get a premium version of Apps with desktop backups and larger file space and a lot of the benefits they currently enjoy. Apple isn’t a cloud vendor, it is a Hardware/Software company. They want to stick to what they do best.
2 votes
