Over the past three decades, a few titanic rivalries have defined the technology industry’s megatrends, ultimately determining which products eventually end up in consumers’ and companies’ hands.
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Now, adding to the annals of competition that include Microsoft’s clashes with Apple in the ’80s, IBM in the ’90s, and Google in this decade, the new defining rivalry in tech may be between Google and Apple. Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s resignation from Apple’s board on Aug. 3 highlights the degree to which these companies are more foe than friend.
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By most measures — revenue growth, stock appreciation, magazine cover stories — Apple and Google are the two most successful and influential companies of the past decade. Yet their visions for how the computer industry will shape up in the next one could hardly diverge more. They are both very innovative companies with very different ways of innovating, says Henry Chesbrough, director of the Center for Open Innovation at the University of California at Berkeley. They’ve both been very successful, but there’s a contest of different approaches going on here.
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Google is the standard-bearer for a wide-open world of Web standards in which programmers should be able to run nearly any software on almost any computing device. From Google’s perspective, the more the merrier — so long as those programs, devices, and Web sites create places for Google to sell online ads.
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Open World vs. Tight Control
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Apple’s view is sharply different. The company keeps its ecosystem of software developers carefully manicured and maintains tight control over what software can be sold for its iPhone. The reasons range from filtering out schlock applications to what some observers say is putting the kibosh on applications that compete with Apple’s own offerings or those of iPhone wireless carrier ATT. That may have been why Apple blocked Web-calling software Google Voice…