Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s resignation from the Apple board early this month has tech industry observers picking their seats and calling for hot dogs wrapped in grape leaves. Another tech industry battle of giants may be shaping up, this time to rule the mobile Internet. And for once Microsoft will be watching from the stands instead of fighting it out as one of the gladiators.
Peter Burrows of Business Week gets props for putting the looming fight in historical context. Battles royal are nothing new to the tech industry. In the 1980s it was a double round as Microsoft both wrested the PC away from IBM and muscled past Apple to dominate the personal computing market. In the late 90s it was Microsoft again versus upstart Netscape in the browser wars – a desktop battle over access to the Internet.
What makes the looming Apple-Google battle an epic is that more than just market share is at stake. Like the battles of the 80s it pits open standards against a closed ecosystem. IBM took for granted that the hardware manufacturer would call the shots, the way it was in mainframe days. Apple thought the same thing. Microsoft upended them both, first turning desktop computers into a commodity, then opening its operating system to third-party applications. ‘Openness’ is not a word we associate with Microsoft, the company everyone loves to hate, but it conquered the world by letting in third party apps.
Apple survived, proving that even in the tech industry there are second acts. With the iPhone it has jumped to an early lead in the industry’s fastest-growing segment, the mobile Internet. But one thing hasn’t changed since Apple II days. The iPhone App Store may have thousands of apps, but if you want to play, Apple is referee and scorekeeper … as Google found out when it had an app rejected.
Google, in contrast, is the new champion of open standards, with its Android operating system slated for use in a slew of competing smartphone brands. And with its push for cloud computing it is proposing to move the apps onto the Internet, making the devices in our hands really just super browsers. So the stage is set for a new clash of philosophies: Apple, stylish and powerful but offering what Burrows calls a ‘walled garden,’ while Google offers the cloud.
Meanwhile, what of Microsoft? It hasn’t put down its sword completely, needless to say: Even as Google and Apple square off over the mobile Internet, it is taking aim at Google’s core business with Bing. But Microsoft has always been business-oriented (which is why MS Word has 10,000 features most of us never use and wish would go away). Bing, a ‘decision engine,’ is pretty unabashedly a shopping engine – and also a suitable platform for enterprise search.
Microsoft has never been a great consumer company. It conquered the computing market by offering business productivity suites, with the home computer a bit of an afterthought. It may be leaving old rival Apple and new rival Google to fight it out for the consumer-centric mobile Internet, and concentrating its own efforts on the business end. Meanwhile, take your seats as we await the march of the gladiators.