Mobile computing war: Apple, Google fight getting personal

For one it is a betrayal. For the other a matter of survival. A divide that even friendship could not bridge. Divergent philosophies and, more importantly, differing business visions have now left Apple and Google on the opposite sides of a mobile computing war

It looked like the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Three years ago, Eric E Schmidt, the chief executive of Google, jogged on to a San Francisco stage to shake hands with Steve Jobs, Apple’s co-founder, to help him unveil a transformational wonder gadget - the iPhone - before throngs of journalists and adoring fans at the annual MacWorld Expo.

Google and Apple had worked together to bring Google’s search and mapping services to the iPhone, the executives told the audience, and Schmidt joked that the collaboration was so close that the two men should simply merge their companies and call them “AppleGoo”.  

“Steve, my congratulations to you,” Schmidt told his corporate ally. “This product is going to be hot.” Jobs acknowledged the compliment with an ear-to-ear smile.

Today, such warmth is in short supply. Jobs, Schmidt and their companies are now engaged in a battle royal over the future and shape of mobile computing and cell phones, with implications that are reverberating across the digital landscape. This month, Apple sued HTC, the Taiwanese maker of mobile phones that run Google’s Android operating system, contending that HTC had violated iPhone patents. The move was widely seen as the beginning of a legal assault by Apple on Google itself, as well as an attempt to slow Google’s plans to extend its dominion to mobile devices. 

Apple believes that devices like smartphones and tablets should have tightly controlled, proprietary standards and that customers should take advantage of services on those gadgets with applications downloaded from Apple’s own App Store.

Google, on the other hand, wants smartphones to have open, non-proprietary platforms so users can freely roam the Web for apps that work on many devices. Google has long feared that rivals like Microsoft or Apple or wireless carriers like Verizon could block access to its services on devices like smartphones, which could soon eclipse computers as the primary gateway to the Web. Google’s promotion of Android is, essentially, an effort to control its destiny in the mobile world.

While the discord between Apple and Google is in part philosophical and involves enormous financial stakes, the battle also has deeply personal overtones and echoes the ego-fuelled fisticuffs that have long characterised technology industry feuds. (Think Intel vs AMD, Microsoft vs everybody, and so on.)

Yet according to interviews with two dozen industry watchers, Silicon Valley investors and current and former employees at both companies - most of whom requested anonymity to protect their jobs or business relationships - the clash between Schmidt and Jobs offers an unusually vivid display of enmity and ambition.