I retired from personal blogging in July 2008.
But you can find me over at http://blog.xero.com.
Apple has just announced the Google CEO, Eric Schmidt has joined the board of Apple.
Wow!
So that accelerates the rumours of an Apple Sun Merger. But really, is Apple going to make a big push into the Enterprise Server market?
More interesting to me is that the worlds biggest server side computing company creates a stronger link with arguably the most dynamic client computing platform company - who operates in a much faster revision cycle than the incumbant.
What do you think? Is this a big deal?
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I really don’t think this has much to do with Sun.
1.) Sun has very little to offer Apple.
2.) Jobs takes Eastwood’s advice to heart - “A Man’s got to know his limitations.” Jobs knows that he’d rather do fewer things exceptionally well than be all things to all people.
I would think that being friendly with Google is of more benefit to Apple than being friendly with Sun at this point.
Apple have struggled to find a niche in the server market for quite some time. When we last met their server group at Cupertino, they admitted that they had a big issue with positioning themselves as a serious player in that arena - and at that stage they were just talking Workgroup servers, with no focus at all on Enterprise.
Maybe they’re figuring on buying the leverage that they need to accelerate them into that field, but when you are in the Enterprise space, the IT departments in the corporations are all about corporate standards such Microsoft .NET compliance, clustering, failover, yadda yadda - and they truly dismiss Apple servers as being toys. There’s still that stigma to get over.
I think it’s definitely newsworthy. There are a hundreds of people Apple could have asked. So to specifically go to Schmidt, and for him to accept (or even the other way round) is very interesting.
I don’t see this as being a hardware-oriented relationship - I believe this is all about media, and the respective influences that AAPL and GOOG have in this area. Google-supplied advertising could well play a part within Apple’s growing, captive audience, and could be used to drive revenue for both companies. Whether this happens at the iTunes level or from within apps/OS, will be interesting.