Potential problem: Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt is on the board of Apple. The concern leveled by many in the business world is that his position on the boards of both Google and Apple might decrease competition between the two. A lot of people, now that Google is doing the Chrome OS, have reignited concerns, thinking that the two companies might play softball with each other instead of each trying to build the better operating system to outdo the other.
But Chrome OS and Apple’s OS X should have very little overlap in terms of the markets which would use each. OS X is for laptops and desktops. Chrome OS is for netbooks. In my mind, this puts the two operating systems in very different categories. Sure, there is the hackintosh crowd that puts OS X on Dell Mini 10’s, and there is bound to be some curiosity on the Mac side of things that will see the more adept users running Chrome OS for a while, but to say that these two platforms are for the same market seems like an assumption which would be made by people who are a little less than informed.
Where you should care about the Google-Apple overlap is in the smartphone market, as that’s where Google and Apple are competing for the same thing. People who want iPhones could be people who want Android phones, and vice-versa. So minimizing competition between the companies in that regard would kind of suck for consumers. Yet it’s hard to imagine that either Google or Apple would take it easy on the other when it comes to bringing all they’ve got to the phone market. Both seem as if they’d want to win this standards battle (yes, that is in fact what it is), and both companies have such differing mentalities about the whole thing. Google wants your phone to be open, whereas Apple very much wants it to be closed. That makes for a very divided vision, and hence little likelihood that these two companies are in cahoots at the expense of consumers.
