They said it could never last, and sure enough, after a tumultuous three year relationship plagued by anti-trust legislators, Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt has parted company with Apple. The growing conflicts in interests between the two technology titans made Schmidt’s position on the Apple look increasingly untenable, and so it has proven with the announcement that he will be stepping down on their board.
It’s not hard to see why so many viewed Schmidt’s alignment with Apple as potentially anti-competitive. With Google already dominating the search market and diversifying elsewhere, Apple have rebuilt a technology empire around the Mac, iPod (including iTunes) and iPhone. With the release of the Android phone operating system, Google found themselves in direct competition with Apple; something which would not have been openly welcomed by Steve Jobs et al.
More…
Google CEO Eric Schmidt has publicly slammed state intrusion determining how civilians use the Internet. In the report by The Telegraph, Schmidt claims that “if they don’t listen to us it is at their peril” – very ominous indeed; which serves as a thinly veiled attack on governments throughout the world, most notably Iran and China, who have decided to step in and filter what can be searched for.
The importance of the Internet in the creation and subsequent proliferation of news has come into focus in recent weeks. Ordinarily secretive states with little or no foreign journalistic contact, have had their barriers smudged by increasing numbers of videos and messages from within their own populous. Facebook, YouTube and Twitter have been right at the cutting edge of this distribution; a process that has invariably also involved the world’s most popular search engine, Google.
More…
Barely a day goes by currently without someone talking about the new Microsoft Bing search engine. Some of it positive, a good deal of it negative. But the word of mouth campaign that appears to be happening is seemingly getting under the skin of a few of the rival execs.
Yahoo executive Carol Bartz hasn’t pulled any punches in her damning criticism of Microsoft and Bing itself. She had this to say about Statcounter’s results that found Bing had overtaken Yahoo last week (as we reported in the post Bing Leapfrogs Yahoo! in First Week) “They didn’t beat us by much. It was one day. I think it’s gosh maybe it was in Omaha some place; It was some small area.”
More…
