Nicholas Carr has an interesting article about Google and Apple taking on the rest of the world within “the next months”:
“At this very moment, in a building somewhere in Silicon Valley, I guarantee you that a team of engineers from Google and Apple are designing a set of devices that, hooked up as terminals to Google’s “supercomputer,” will define how we use computers in the future. You can see various threads of this system today - in Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch, its dot-mac service, its iLife and iWork applications as well as in Google’s Apps suite and advertising system, not to mention its vast data-center network. What this team is doing right now is weaving all those threads together into what will be, for most of us, the fabric of cloud computing. (This is so big, you need at least two metaphors to describe it.)”
Interesting thoughts and this might be true, but Apple with a 3% worldwide(!) market share and Google with a much higher penetration (currently worldwide about 37 billion searches) are on a different level in their company history. I also believe that a collaboration of these two giants won’t dominate the market, b/c other large software companies (e.g. M$), the ISPs as well as the Telcos (which currently are on track of running the show worldwide) have other ideas than seeing these two companies taking on their market share.
I can imagine that the personal computer will be a “mobile” and currently Nokia and others run the show everywhere outside the US (e.g. Nokias market share is 50% in China, 70% in India). So nothing really to worry about…
