Yesterday’s announcement by Apple that Google C.E.O. Eric Schmidt will join its board means that half of Apple’s eight person board has ties to the search giant.
This means several things in the context of the Web, emerging technologies, and business. First and foremost, it means that Apple is looking to the Web as a platform for more applications. We can probably look for more Web-dependent products from Apple in the years to come. This is especially true if, as some analysts predict, Google is planning to take its omnipresent WiFi experiment in San Francisco to other cities in the coming years.
Apple’s latest computer products already offer blogging and podcasting capabilities straight out of the box, and with further strategic ties to Google, I can’t help but wonder whether Apple might decide to delve further into this space. Could the next few years bring an even more robust Apple blogging platform to the marketplace? Such an offering would likely entice many a prospective business blogger to become an Apple user purely for simplicity’s sake. It would be good for Apple and for the business blogosphere, which plays right in to Google’s waiting hands.
Only time will tell exactly how this relationship will play out, but the 30,000 foot view suggests that Apple’s future became a even more Web-based in the past 24 hours.
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