Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) has waved a fond
farewell to board member Arthur Levinson. The former CEO of
Genentech will surely be missed, but in the end, his presence
had become a liability. Better to cut the cords cleanly than
to let Levinson become the focus of an antitrust inquiry.
This move is no surprise --
I've been expecting itsince the government started
sniffing around Google's backyard this
spring. Levinson and Google CEO Eric Schmidt shared time
between Google and the board of
Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL), and the conflicts of
interest between those two businesses were starting to pile
up:
iPhoneand Android are clashing head-on in the
smartphone arena. Move aside,
Research In Motion (Nasdaq: RIMM) and
Palm (Nasdaq: PALM), because Apple and
Google will soon be more important as phone designers than
either one of you.
Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) is sweating
bullets over the Google Chrome browser and upcoming system
platform. In that space, Apple's Mac OS X and Safari offer
direct competition again.
Schmidt chose to leave Apple's boardin August, and now
Levinson has completed the separation between Cupertino and
Mountain View. Well, almost; former Vice President Al Gore
kinda-sorta bridges the two tech campuses by serving on
Apple's board and being an official advisor to Google. We'll
see how long that fence-sitting situation lasts.
The mere fact that Apple and Google are competing in a
number of different markets is telling. The way I see it,
Apple is becoming a smaller and much more consumer-oriented
version of high-tech conglomerates
IBM (NYSE: IBM) and
Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ). The company
sells hardware, software, and services and is bound to step
on a few toes around Silicon Valley. And Google has become so
much more than the search engine that made it famous.
Nobody is claiming that Google Search is competing against
Apple, or that Google is building its own laptops. Yet both
companies have
matured and diversifiedto the point where conflict
becomes necessary -- and people need to choose sides.
This article was originally published as
Google Battles the Antitrust Demonson
Fool.com
Copyright © 2009 The Motley Fool, LLC. All rights
reserved.
|