Update | 5:07 p.m. Added link to YouTube’s start of its movie rental service.
Paul Sakuma/The Associated Press Friends or “frenemies”? Steve Jobs, left, of Apple and Eric Schmidt of Google in 2007.Consumers are witnessing the beginning of a new war between computer companies. Instead of the Apple-Microsoft conflict of the early 1980s, this fight is taking place between Apple and Google.
The latest skirmish: BusinessWeek reported Wednesday that Apple was in talks with Microsoft to make Bing the default search engine on the iPhone’s Safari Web browser. The article said the two companies had been negotiating for weeks over a possible partnership on the iPhone.
Apple and Google weren’t always “frenemies.” The companies seemed to band together against any number of competitors, Microsoft’s Windows Mobile included, in 2007 when the iPhone was introduced with numerous Google applications tightly integrated, including Gmail, the Google search engine and Google Maps.
But the friendship turned sour last year during a conflict over the Google Voice application and Apple’s refusal to allow the software into the iTunes App Store.
The Google Voice quarrel was also extremely confusing: Google said it was Apple’s fault, and Apple pointed the finger in the other direction. Eventually, the Federal Communications Commission stepped in and began investigating the dispute. Eventually, Google’s chief executive, Eric Schmidt, resigned from Apple’s board of directors.
To date, Google Voice still doesn’t exist for the iPhone, although Vic Gundotra, Google’s vice president of engineering, said in an interview at the Crunchies last year, “Google Voice will come to the iPhone soon — one way or the other.”
As Google and Apple enter new realms, the two companies are competing in more arenas than we can count. In mobile hardware and software, Apple has the iPhone, and Google has the Nexus One and its Android software. In cloud computing, Apple has MobileMe, and Google has its suite of Web applications, including Gmail, Google Docs and Google Calendar. As Google’s YouTube unit begins renting movies through its Web site, it will start competing with the highly successful iTunes store. Then there’s Picasa and iPhoto.
Traditionally, strong competition between rival companies can be good for customers, driving down prices and bringing better services.
But both Apple and Google have plenty of financial muscle to prolong the fight. Instead of a healthy competitiveness, customers could end up embroiled in format wars between applications they buy for their phones and the software they use on similar devices.