GAPPLE?

I have been jonesing to write a post on a potential Google/Apple merger ever since Google's Erick Schmidt was elected to join Apple's Board of Directors last August.   Does it make sense.....hell yes!

Instead  of me gassing away at this theory, I thought it would be fun to quote the rationalization that was provided on the Fake Steve Jobs Blog (admittedly not a very authoritative source....but damn funny!!!).

"So the idea I guess would be that we'd bring Squirrel Boy onto the board for a while, let him learn all about the company and develop a comfort level, and then at some point Apple becomes the consumer-facing side of the Google cloud operation. The combined company controls search, and controls the utility computing data centers that Google is still secretly building, a virtual supercomputer girding the globe, in effect the world's most powerful single machine which in ten years will be delivering not just email and word processing but also television programming, movies, games and phone calls. Basically, everything. Cable companies? Phone companies? Our kids won't know what they were, unless they look them up on Wikipedia, using GoogleNet.

What does Apple bring to the party? We have the best UI engineers in the world, plus a really slick Unix-based desktop OS that meshes pretty easily with Google's Linux-based back end. (Yeah, our engineers have tinkered together.) Sure our desktop OS has very little market share, but perhaps we boost that by evolving the Mac and selling loads of iPhones and also creating some new kind of home computing appliance or even a Google-branded business appliance that puts a pretty face on all those in-the-cloud Google applications and makes them work together really well and interoperate easily with our iLife suite, which just happens to complement Google's applications.

Meanwhile Microsoft keeps cranking out its bloated, butt-ugly OS and apps, and struggles to figure out search, and struggles to develop its Live stuff, and struggles to fight off Linux in the desktop and server markets, a taxing and exhausting battle that ends up being pointless when customers stop building data centers and instead run everything in Google's cloud, on Google's version of Linux, or Open Solaris, or some OS that Google develops on its own."

Signs of the collaboration are everywhere.  Look at your iPhone (if you do not have one yet, shame on you).  Every internet enabled application (sans Safari) is Googles: Google Maps, Google Search, Google YouTube.  Google has started to highlight Apple based applications for download here and they have recently launched the first Google Mac Blog.

I know that it's probably a long shot....but if there is even a sliver of a hope that there is life beyond Microsoft, I am grabbing on to it!

Jeremi Karnell-President, One to One Interactive