After Levinson, Apple-Google Infighting Likely Rises (GOOG, AAPL)
The board of director infighting may be heating up between Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) and Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL). First it was Google’s Chairman Eric Schmidt leaving, or being forced out, of the Apple board of directors. But now it…
No reasons were given for the departure here, but the obvious reason is that these two companies are no longer just co-existing competitors of Microsoft and/or Yahoo!. The fight is still going over voice applications and over operating systems, and is probably a fight that is far from over.
After comparing the two boards, Arthur Levinson is the last technical overlap. Former Vice President Al Gore is an Apple board member, and the most recent data we have seen still lists Gore as a “senior adviser” to Google. The growing competition over voice and operating systems will likely make the resignations from the boards a sideshow to the real competition that is heating up.
JON C. OGG
October 12, 2009
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Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.
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A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.
TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.
McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.
