Redmond Yawning at Apple-Google Alliance?

Debra D'Agostino writes "Despite the media hype around Google CEO Eric Schmidt's appointment to Apple's board, CIO Insight Executive Editor Dan Briody says it's not that big a story. 'Apple and Google are already plenty tight,' he says. Arthur Levinson, CEO of Genentech, has been on both boards for years. And Al Gore and Intuit Chairman Bill Campbell are both Apple board members and advisors to Google. 'While it's fun to speculate about what an Apple-Google alliance could produce (GoogleMacs? MacGoogle? GoogleTunes?) this move is far from an alliance,' Briody writes. 'And even if it were, it wouldn't be first time that two upstart powerhouses have joined forces in an attempt to unseat Microsoft. Remember AOL-Netscape? Boy, they just steamrolled the team from Redmond, didn't they?'"

Board connections != product collaboration

[Infonaut]

If Apple and Google are so tight, where the hell is that Mac-compatible Google Talk voice chat client we were promised a year ago?

Likewise, how come Intuit has waffled back and forth over Mac support during Campbell's tenure on Apple's board? How come the presence of Ellison on Apple's board never resulted in any staggering Oracle+Apple ventures?

Boards of directors are supposed provide outside perspective and serve as a safeguard for shareholders. Whether they actually do this in the era of the massively overpaid chief executive is debatable, but it seems obvious that membership on a board doesn't lead to actual strategic connections between the two companies.

Re:Question from a Mac user

[tajmorton]

They don't actually use KHTML. Instead, they use a codebase called WebKit [webkit.org], a forked derivitive of KHTML.

Apple doesn't use much new code from KTHML anymore, but does contribute some back, although merging it into the KHTML tree is hard, because of the way the WebKit team makes patches. See the Wikipedia article on KHTML for more info. [wikipedia.org]

If you want stuff fixed in Safari, report bugs to the WebKit team [webkit.org].

Re:Question from a Mac user

[QuantumFTL]

Submit bugs to the KHTML/KJS bugzilla. I guarantee you, if you do that, the next Safari will be far improved (ie: where do you think they get their rendering engine from?)

WebKit is a fork of KHTML. Safari passed ACID2 well before "modern KHTML"-based browsers did because it is now a rather different beast - so different that many of the patches passed back to the original KHTML team are practically unusable. Making KHTML better at this point is nice, but unlikely to directly affect Safari.

Besides, shouldn't you just use Camino?

Re:Crush Microsoft?

[JPRelph]

we get an Apple and find out even point releases are sold seperately as upgrades

Apple charge for milestone releases (eg. 10.3 to 10.4) whereas the point releases are really 10.4.1 to 10.4.7. It's their naming strategy that makes it look like a smaller release, probably because they want to stick with Mac OS X for a bit longer before going to 11, but updating from 10.2 to 10.4 is a pretty massive upgrade even though it just looks like "2 point releases".

upstart powerhouses?

[thebdj]

two upstart powerhouses

Let us look at the definitions of upstart from Princeton Wordnet:

1. an arrogant or presumptuous person (Sounds more like Microsoft then Google, I cannot attest for Apple.)
2. a person who has suddenly risen to a higher economic status but has not gained social acceptance of others in that class (Apple is almost as old as Microsoft and unless my mind fails me, they had a graphical OS first. Google might be closer, but look at Google's core tech. They are considered the top, ahead of Microsoft, and have gained social acceptance.)

That handles the nouns. Now since they used it as an adjective:
1. characteristic of someone who has risen economically or socially but lacks the social skills appropriate for this new position.

Seriously, a horrible use of the word. If anyone lacks the social skills appropriate for their position it is Microsoft. We all know their tactics are less than admirable, and there are plenty of jokes about their social skills with regards to chairs. I just wish people would stop acting like Microsoft is some untouchable entity. I can only hope that I get to see the day they have a great fall.

Re:Slashdot lies.

[ClosedSource]

Or perhaps "need it for work" means you have to run one of the thousands of applications that run on Windows but aren't available for the Mac. I don't agree that the average Mac user is dumb, but let's not pretend that there are valid reasons to prefer Windows in certain circumstances.