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Mutual dislike of Microsoft won’t salvage Google and Apple’s broken BFF bromance

The days of Google and Apple having a cuddly relationship appear to be ending, and unified communications has played a small part in the break-up.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt resigned from Apple’s board of directors today, just a few days after the FCC opened an inquiry into why Apple rejected the Google Voice application from its iPhone App Store. Google Voice, based on the technology Google acquired with GrandCentral, is sort of a UC-on-the-cheap technology, as pointed out by our Click to Talk blogger, Tony Bradley.  At it’s core, Google Voice allows users to establish a single phone number which can be set to ring any number of devices - desk phones, mobile phones, home phones. It also has some unified messaging features, such as visual voice mail and online voice mail access, and it offers some other useful features, such as call recording, conference calling and directory assistance.

When Apple rejected the Google Voice application, many bloggers were upset. Some suspected that Apple was trying to protect AT&T from losing revenue, since Google Voice users can easily use the technology to move a phone call from their mobile device to a land-line. However, the picture is much more complicated than that.

As Dave Michaels pointed out on his blog, Pin Drop Soup, Apple and Google are now competitors. Although Google remains largely a Web-based software company and Apple remains mostly a hardware company, that distinction isn’t enough to keep this bromance alive. Michaels writes: “Well, maybe not a ‘primary’ competitor since Google doesn’t make hardware. But Google does make a browser, a cell phone platform, and an OS - direct alternatives to those made by Apple.”

Historically, Google and Apple have been relatively friendly toward, based on a mutual distrust of Microsoft. Schmidt’s presence on Apple’s board formalized that friendship. But now the companies’ interests are diverging. Google, which makes the bulk of its revenue in online advertising, wants a wireless Internet that is as open as its wired cousin is. Apple, like Microsoft and the majority of wireless service providers, want maintain a market where devices, operating systems, and carriers have a high degree of control over how wireless users access the Internet.

Apple and Google should have seen this split coming. After all, Microsoft is mostly a software company, too, and it has been Apple’s fiercest rival for decades.

Watch out, Google: Agito on Google Voice on BlackBerry

I gave a nod to Agito when I blogged about Google Voice on BlackBerry, noting that the big G was stepping into the former’s fixed-mobile convergence (FMC) turf with the launch of the BlackBerry and Android apps for Google Voice, which integrates one-number dialing across multiple lines so that, for example, a telecommuter can give one number and be reached whether he’s at the office, at home, in a hotel, or on the beach with his cell phone.

Agito’s obviously not a company to rest on its laurels, as Christian Gilby, director of product marketing for Agito, quickly put together a video showing the company’s software routing a Google Voice call over a Wi-Fi network:

Not shabby at all, and while the FMC and mobile unified communications fields are certainly going to get much, much more crowded over the next few years, Agito’s demonstrated they have a large head start with the technology. It’ll be interesting to see if they can keep their lead.

Cisco: Google Wave ‘validating’ WebEx work

Since I wrote about Google Wave’s UC potential, I’ve been curious as to Cisco’s response. After all, as Frost & Sullivan analyst Vanessa Alvarez pointed out, Google and Cisco could be the best of frenemies.

After chatting with Cisco directly however, it looks like that friendship will have to wait at least a bit to blossom (they contacted me as a direct response to the article). Grace Kim, a senior manager of marketing for Cisco’s WebEx collaboration suite, told me first and foremost the announcement of Google Wave was a sign Cisco was leading the way.

“I think, number one, they’re validating the growth and potential of our SaaS-based applications,” she said. “We’ve been in this space and they’re coming aboard the web-based application model.”

Google’s “coming aboard” the SaaS model? Google IS the SaaS-based business model: Its strikes against Microsoft have come in search, sure, but it was only when the search giant unveiled Google Docs that it truly encroached on Redmond’s territory. Cisco acquired WebEx in 2007, while GMail was launched (in Beta, naturally!) in 2004, with more and more UC features added regularly since then, including chat, video, text … Is conferencing that far behind?

Grace said the WebEx team hadn’t been paying particularly close attention to the Wave news, however, beyond reading some of the news as it came up, and re-iterated that Cisco was committed to interoperability (without signaling Wave or any other product in particular) as a cornerstone to success.

“We’re always looking at all the vendors and where the market’s going and to interoperate with what our customers want,” she said. “We’ll continue to evaluate it as opportunities arrive.”

Google Wave & Cisco WebEx: The best of frenemies?

Just got off the phone with Vanessa Alvarez, an analyst with Frost & Sullivan, who suggested that rather than Google Wave threatening Cisco WebEx and other collaboration vendors, this could be a perfect opportunity for unlikely partnerships.

“The Ciscos and Siemens and other UC vendors should be looking at this concept to see what they can do to [learn from] or even to interoperate with this platform,” she said. “There’s been talk about Cisco WebEx, and it’s really prime to interconnect with Google Wave.”

But wait, isn’t Google Wave infringing on Cisco and Siemens hard fought turf?

Alvarez said it can be a win-win, because Google’s had trouble penetrating the enterprise market while the UC traditional vendors have stumbled drumming up developer support.

“We’ve told the UC community to start nurturing their own developers, and Avaya has DevConnect, but Cisco has had trouble with that,” she said.

Whatever partnerships follow from the Wave announcement, Alvarez said she’s excited about its potential.

“It’s definitely ground breaking in the sense of what it does, it definitely revolutionizes the current state of the market today,” she said. “But it has a long way to go. It still is in a very infant state.”

There’s even Google Wave discussion on Cisco’s own forums, where Dan Miller, founder and analyst with Opus Research, writes in a posting:

In the near term a feature called “playback” is destined to be the difference maker. It is a feature that enables Wave users to tap into conversations at any point in time – past or present. While it is tempting to think of such a conversation as a “thread” in a email trail or discussion group, tapping into (and reviewing the entries to) a Wave is tangibly different. Most dramatically, entries are displayed on the screens of all participants in real time (or close to it). So there are times when participants, literally, work on the same documents at the same time. To paraphrase Gene Kelly: “That’s Collaboration.”

Playback is also the doctor’s prescription for social media-driven attention deficit disorder. It is the mechanism that enables people to search and tap into an ongoing “thread”, review it from the beginning and work up to real time. But, as the infomercial goes “that’s not all”. Wave enables picture sharing and the addition of any media feed for that matter.

Read more at SearchUnifiedCommunications about Google Wave’s UC potential.