Yesterday’s Apple press event saw the unveiling of new iMacs and major updates to the company’s iLife and iWork software suites. But it also provided further insight into the cosy relationship developing between Apple and Google, with greater integration between the two companies’ product lines.
What’s new? iMovie ‘08 adds the ability to upload video direct to YouTube, and iWeb (Apple’s web page creation software) now integrates with Google Maps and YouTube, along with support for Adsense.
Combine these efforts with the existing iPhone tie-ins — Google Maps, YouTube, Gmail — along with AppleTV’s recently added support for YouTube, and we can see how the Apple/Google alliance is strengthening.
And there’s more to come.
Taking questions from the floor, Apple CEO Steve Jobs was asked about the company’s partnership with Google, particularly in reference to Adsense. “We are working closer with Google, they offer back end services we want to tie into our offerings”, replied Jobs. “Google likes our products, too.”
So what might be next? With iWorks ‘08 adding a user-friendly spreadsheet application, in addition to word processing, Google Docs integration could be a possibility. Google’s also thought to be developing its own web-based presentation software, so the same might apply to Apple’s Keynote software too. Along these lines we could also see Google Docs support coming to the iPhone, and were that to happen, then in many ways the much talked about GPhone would already exist, except it would be spelt with an “i”.
Apple’s real strength has always been in developing elegant hardware and easy-to-use client-side software, with Google taking the lead in “cloud” services, where data and applications are accessible over the Internet. It’s not hard to see how these two core competencies can continue to complement each other.
