Big noise today about the announcement that Google CEO Eric Schmidt is joining the board of Apple as a non-executive director (as our New York correspondent Andrew Clark reports).
Apple today announced that Dr. Eric Schmidt, chief executive officer of Google, was elected to Apple's board of directors at their meeting today. Eric also sits on Google's board of directors and Princeton University's board of trustees.
Schmidt has a long track record with technology firms and before Google he held senior positions at Novell, Sun and PARC - but this announcement is bound to cause some reaction at competitors of both firms, principally Microsoft... especially coming on the back of a wave of deals and initiatives announced by Google recently. Conspiracy theorists are getting their tin foil hats ready, but at the very least it will make relations between the two firms easier.
Everyone's out to comment on What It All Means, including John Battelle "Apple shares much in common with Google, that is for sure. But I'm not sure there's too much to be made of this connection - yet" while Microsoft's Don Dodge says "Nah, this don't mean nuffing".
Meanwhile Techcrunch's Marshall Kirkpatrick does an admirable job of sitting on the fence (could be great, could be terrible!) and The Unofficial Apple Weblog, unsurprisingly, says "If I were in upper management at a certain Redmond based company I would take note of this development".
As far as I can tell, the biggest actual repercussion of this is that everyone's started calling Eric Schmidt "Dr Eric Schmidt", in deference to the Apple press release. His mother must be proud.
