Apple-Google-Skynet-Microsoft

AMDAL has a definite interest in the ongoing War of the Machines (not to be confused with the War against the Machines). This month, I've been reading Pixar a 2008 book about the animation studio once dominated by Steve Jobs (during Jobs' late-1980s-to-mid-1990s exile from Apple). It's a good book, with lots of worthwhile history about the development of Silicon Valley alongside an analysis of the the recent history of moviemaking and animation. Interesting fact: Jobs, at age 23, was nearly Time Magazine Man-of-the-Year; he would have been succeeding Ronald Reagan and Poland's democratizing leader Lech Walsea. At age 23 I was trying to find a job as a legal assistant and living at home. Instead, Time chickened out and named "The Computer" as Man-of-the-Year.
It feels pretty remarkable to realize how rapidly the computer experience has evolved in the last 25 years (I realize thats a pretty trite and bland statement).
The Skynet idea interests me. I don't mean a malevolent automated corporation. I'm thinking about the idea of a real eventual merger of these consumer computer/internet/entertainment companies, or their de facto cooperation, meaning that we end up using exclusively their products. Sometimes, it feels like we're already there. All the major companies' technology "talks" with each other. I use use Google search to find music on youtube to download to itunes to play on my iphone that I charge using the Dell PC at my office that runs Office. We live in a friendly world of cooperation between these companies.
That's why this one paragraph, from a Robert Cringley op-ed in today's NY Times, struck me as a particularly sharp breakdown of the true nature of competition between Google and Microsoft and the symbiosis that underlies modern technology:

"What Google’s chief executive, Eric Schmidt, has to fear more than anything else is that he’ll awake one day to learn that the Google search engine suddenly doesn’t work on any Windows computers: something happened overnight and what worked yesterday doesn’t work today. It would have to be an act of deliberate sabotage on Microsoft’s part and blatantly illegal, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen. Microsoft would claim ignorance and innocence and take days, weeks or months to reverse the effect, during which time Google would have lost billions."

Cringley suggests that the biggest problem we may face won't be a skynet-esque merger of the machines, but a refusal to coexist.