Have the battle lines been drawn? Is it time to take sides? Am referring to the recent announcement that Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google will be joining Apple Computers board. As a keen follower of the companies and a avid user of their services, software and computers I find the move extremely interesting and exciting. So what are the areas they can cooperate on?

• I can imagine a world without the need for the $99 .mac service that Apple provides. I’ve heard the service is not great (I did use it through the 60 day trial and wasn’t impressed).
• Google and Apple could work out a better solution for the end customer where in Mac Mail, Calendar, Address-book etc. just work with the corresponding Google services, keeping all user data in sync.
• Why limit ourselves to mundane things only? How about being able to access (and play) all my iTunes music and video through Google Video (and Audio one day)? How about backing my entire mac and making it searchable online?
• Spotlight search on Mac’s could offer algorithmic web search results from Google.

Now there are areas where Google and Apple may not see eye to eye:

• Apple would like to keep iPhoto as the tool for managing photos, instead of Google’s Picasa (which someday may have a Mac version…for now it has a basic picasa web albums uploader).
• Apple would probably like to make sure that they retain their brand and mac doesn’t become synonymous with Google (far fetched …. but possible).

A quote from the very well written NY Times article:

“The old social networks in Silicon Valley run very deep,” noted AnnaLee Saxenian, a leading scholar of the industry and dean of the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley. “And this reminds us that Silicon Valley has a common enemy to the north.”

Now we all know who the common enemy is! But the real question is what options does all this leave it and Yahoo! (the company I work for) with?