After Jobs, Apple and Google Merge?

Apple Inc is worth around $140 billion. It is also the most watched, envied, admired and adored company in the world. But is it worth anything without Steve Jobs? It is a company formed around his personality and inspiration. A Jobsless Apple might seek a merger with Google. The two companies are rapidly converging, a fact that recently led to the resignation of the Apple director Eric Schmidt, the chairman and chief executive of Google. He had been on the Apple board for three years, and was forced out because of suspicions that links between the two companies could endanger competition. One other director of both companies remains: Arthur Levinson, former chief executive of Genentech. The key areas of convergence are, first, mobile phones. There is Apple's iPhone and there is Google's Android, not a phone in itself, but an operating system that can be used by other companies. Google also produce a web browser called Chrome, which competes with Apple's Safari. And, most importantly, Google is working on a computer operating system, also called Chrome, which may well be a very serious competitor for Mac OS X. Apple's iPhone "apps" also compete with many free Google applications. The point is that both companies are aiming to seize dominance of the world market from Microsoft. Microsoft's Windows still dominates world computing in spite of its failure to innovate. The loss of Jobs's genius for products would mean Google's innovation and Apple's design and market sense would be a very good fit, although antitrust regulators might disagree.