The Register says Google is gonna buy Apple

Or, er, not really. See here. The Register, Britain's finest tech publication, just rehashes the rumor that was in the New York magazine article. (As I've said before, God forbid a Brit publication would actually develop sources and interview people; that sounds like work.) Great thing is the rumor of a Google buyout in New York mag came from an unnamed "friend" of mine who is quoted in the piece saying I've mellowed and that I probably want to go do something else. (Think about this. First of all I don't have any friends. Second, do you really believe any of my quasi-friends talked to a reporter without my permission?)

So the idea I guess would be that we'd bring Squirrel Boy onto the board for a while, let him learn all about the company and develop a comfort level, and then at some point Apple becomes the consumer-facing side of the Google cloud operation. The combined company controls search, and controls the utility computing data centers that Google is still secretly building, a virtual supercomputer girding the globe, in effect the world's most powerful single machine which in ten years will be delivering not just email and word processing but also television programming, movies, games and phone calls. Basically, everything. Cable companies? Phone companies? Our kids won't know what they were, unless they look them up on Wikipedia, using GoogleNet.

What does Apple bring to the party? We have the best UI engineers in the world, plus a really slick Unix-based desktop OS that meshes pretty easily with Google's Linux-based back end. (Yeah, our engineers have tinkered together.) Sure our desktop OS has very little market share, but perhaps we boost that by evolving the Mac and selling loads of iPhones and also creating some new kind of home computing appliance or even a Google-branded business appliance that puts a pretty face on all those in-the-cloud Google applications and makes them work together really well and interoperate easily with our iLife suite, which just happens to complement Google's applications.

Meanwhile Microsoft keeps cranking out its bloated, butt-ugly OS and apps, and struggles to figure out search, and struggles to develop its Live stuff, and struggles to fight off Linux in the desktop and server markets, a taxing and exhausting battle that ends up being pointless when customers stop building data centers and instead run everything in Google's cloud, on Google's version of Linux, or Open Solaris, or some OS that Google develops on its own.

So let's think about this. Does it make any sense? Hmmm. Nah. Makes no sense at all.