Submitted by Apple today announced that Dr. Eric Schmidt, chief executive officer of Google, is resigning from Apple’s Board of Directors, a position he has held since August 2006. “Eric has been an excellent Board member for Apple, investing his valuable time, talent, passion and wisdom to help make Apple successful,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO, “Unfortunately, as Google enters more of Apple’s core businesses, with Android and now Chrome OS, Eric’s effectiveness as an Apple Board member will be significantly diminished, since he will have to recuse himself from even larger portions of our meetings due to potential conflicts of interest. Therefore, we have mutually decided that now is the right time for Eric to resign his position on Apple’s Board.”
So basically Apple is saying that they are excluding him for reasons of duplicated functionality?
Edited 2009-08-03 22:46 UTC
Don’t be silly. They are excluding him before the SEC considers it a conflict of interest and investigates.
Let’s not forget the fact that this was a mutual decision.
No, it was a mutual decision according to the politically correct public statement. Whatever may have happened internally, however, could be a very different story, and the PR people are very good at saying something while really saying nothing at all that’s true. We’ll probably never know who actually was involved in this decision.
“…we have mutually decided that now is the right time for Eric to resign…”
Gotta love that weasel corporate speak.
Having the ‘internet king’ on your board MUST have got the odd better deal here and there. Not excluding the information sharing that woul have taken place over lunch/golf
It also sortof ‘morally obliged’ Google to produce Mac versions of their apps, lets hope this continues!