The somewhat-stunning after-hours news today was that Google CEO Eric Schmidt has joined Apple's board of directors, joining former Vice President and would-be world supreme leader Al Gore, and the CEOs of Intuit, J. Crew and Genentech. Fresh off of the news that Google was introducing new applications that could be co-branded for business' domain, the expectation is that Apple and Google have teamed up in a joint fight against the Redmond behemoth, Microsoft. But what's not seen is that the usual direct impact a board member has on the company's products is very slim indeed.

One need only look as far as Apple to see this. When Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, a close friend of Steve Jobs, was on the board, the Macintosh did not make much headway in running Oracle's business suite, and Intuit hasn't exactly wowed anybody with their support for Macintosh in the last decade or so. While we can dream of further collaboration between the two companies, beyond a Google search bar embedded in Safari, and $1.75 iPod wrappers with the Google logo, this doesn't guarantee a streamlined plethora of joint product announcements - so don't hold your breath for a Mac OS X version of Google Desktop, Google-branded Mac Minis and X Serves, or the debut of GTunes, powered by iTunes.

At least... that's my expectation. A board of directors' role is to ensure the company is growing smoothly and that all activities are above board, from compensation to product roadmaps - not to sit in a dark room and merge business lines.

But this of course won't thwart speculation. TechCrunch writes, "Could close collaboration between online giant Google and Apple hardware pose the most viable threat yet to Microsoft’s long held personal computing leadership? It certainly seems possible.", while Om Malik somehow finds a dark corner in his soul to poo-poo the relationship, saying this "portends potential headaches not just for Microsoft, but for anyone with digital media ambitions." Right. As if with one swoop, iPod and iTunes are going to get that much more market share in the face of Zune and other challengers because some guy gets to visit the Cupertino campus every two months.

What it does do is further validate Apple's rise to prominence in a once-skeptical Silicon Valley. I know Google spends millions every quarter in new Apple equipment for employees, and at some point, those MacBook-carrying Webheads are going to want the latest and greatest Google gear to go. I hope that some of the speculation comes true and can prove me wrong.

Listening to ''Under One (JK Walker Remix)'', by Todd Tobias (Play Count: 6)

The Asypta model is somewhat flexible. If you look at Altria, you have a slight variation - extending to A consonant, vowel, A, but the phonetics of the word are the same, as the "ria" sounds like "riya", which maintains the Asypta rule verbatim.

With that said, Philip Morris' choice to rebrand as Altria in January 2003 is a classic example of selecting a name without any meaning and plugging into what I term the Asypta name generator. As widely reported, the company, which owns a wide variety of cigarette brands, ranging from Marlboro to Benson & Hedges and Virginia Slims, was looking to divorce itself from its life-long relationship with tobacco, and instead, highlight a healthier, more anomalous self.

From the press release on January 27, 2003, the company opted to change its name to Altria Group, Inc. As they said in the release, "The Altria name and logo powerfully express these enduring qualities: its drive toward excellence, its companies' focus on building brands, its passion for success, its openness to innovation, its commitment to its communities and societies, and its focus on its people."

And just how do they do that? If you look at the Altria logo, It's a 5 by 5 pixelated square made of many colors. A 25-grid square, symbolizing nothing. The word Altria doesn't demonstrate quality or excellence or success or innovation, unless you believe it does. Just like when the tobacco companies had you believe that "Nicotine is not addictive", this too has to be taken at face value, when there is in fact, no value.

More about Altria can be found on the company's "Who We Are" page, where they say "By changing its name, Altria Group has clarified its identity as what it is: a parent company to both tobacco and food companies that manage some of the world’s most successful brands." Gotcha.

For fitting the criteria set out in the rules of Asypta, and further befuddling corporate identity, we give Altria a near-perfect score. They just miss the hall of fame, due to a lacking consonant before the second A. Sorry, guys.

Overall Asypta-Meter Score: 9.5

Listening to ''Silent Words - Chiller Twists'', by Jan Johnston (Play Count: 25)

Speaking of OfficeCube, my curiosity got the best of me - to see if there was any hint out there on the Web as to what our plans at 3Cube were, and only through Google's cache can we get anywhere to discuss OfficeCube itself, though some of our media coverage from the early part of the decade remain up for only the most ardent of communications application service provider afficionados.

As we find in a press release from early 2000, we had announced, "PhoneCube and FaxCube are the first two members of 3Cube's growing family of online office services soon to be combined in one office portal called "OfficeCube," an entire suite of integrated virtual office productivity solutions to be announced in the first half of 2000."

Those were exciting times. Unfortunately, as we know, the best products don't always make the best businesses, and though I still believe in those early products' features, functionality and promise, the customer traction was never there.

For more on the 3Cube story, here are some obscure gems:

InformationWeek: Innovation (October 2000)
TMCNet: FaxCube and PhoneCube review (January 2001)

Listening to ''Live @ DI.fm'', by DJ Irish (Play Count: 1)

Six years ago, while at 3Cube, we had huge expectations for moving software to the Web. Following some success with our fax over Internet product, FaxCube, and our phone conferencing and Web meeting solution, PhoneCube, we had plans to debut something by the name of "OfficeCube", which in theory, would let customers not only hold real-time chats and full desktop sharing, across OS platforms, but would give you an online vault where you could create, edit and save documents or presentations. This vision of the Web office was but a gleam in our eye in 2000, and for a variety of reasons, we never quite made it. Six years later, we still see the business world tied to software - and most of those are tied to Microsoft Office, despite challenges from Apple, Sun and now, Google.

Google started out as a search company, aiming to gain access to all the world's information, quickly and easily. But the company has branched out into a variety of Web applications, from Gmail for E-mail to Google Talk for instant messaging, Google Desktop for local search, Google Earth for mapping and much, much more. This week, Google takes it all a step further with the debut of enterprise-targeted applications that would be branded by third-party companies, but provided by Google. That way, you could keep your company.com domain but leave all the grunt work to Google's servers and staff. Sounds good, right?

Much of the conversations in the last several years were that in order to unseat Microsoft Office, a competitor needed to build clones of those apps that made Office what it is - Excel, Word, PowerPoint, and Outlook. But now, people recognize that the new office has a lot more to it - with a very real focus on real-time interactive communication, regardless of location. Google's debut includes the aforementioned Gmail and Google Talk, but also Google Calendar and Google Page Creator - which hopefully bears absolutely zero resemblance to Microsoft's horrid Front Page for WYSIWYG Web design.

As a consumer, we can't help but root for anything that enables more choice, and more variety, especially as it takes advantage of new technologies. I can't say that Google's will be the winner, or that we'll be adopting it soon. Google has no equal as a search engine, without doubt, but for me, GMail is a second-class address, on par with all the other free e-mail addresses I've accrued over the last decade, and the rest of the apps are just for fun. The only one I'm truly waiting with baited breath for is Google Desktop for Mac OS X, if they ever get there. Interestingly, despite Google's failings there, leading blogger Robert Scoble writes that Google is even further ahead in Mac support than Microsoft with some of its tools saying, "They (Microsoft) are gonna get their ass kicked in this space because of their lack of attention to the Macintosh."

As you can expect, anything Google does gains plenty of attention. You can see further discussions of the launch at SiliconBeat, Searchblog, and InformationWeek.

To check out the solutions for yourself, go to https://www.google.com/a/.

Listening to ''Escape Velocity 007", by DJ Irish (Play Count: 1)