New York Times Examines the Apple/Google Rift
The New York Times has a lengthy article laying out the history of the relationship between Apple and Google, which started close but has now developed schisms due to the huge differences in corporate approaches and increasingly competitive products. Apple prefers proprietary systems and tight control over high margin products, whereas Google's goal is to increase Web usage (and thus ad revenue) via free services and open source software. It's the iPhone OS versus Android, Mac OS X versus Chrome OS, Safari versus Chrome, and Apple's Quattro acquisition versus Google's AdMob buy. All that, and the competition between the companies is just starting to heat up.
Is open source vs. proprietary really a big distinction between Google and Apple? The heart of Google, where almost all of the money is made, is search and adsense. And that software is as closed and proprietary as it gets. I think people tend to overlook this because the proprietary software is hidden away on Google's servers, not running on their personal machines. Both Google and Apple are big participants in open source projects, but both rely on top secret proprietary software for their core business.
As for increased open standard web usage, that benefits Apple as well as Google. As the web becomes a primary platform, Windows lock-in diminishes and the potential growth of all Apple platforms increases.
There's no question that Google is happy to keep certain things extremely secret, but at the same time, they generally give services away and make major products that are used by customers open source. In contrast, Apple sells nearly all services, and apart from some underlying code, keeps all public products closed source and for sale.
Apple may benefit some from increased Web usage, but you don't see Apple doing anything to encourage it (as Google does with all its free services). Apple wants to sell hardware, and everything it does revolves around making Macs, iPhones, and iPods more attractive.