It’s been quite a ride participating in the development community and recording the events that brought the valley to this point. The one where we find Google and Apple at war.

Google has rallied the troops to their gate.

Google will soon begin selling music, and content. Then the era of cooperation will truly be over.

The amazing moment in history we just experienced with Apple selling hardware, software and media while Google was pioneering super useful applications like Google Earth, Docs&Spreadsheets, Maps and Gmail-all in support of it’s trade in advertising and influence.

The synergies and amazing user experiences that came out of that dynamic, like the iPhone, the fall of the MS Office suite and the proliferation of connected devices are being totally taken for granted by the people at the helm of these companies right now. They are dead serious about throwing that all away for a buck. The iPhone would have been lacking without Google, and Apple brought Google further off the desktop than any of Google’s other partners. And they did it in style.

Google and Apple were great together and they could continue, but Google has lost it's way. Manufacturing their own internet device to compete in the Android ecosystem they host, and beginning to sell music, competing directly with Amazon and Apple, seem misguided.

It’s as if Google forgot it’s mission was to organize the worlds information and they are now working on selling the worlds information. The board at Google seems to be in complete support of the strategies that are shifting their core value proposition to the world from being a service organizing the worlds data, to being a retailer that sells access to the worlds data.

Google is not well. The most compelling features added to Google’s Search engine over the last 5 years have all emerged from outside the company.

Freebase.com, a product of MetaWeb Technologies has been quietly powering a large and growing portfolio that has included Powerset, Bing, and Google for years.

Google just inked with Twitter to have access to realtime data which will keep Google’s search competitive, and lessen the blow of completely botching the beta "preview" release of Google Wave, but only delays the inevitable.

The ball moves really fast in the valley and in technology. With Google driven mad by a zero sum view of Apple, no number of phones will halt the fall from use as their services deteriorate in a misguided war with Apple.

Make no mistake, the Android Phones flooding the market belong to the carriers and the operating system belongs to humankind. Open source is powerful, because it will not be dominated. Not by money and not even by Google.

To be the torch-carriers of pagerank’s fair and objective search algorithms and ensure they continue to organize the worlds information while simultaneously selling paid search results to advertisers, and at that same time selling information products and media to consumers leaves them with no one to answer to. They have a conflict of interests with the advertiser, media consumer and search engine user.

The best thing Google could do right now is ask Larry Page and Sergey Brin to take a break from Project Virgle (google it) and come tour the Meetups, User Groups and independent sources of innovation that keep the industry alive and kicking, no matter what happens at the top.

Google desperately needs to come down to earth.