This is a power dinner if there ever was one. These two men casually sitting across a table at a restaurant are Apple CEO Tim Cook and Google CEO Sundar Pichai.
De quoi pouvaient bien parler Tim Cook et Sundar Pichai à table ? Bagnoles, téléphones, politique… ?https://t.co/rKp5UAAJ3O pic.twitter.com/wa6nha4ycF
— MacGeneration (@MacGeneration) March 8, 2017
Cook and Pichai were spotted by several people at the Tamarine Restaurant in Palo Alto, who snapped up pictures of the dining duo.
it's a good restaurant when Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai are in the same place ! #apple #google #entrepreneurship #siliconvalley #paloalto pic.twitter.com/nql8FutjNE
— Steve Sims (@UglySims) March 8, 2017
Others fellow diners were thinking in more practical terms.
Just having dinner next to Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai. Shall I pitch them my startup idea?
— Michael Hui (@hichaelmui) March 8, 2017
People were losing their heads for good reason. That table alone accounted for the operating systems of nearly every smartphone in existence; it accounted for over $1,000 billion in market capitalization, and it sat the leaders of the first and second most valuable companies in the world.
Why Cook and Pichai would chose to meet is anyone’s guess. They certainly seem to like each other well enough – they follow each other on Twitter – but they aren’t exactly known to be friends. A dinner during a weekday points to a more business oriented meeting. Apple and Google, though, are bitter rivals and there’s no love lost between the two giants. They’ve sued each other numerous time in the past, and now compete bitterly in the smartphone market. Google’s latest phone, the Pixel, attempted to squarely take on the iPhone, and Android and iPhone are the only meaningful operating systems left in the billion-dollar smartphone market.
This isn’t the first time high-level Google and Apple execs were spotting sharing a meal together. In 2010, then-Apple-CEO Steve Jobs was seen sharing a coffee with then-Google-CEO Eric Schmidt. They’d been animatedly talking before Jobs reportedly said “Let’s go discuss this somewhere more private” when he saw a crowd beginning to mill around.
But this latest Cook-Pichai meeting will likely stoke the rumour mills like nothing else. What could be in the offing? The wildest theories on the internet are coming up with terms like “Gapple” and “iDroid”, but those seem like a stretch. Perhaps Cook and Pichai are discussing something that concerns both their companies – Donald Trump’s travel ban? Or maybe they’re just catching up? Also, another important question has been raised – when the CEOs of Apple and Google meet for dinner, who foots the bill? 😛