What if Google and Apple really went to war?

Dan Kois has a Slate article about a (so far) fictional war:

They’re the two titans of the tech industry, and they command attention throughout the digital realm the way the USA and the USSR once drove the geopolitical agendas of the entire world. They’ve sparred before, especially on the issue of Android vs. the iPhone. But what if the cold war between these two behemoths got hot? If Google and Apple went to actual war, who would win?
I asked two experts here at Slate to do a little wargaming with me. Tech columnist Farhad Manjoo will play Google. Moneybox columnist Matthew Yglesias will play Apple. I will play referee as Farhad and Matt imagine their way through a (totally speculative, fictional, and not true) Google vs. Apple all-out-war for world supremacy. Could Google erase Apple from the Internet? Could iPhones control killer drones over Mountain View? How different is Apple willing to think? And how evil is Google prepared to be? 

As of 1 October 2013, Google has $54 billion cash on hand, and 45,000 employees.
Territory controlled: Several large office buildings around the globe, including the GooglePlex in Mountain View, California, the third largest office building in New York City, and a $1.6 billion new complex in London. In addition, Google maintains more than a dozen huge data centers around the world, with a total computational capacity estimated to be many times more powerful than the world's best supercomputer. 

It’s an unseasonably overcast morning in Mountain View when Larry Page gives the Go command. He does so with a heavy heart. Though the feud with Apple has been escalating for months, Google’s CEO has never given serious consideration to the plan known internally as Operation GhostFruit. Then Apple decided to test him, first by removing Google as the default search engine on the iPhone and iPad, and then— when Google complained to regulators and launched a petition drive calling on Apple to reinstate Google— by blocking Apple devices’ access to Google.com entirely. The iPhone and iPad provide the bulk of Google’s mobile ad revenue. Page has no choice but to go nuclear.
Still, he’s wary of GhostFruit. He understands that it conflicts with everything Google stands for. Indeed, when Sergey Brin first floated the idea, Page wondered if those silly glasses had disoriented his fellow co-founder. GhostFruit calls for a complete, total delisting of Apple and all related results from every Google service. At the flip of a switch, the search page will begin to list the Washington State Apple Commission as the first result for “apple.” People looking for help updating iOS will be asked, “Did you mean IRS?” As GhostFruit’s code penetrates deeper into Google’s servers, it will set up an alternate digital universe in which Apple ceases to exist online. YouTube will censor every Steve Jobs keynote presentation. Image search will delist all photos snapped on iPhones. Gmail will block mail to and from people who use Apple’s devices. Search Maps for “apple store” and you’ll be directed to your local farmer’s market.
But Page suspects GhostFruit will never be fully realized. Because it would instantly imperil Apple’s  worldwide brand recognition—its most important asset—Tim Cook will quickly reconsider his aggression, and the whole feud will be called off. “You really sure you want to do this?” asks Eric Schmidt, the company’s cautious chairman. After a long pause, Page nods, then begins to smile. “I’m feeling lucky,” he says. 

As of Oct. 5, 2013, Apple has $145 billion cash on hand, and 80,000 employees.
Territory held: A campus in Cupertino, California, hundreds of retail stores, and (via subcontractors) a vast array of Chinese factories. 

Laughter breaks out at the Apple board meeting. Blocking Google services from iOS devices cripples Google’s revenue stream in a direct and immediate manner. Eliminating Apple from Google’s search results will, at worst, erode Apple sales over time, time that Apple has to spend on countermeasures. Barack Obama and Mitt Romney spent a total of $900 million on their effort to secure the White House in 2012. The 2013 ad spending binge to promote the use of alternate search engines is going to dwarf that. Every state’s a swing state in this race, so Apple spends $200 million in the first month after Google’s move alone. The message is simple: Google is a menace and their results can’t be trusted.
Meanwhile, Tim Cook rings up his Internet Services chief and CFO Peter Oppenheimer to talk acquisitions. The name Duck Duck Go doesn’t exactly ring out on Main Street, but people in the tech world know it as the hot Google rival. It doesn’t just compete in search. It competes in philosophy. No tracking of users’ search history means more privacy, but less potential for ad revenue. But Apple’s got plenty of revenue. What it needs is to offer the world a first-class web search service to destroy its strategic rival. $500 million and some stock later, Duck Duck Go is Apple’s, and the company buys every ad slot during Monday Night Football to introduce it.
Then there’s video. Brightcove is listed on the NASDAQ at a market capitalization of a mere $260 million. Apple gets it for $330 million; child’s play for a company as cash-rich as Apple. What’s the point in making the profits if you can’t spend them when needed? Running ad-free search and video services won’t work forever, but Apple’s got more than enough profitability and money in the bank to keep them going until Google goes under water. Anything Google can do, Apple can do; well, if not exactly better, then at least free of annoying tracking, advertising, or manipulation of search results to punish rivals.
Pondering the news, Jonny Ive mentions that Steve Jobs didn’t believe in big acquisitions. “Steve’s dead,” Cook says. “This is war.” 

As of 12 October 2013, Google has $54 billion cash on hand and 45,000 employees.
Territory controlled: office buildings, server farms, the political sympathies of the Republican Party in the United States, and the governments of India, Mexico, South Africa, and all of South America.
When Larry Page learns about Apple’s acquisition of Duck Duck Go, a strange quiver grips his torso, something like the sensation of being tickled. Once, years ago, he’d felt something similar while watching a clip of America’s Funniest Home Videos on YouTube. Sergey had identified the sensation as “experiencing humor,” but Page didn’t have time for Sergey’s nonsense, and instead he instructed his scientists to buy YouTube and get to the bottom of its strange power.
“Duck Duck Go?!” he asks his fellow execs. “That’s their plan?” Sure, the little search engine got some good post-PRISM press, but everyone in the search industry knows that it’s heavily dependent on partnerships with Yahoo, Bing, and other web behemoths for its results. Duck Duck Go is barely even a real search engine. And it’s easily swatted away: Page directs his search team to present an ultimatum to every site on the Web. They’ve got 48 hours to permanently bar Duck Duck Go from indexing their pages, or face Google’s wrath. For most sites, being banned from Google is tantamount to being banned from the Web. Billions of pages instantly alter their Robots.txt files to shun Duck Duck Go. Apple’s search engine is DOA.
“More like Duck Duck Go-away, am I right?” smirks Sergey, but Page is in no mood. Killing Apple’s search engine has given him a bolder idea: folks around the world may like Apple, but they need Google. For most of what Google does— search, mapping, image detection, machine translation, video hosting, speech recognition, cloud-based email and calendars— Apple’s offerings are either laughably inferior or nonexistent, and it would take more than just a few quick acquisitions to match Google’s prowess. Meanwhile Google can match Apple pretty well— sure, its phones and tablets aren’t as pretty, but they work, don’t they?
So, if this really is war, why not force the world to choose? They can have Apple’s pretty baubles. Or they can have Google’s power. But not both. The message flows out to anyone who enjoys a cut of Google’s gravy train, which is pretty much everyone. (In 2012, clicks from Google generated $94 billion in economic activity in the United States alone.) The world’s retailers and cell carriers are forced to submit— if they keep pushing Apple’s products, they’ll face a drastic reduction in leads generated through Google. Apple notices an immediate drop in sales. The press, too, is kept in line. When The New York Times’ editorial board aligns with Apple, Google disappears the site. The Wall Street Journal is kinder, and sees a surge in traffic.
Page’s lawyers and Washington lobbyists go crazy about that one. Members of Congress are threatening hearings, the Justice Department is promising charges, the President has called in a huff. Page doesn’t take the call. He doesn’t look worried, and, in fact, the next day the Republican Party suddenly announces that it’s aligning with Google, and the Democrats appear agreeable as well. The House and legislatures in thirty states begin work on laws that would force Apple to reinstate Google’s search engine in iOS. A similar bill is taken up in the European Parliament. Meanwhile, lawmakers in India, Mexico, South Africa, and pretty much all of South America— countries where Apple products are confined to a rarefied elite, while Google is enjoyed by the masses— follow suit in aligning with Google. The search company’s lobbyists are stunned. “How’d you do that?” Google’s Washington chief asks Page. “Oh, it was nothing,” he says. “I just explained that they’ll need us in 2014. And I reminded them that we read all their email.”

Rico says let's hope it doesn't come to that...