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Apple COO Timothy Cook delivered a question and answer presentation at the Goldman Sachs Investment Symposium today, discussing company strategy for the Mac, iPhone, iPod and Apple TV. Saying that at the end of the day Apple is “all about people,” Cook proclaimed that while innovation may be one of the most difficult models, its the one that gives you a true competitive differentiation. “We run Apple in a fluid manner, where we move people where we need them. This is why you begin to see things on the phone that were developed for the Mac. You see Cover Flow, developed for the phone, in the Mac OS X. There’s some much synergy in those area.”

Tim Cook was eager to point out that Apple had 24 billion in revenues in fiscal year 2007 from four major product lines. The Goldman Sachs interviewer noted Steve Jobs’ has prior statement that Apple has 3 businesses and a hobby, the hobby being the Apple TV. He asked if four major product lines represent the maximum.

Cook replied by saying that the Apple TV is an interesting product. “We launched this as a peripheral to your Mac or PC, but the size of that customer base was a niche. That’s why Steve calls it a hobby. The market for it isn’t in the realm of the iPod, iPhone or Mac. Will we enter a new category? You can say we entered a new category with the MacBook Air and the iPod Touch. Could we do more? I think Apple can do about anything it puts its mind to. For everything we do, we know me make a choice not to do something else. We may or may not add some over time, we’ll see.”

Regarding slowing iPod growth: Cook says Apple’s focus was the introduction of the iPod Touch — getting it out into the market. He sees getting the “first mainstream WiFi portable platform” out as a big strategic move.

In terms of market saturation for the iPod: 40% of the iPods sold were sold to people who did not own an iPod. “That doesn’t seem like a saturated market to us,” said Cook. On why the US number was flat: “part of it might have been the economy.”

Will there be some cannibalization from the iPod Touch and iPhone? Tim Cook says maybe. “But I’d rather Apple cannibalize itself than others take our business”

The moderator asked: Why did you cut the iPhone price? Cook said “We saw that we had an incredible product that many people wanted. The barrier to some people buying it was the price. We were about to enter the holiday season. We decided we wanted to go for it. The more people we get under the iPhone tent, the more developers we get interested in developing, the more iPhones we sell.”

Regarding the “trade offs” Apple had to make for the MacBook Air, Tim Cook says that other people used really small screens or tiny keyboards to make sub-notebooks work. Apple, Cook says, put “what’s important” in the MacBook Air. “Do you really need an Ethernet cable?” he said. “Do you really need the optical drive?” He said that remote disc booting, the ability to rent movies online and the proliferation of wireless have largely addressed the so-called shortcomings of the Air.

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Google is adding a new front to its assault on Microsoft’s software applications business.

The Internet search giant on Wednesday is rolling out a rival to Microsoft’s SharePoint, a program used for collaboration among teams of workers. Google’s program, called Google Sites, will become part of the company’s applications suite, which includes e-mail, calendar, word processing, spreadsheet and presentation software. Like other elements of Google Apps, it will be free and require no installation, maintenance or upgrades.

With Google Sites, the company is taking on what Christopher Liddell, Microsoft’s chief financial officer, said has become a $1 billion a year product. That’s a relatively small, but far from insignificant, portion of Microsoft’s business division whose mainstay Office suite is the No. 1 target of Google Apps. Microsoft’s business division brought in $4.8 billion in the most recent quarter.

Google Sites was built on top of technology created by JotSpot, a startup co-founded by Joe Kraus, who also co-founded Excite, the now defunct Internet 1.0 portal. Google acquired JotSpot, which had developed a set of “wiki,” or collaboration, tools in October of 2006.

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The European antitrust regulator imposed a record $1.35 billion fine against Microsoft on Wednesday in a ruling intended to send a clear message to the world’s largest software maker — and to any other company — of the dangers of flouting Europe’s competition rulings.

The size of the penalty, which surprised lawyers and legal experts, was a clear assertion of the power of the European Commission and its main antitrust regulator, Neelie Kroes, who is its competition commissioner. She has emerged from a lengthy legal battle with Microsoft as possibly the world’s most activist regulator.

The dispute with the commission has cost Microsoft more than $2.3 billion in fines.

Google, which has a dominant share of the market for Internet search and its related advertising, also faces a tough examination of its proposed acquisition of Doubleclick, an Internet advertising company.

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Today, EA officially dated Dead Space for Europe and the US: The game is to burst out onto the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 this Halloween, October 31. As an extra treat, EA released the first official trailer for the Resident Evil-meets-Alien sci-fi survival horror title along with the announcement of the date.

For those unfamiliar with Dead Space, the game takes place 500 years from now in deep space. A team of soldiers and support personnel, including the game’s protagonist, Isaac Clarke, are sent to investigate the lack of communication from the mining vessel USG Ishimura–a “Planet Cracker”-class ship capable of stripping an entire planet of its resources.

It appears that while harvesting a planet, the Ishimura has inadvertently knocked on the wrong door. Isaac will have to fight for his life against hostile aliens that have already managed to decimate the ship’s crew and are intent on doing the same to him.

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Ubisoft has today announced that Free Radical’s Haze will arrive exclusively for the PlayStation 3 this May.

Initially slated to arrive on the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC in the first part of 2007, Ubisoft bumped the shooter back in January 2007 and said it would arrive in the company’s fiscal year ending March 31, 2008. In May, Ubisoft once again amended that date, this time saying the game would arrive for the PlayStation 3 in the fall. At that time, no mention was made of the Xbox 360 and PC versions of the game, primarily because the publisher had intentions to can those editions, perhaps because work on those editions had officially ceased by August.

Ubisoft then delayed the PS3 version of Haze for its January-March quarter of 2008 during its second quarter earnings report in November, and then bumped the game out of its fiscal year 2008 entirely during its third-quarter fiscal statement this January, which meant that the game could potentially have arrived as late as March 31, 2009.

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Google has called for ISO member bodies to reject Microsoft’s Office Open XML document format during the current voting period, which ends March 30. In an entry at the company’s official blog, Google’s open-source programs manager says that Microsoft’s document format is redundant and has technical flaws. Google has backed the competing OpenDocument Format (ODF), which has already received ISO approval.

Google argues (PDF) that OOXML falls short of meeting interoperability requirements because it is a Microsoft-specific format. “After further technical analysis of the specification along with all the additional data available on OOXML, Google believes OOXML would be an insufficient and unnecessary standard, designed purely around the needs of Microsoft Office,” Google says. “We join the ODF Alliance and many other experts in our belief that OOXML doesn’t meet the criteria required for a globally-accepted standard.”

The OOXML and ODF formats have both broadly been accused of containing too many application-specific features that create challenges for third-party implementors. Apple has independently implemented read-only support for OOXML in its iWork office suite and there are partial OOXML converters under active development. ODF has also been independently implemented and is supported by KOffice and Google Docs. Supporters of ODF contend that the format is more conducive to third-party adoption since it relies on a number existing standards from W3C and other standards bodies.

Microsoft argues that existing standards like ODF fail to provide support for many of the advanced features offered by Microsoft Office and cannot facilitate sufficient backwards compatibility with Microsoft’s binary-based legacy document formats. Creating a new standard, says Microsoft, is the solution that best serves existing Microsoft customers—a factor that is highly relevant since Microsoft’s productivity software is the most widely used. Google has called for Microsoft to request enhancements to ODF rather than attempting to maintain OOXML as an independent standard.

Google’s position on OOXML is shared by IBM and other Microsoft competitors who see OOXML as a way for the software giant to perpetuate its control of the office software market.

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The Gmail CAPTCHA has been cracked—albeit not easily—raising new concerns about spammers’ ability to abuse Google’s e-mail services. Websense Security Labs pointed out the security breach late last week, noting that spammers have a lot to gain by being able to use bots to automatically sign up for new accounts.

Google’s free e-mail services and a highly-desirable gmail.com domain—one that is unlikely to be blacklisted by anybody’s spam filters—are just two of the features that induced spammers to crack the CAPTCHA and have bots do all the work. On the upside, it apparently wasn’t easy—Websense says that it required two bot hosts to crack instead of just the one that recently cracked Windows Live Mail’s CAPTCHA (Websense believes that the same group was involved with both). It also believes that the two hosts are required because the first host may fail at cracking the code the first time around (and possibly time out), but the second host may also be required to check the work of the first. Additionally, only one in every five CAPTCHA-breaking requests on Gmail succeeded. Still, a 20 percent success rate is relatively high when you consider that spambots are trying to register hundreds (or thousands) of e-mail addresses at a time.

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