It was a marriage of necessity when the iPhone was starting out, as Apple needed many of the things Google already had and Google was willing to supply them for next to nothing betting on the advertising revenue.

So Google gave Apple the Maps, but earned no revenue from it.

(There is the fiction, popular among iPhone fans that Apple wrote the Maps App. This is alleged because it was delivered with the OS, but there is precious little evidence that it was actually WRITTEN by Apple, and if it is, all they did was put a thin Safari wrapper around normal Google Maps delivery. As evidence to this, note that the day Google announced Traffic on Maps it arrived on the iPhone. The day Google added advertising to Maps it appeared on the iPhone. (See http://www.9to5mac.com/Adsense-in-iphone-maps ).

Now Apple seems to disapprove of this, and is laying the groundwork for a Maps divorce. (Which will be a fatal mistake, because Google buys its map data from ALL the big sources, Navteq, TeleAtlas, Digital Globe, TeraMetrics, GeoEye, etc. Apple’s pathetic back-pocket mapping company can’t compete).

But, having said that, I wouldn’t put too much into this separation other than the SEC does not like to see interlocking directorates in companies that are in closely related categories. Its not unusual to see board members as officers or board members for multiple companies, because the talent pool is not as big as you might imagine.