The truth is that Silicon Valley execs have historically been an incestuous lot. Top Oracle execs, for instance, have held CEO positions in Salesforce.com, Siebel Systems, NetSuite, PeopleSoft and others. Indeed, Ray Noorda, then CEO of Novell, popularized the phrase "coopetition" in the early 1990s to describe tech relationships.

As for Google and Apple, Smulders says, Schmidt's exodus from Apple's board "does not necessarily mean an end to coopetition" between the two companies.

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