Google TV was released a few months later. It flopped.

Android 2.2 was not available on any phone except the Nexus One for months, and took             even longer to reach mass distribution.

The Chrome Web Store was released several months later and has failed to gain                             significant traction.

Google Music was released in a limited beta at this year’s Google I/O. They still have yet               to release a music store, as they originally announced.

Chrome OS, which was also flaunted at I/O 2010, is only just now being shipped.

The success or failure of these individual products matters little in the big picture. In the long term, Google I/O 2010 will be remembered as the moment when the divide between Google and Apple became very, very public. Any doubts as to the intensity of the conflict were quickly thrown out the window. As John Gruber put it:

“Post-Google I/O, there’s not much room left to see iPhone-vs.- Android as anything                     other than an all-out war. What we’ve got here is a good old-fashioned epic rivalry.”

Google’s message couldn’t have been clearer: Android’s period of “catching up” to the iPhone is over. Android has become the dominant mobile platform. Not only that, but Apple, like Microsoft and Yahoo before it, was next on Google’s hit list.

The closest Apple came to issuing a response to I/O was from Steve Jobs at the All Things D conference a few weeks later: “Just because we’re competing doesn’t mean we have to be rude.” While this was given in response to a question about replacing Google as the default iOS search engine, Jobs was clearly alluding to the I/O keynote. Roughly a week after Jobs gave that interview, he appeared on stage at WWDC to spend two hours revealing essentially one product: the iPhone 4.

Jobs’ keynote featured some of the subtle, humorous jabs against the competition that Apple has become known for, but even then, there was something markedly different in his tone than what we saw at I/O. As fun as Google’s keynote was to watch, and as tame as Apple’s seemed in comparison, the difference between them reveals something fundamental about the way the two companies see this industry. To paraphrase The West Wing: Apple’s goal is to win, Google’s goal is to beat Apple. It’s a subtle but important distinction. Google is a company that seems to need an enemy: AltaVista, Yahoo, Microsoft, Groupon, Yelp, Facebook, Twitter, and now Apple. Apple aspires to its own standard – Google aspires to be everything to everyone.

Even the products themselves are a testament to this. I/O 2010 (and 2011, for that matter) was a show of a staggeringly ambitious scale. The products unveiled were neither fully connected nor fully explained, and a release date? You were lucky if they specified a particular quarter, much less a particular month or day. In a similar way, the iPhone 4 seems to epitomize Apple: a single, tangible product polished to perfection, with a suite of software and services designed to make it shine. Even at this year’s WWDC, which was jam-packed with news, almost everything revolved around one product: iCloud, the new center of the Apple ecosystem.

Now that a full year has passed, what do 2010′s WWDC and I/O keynotes say about where Apple and Google are headed? In the end, the Tale of Two Keynotes tells the story of two wildly successful companies headed in radically different directions. Only time will tell where Apple and Google’s respective paths will lead them, but one can try to find clues in the past. Much of what Google unveiled at I/O remains unfinished and has been forgotten by most. The iPhone 4 is by far Apple’s most successful iPhone, and likely the most profitable product in their history.

No one knows how this will play out, but for all the talk of history repeating itself and Apple’s impending demise, we would all do well to look to where Apple and Microsoft stand today. No major player in this industry has an easy or predictable path ahead of them. For Apple, following that path means continuing to jump seemingly insurmountable hurdles without so much as a stutter. But for Google, the path may well be a rocky road to Redmond.