..is what I want now that Eric Schmidt is off the Apple board of directors.

Eric Schmidt, Google’s co-founder and CEO, and also member of Apple’s board of directors until very recently, has just stepped down from Apple’s board. There are all kinds of investigations being talked about, and news is coming out about a tit-for-tat agreement between Google and Apple not to directly poach each others’ employees (which would be, by the way, a violation of all kinds of legal thingamajiggers).

And while that’s all well and good, I’m hoping to get a little bit more out of this break-up. Google is the king of entering other people’s markets, especially when they’re getting stagnant and lazy and not opening up properly. Google Docs, Gmail, etc. So, there’s a little piece of my brain, way in the back of my head somewhere, that is hoping that now that Apple and Google are splittsville we may be looking forward to a Google Media Player.

iTunes is fine, but it’s not the end all, be all that some people think. It just happens to be the best thing available right now. Unfortunately it’s tied to the iPod. Sure, I own an iPod, but if someone could come along and make something even close to as good that’s more open than the iPod, I’d jump on it in a second.

There’s a wave of announcements and denouncements recently of high profile people like Jason Calacanis and Mike Arrington giving up their Apple addictions because of the closed nature of the platform. A Google media player that allowed any portable media device to sync would be awesome. Oooh… and maybe they’d have a default offer to buy tunes through the Amazon mp3 store or other non-iTunes services…

And a solid media player offering that meshed well and optimized with Android wouldn’t hurt either.

I may be dreaming, but it sure would be nice.