The Google Zeitgeist and the walking dead...imho

Hi,

I always chuckle to myself when I read nonsense like:

"It [M$] continues to state the importance of the PC over PDAs-cell-phones-or-any-lesser-enabled-digital-device"

My dear, where is the phuckin' economic ecosystem around cell phones? Where are all the young companies from Helsinki to Madrid with an idea and a gleam in their eye ready to monotize those 2 billion consumers gabbing and tapping on there handsets. Dead, dead, dead. Gone. Toast.

You want to talk about Clue Trains? Bet, go ask your Silicon Valley buddies running mobile content shops if there are they having fun yet. Or are the waiting for compatibility issues to get sorted (hah!) by the mobile operators.

Act like ya' know,
Doug Turner
email: douglass.turner@gmail.com

Ooops, sorry Douglas, I seemed to have hit a nerve, I hope you are feeling better ;-)

Actually the issue of economic ecosystem applies to Google vs. M$.

Google's (and Amazon and Y!) "platform" is the Internet. M$'s is Windows.

Google/Amazon/Y! all have open API's atop this platform for developers to program against. As an M$ developer I have a well established ecosystem within which to sell my wares (and market them, trade shows, booths, etc.).

As far as I can tell Google provides no such ecosystem around their APIs. Ditto for Y! and Amazon. If I were a cynic I would call these APIs nothing more then geek-targeted branding. Programmatic swag, as it were. Geeks like to build stuff. Give them some APIs to play with. No?

Cheers,
Doug

Google's BigTable

Greg Linden reports at his blog:
"Jeff Dean from Google will be giving a talk on October 18 at University of Washington on a new large scale distributed system at Google called BigTable."

I wonder if Google has already beaten everyone to the punch. Looks like Sun + Google are announcing something around StarOffice. OpenOffice is already available...

StarOffice seems so last century though, in this AJAX world. I hope not...?

Looks like it wsa a bit of a damp squib after all the broo-ha-ha. Shame - opportunity misssed perhaps other than to ruffle a few feathers up in Microsoft Towers? But hey - Scott MacNeally relishes this as does Schimdty...

No opportunity in bloated client software. . .I used to use OpenOffice, now I use web/AJAX, small client apps. The debate is over and neither server side or client side won, but the user won. Nw we will have a world where we don't need to care where the app or our docs are, we just know that they are always available, anywhere. I think Schmidt just wanted to visit his old alma mater, and rub it in a bit :-)

Plus, Google needs office space badly, Sun has plenty...

What a bunch of nonsense. How many times in the past two decades has MS's epitaph been written. And how many times have they awoken and crushed the competition?

Terry Semel (CEO-Yahoo!) has a great point that everyone overlooks when fawning over Google...they can't be everything to everyone. Are they a portal? A telco? An apps provider? All of the above? Then good luck to them maintaining any cohesive strategy. They are biting off more than they can chew, esp at a time when rumblings are beginning that Web 2.0 is coming to a close. News Corp buying up properties like Intermix and and IGN for well in excess of $1 billion?? eBay-Skype? Not yet a return to the era of irrational exuberance, but come on.

Google got where it is today by having the vision to monetize advertising. IM and VoIP are commodities and getting in the telco space? Well MSFT is enough to deal with let alone the "not-so Baby" Bells that are experts in their field. Google may be the star of the moment...but it's opening up more fronts than it can deal with.

Ahsan, MSFT has not been written off many times in the past two decades, they have continued to grow and prosper. But I'm seeing a new world emerging and there is a new language of business emerging too. I don't think it is a Google versus MSFT story, it is MSFT versus the whole new world of AJAX and other trends that MSFT needs to deal with. The enterprise customers will continue paying their license fees, and that market is slower to change. But everywhere else, things are changing fast and MSFT is not. I'm not sure MSFT has the luxury it once had of banging away at something until they get it right.

Tom, your point is well taken. However, there have been many periods where things were speeding up and getting away from Microsoft. I understand that being nimble has not been that behemoth's strong point. No one will debate that with you. However one could argue that is changing. For an example, look at the recent Journal article about the development process of Longhorn/ Vista. It's clear the culture is shifting to one that acknowledges the mistakes of the past.

The "nimbleness" of Google also needs to be questioned. While it makes a PR splash every other week, how much of this stuff is real business? And isn't Google, through its sheer size, now opening itself up to being beaten by a smaller, quicker company in the myriad of fields its entering? It is one thing to announce XYZ...it's another to be able to actually have it be of any gravity.

Ahsan, yes, MSFT is changing but it is who can innovate the fastest. Google has a system of self-organizing teams that can create products at a rate much faster than MSFT.

Those products then accumulate communities of users on top of the planet's most powerful computing system. The potential scale and reach of those products is enormous, and with the Google "Beta" model, they don't have to be perfect, they can be changed and improved on the fly.

And with the AJAX approach, yo make best use of the client or server--there is no religious arguments you have to make over fat client versus thin--it is whatever is best, and you then have a product/service that enables you to have have access to it on any computer anywhere, any time (that part to come!)

That is a business model that is very difficult to duplicate. And Google's internal development teams are as swift if not swifter, than third parties. (No capital to raise, no extra management, etc...)

Tom-
Not being familiar with AJAX I can't argue that point with you. I will be sure to read up on it now. Could you email me (or post) any links to decent primers? Would appreciate it.

However to your point of Google "Beta" teams creating novel and useful, albeit imperfect products: isn't this the very issue that people crucify MSFT for? Releasing an imperfect product and fixing it on the fly. I'll grant that by doing this with the OS, MSFT may be a more egregious offender. However the relative rigidity of Gmail (which I use despite the lack of foldering and some other basic functions)vs. the recent release of almost desktop-client-like Yahoo! Mail makes one wonder if the big G is not spreading itself too thin. This is my point re: all the "Beta" projects. They make for great hype and PR, but the products often end up being simply 2nd or 3rd rate. The example of Froogle and Orkut are case in point of GOOG actually missing real trends with shoddy product. Again it's one thing to have your shopping comparison search engine not work. But a year or two down the line, if the Free WiFi you've come to expect as a right in an urban center is intermittent or inoperative, isn't this a major issue.

I think we may have been arguing two difft points. I will concede that GOOG may be able to develop product faster bc of AJAX and/ or its slimmer org structure. Yet the constant stream of new products and offerings is going to fatten that org stucture to the point of MSFT-like heft, and accordingly, slowness. We will see what the future holds but I think MSFT has more than a few tricks in its bag still.

I think what it all boils down to is what I call "you can't get there from here" in that legacy thinking and other obstacles will slow or stop MSFT from figuring out what is going on and responding. GOOG can experiment and produce applications and develop them further if they show promise, w/o having to collect license and retail payments from their customers. GOOG collects from advertisers not users and that is a better place to be, imho.

I ran into one of MSFTs lead programmers Saturday and he was telling me what progress they had made in search technology. Well, the world has moved on, most search is good enough. The game now is about what I call search enabled applications. MSFT is still back in 2003 talking about search :-)