How Google's Ecosystem Changes Everything
Google has created an ecosystem while no one was watching that will forever change the dynamic of software development, to the detriment of Microsoft and Apple.
Microsoft and Apple have leveraged a particular dominant proprietary platform (Windows/Office in one case, the iPhone/iTunes duopoly in the other) to turn every other vendor into a bit player; and by allowing other vendors to sell products or services that integrate with theirs, they offer just enough incentives for the others to play along. Google is also leveraging a dominant platform (in this case, the Web, the largest platform there is) just as relentlessly as Microsoft and Apple have done, but with an open source philosophy that encourages others to compete.
The ecosystem includes everything from a development platform to application suites, but its strength emanates from a basic understanding of what it takes to dominate technology: you have to control what former Open Document Foundation director Gary Edwards calls the "point of assembly" -- that crucial spot where end users have to come in order to save, share and retrieve their documents -- the final work product that all this technology is meant to help create. What Google is in the process of doing is moving that point of assembly from the desktop, where Microsoft and Apple rule, to the Web, where Google is king.
Others have tried to dethrone Microsoft by creating killer applications; people used to say "it's the application, stupid." But it's not about the application, and, with all due apologies to Cisco CEO John Chambers, it's not about the network either. It's about the platform. As Edwards put it in an email:
The transition from desktop productivity to Web productivity is an intersection point of epoch proportions-- Google seems to be the only one who understands that the great Open Web point of assembly is going to involve much more than unified communications and a gaggle of rip and replace apps. The key here is the concept of unified productivity; where communications, collaboration and content converge.The ecosystem that Google is creating includes a number of distinct parts, but they have to be understood in the context of Google's overall strategy, which is quite simply to encourage end users to spend as much time online as possible. Google doesn't really care what they do there, or whose applications they use, as long as they're online. Zigurd Mednieks, a consultant, mobile applications developer and author of a book on developing using Google tools, enumerated some of the elements of this ecosystem:
- Operating systems -â€" both Chrome for larger devices like laptops and netbooks, and Android for mobile devices like smartphones -- to provide better online experiences for end users. Google has learned from focus groups that even split-second improvements in page load speeds make a difference in how long people remain online, and great operating systems also improve the performance of Web-based applications. And great Web apps combined with a great operating system makes for a very sticky situation (in a good way);
- The Google Web Toolkit allows developers to create applications for a browser (rather than desktop) environment, and includes tools that allows developers to overcome incompatibilities between various browser types (like Firefox, Opera and Explorer);
- Google also makes productivity, collaboration and communications applications, which are meant more as proofs of concept for others to emulate than as the ne plus ultra of functionality. Their value to Google as revenue generation is not material;
- Google Gears, which allows Web applications to interact with software residing on local machines, and also allows end-users to save their work even if they're offline.
You can expect Google to contribute to and influence the development of these key ingredients. You can also see some design philosophy in common across Google products. For example, Android runs Java applications in multiple tasks, and Chrome runs Web pages/apps in multiple tasks to make these systems resilient to apps that crash.As I noted above, Google has no qualms about using open source technology to create products that others can copy -- not because it's unafraid of competition, but because the competition will enliven and strengthen the crucial point of assembly, the Web, which is where Google wants everyone to live: end users, developers, and, of course, advertisers.
Microsoft and Apple? Hard to imagine so many people giving up Word or OS X? I'm old enough to remember when everyone wondered which typewriter would win out -- the one with the little roll of white erasing tape, or the one with the magic backspace button that could erase the last line of text you typed. You see where I'm going with this? Extinction.