Will Google Wave Be Microsoft’s Tsunami?
Yes could be the answer, depending on how much Google lives up to promises made yesterday at its I/O developer conference.
Simply put, Google Wave is a real-time collaboration and communications product/service bringing together: Document creation/editing/sharing, email, instant messaging and status updating (e.g. Twitter). And more! Unfortunately, the shortlist doesn’t aptly describe how big is the Wave.
Google’s introductory messaging is excellent and perhaps captures the essence: Live—or life, if you prefer—streaming. Google’s explanation:
A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more. A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when. A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.
Do you get it? I do, but damn if I can yet explain it well. Google’s Wave concept is all about real-time, real-live streaming and sharing. Conceptually, Wave could be the showcase Web 3.0 application/service—and that should greatly concern Microsoft executives.
First Internet Tidal Wave
Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates’ May 1995 letter, “The Internet Tidal Wave” is aptly titled. Microsoft survived the wave by integrating the browser into Windows, thus preserving the operating system’s relevance. But a new wave is coming, and not just from Google. The next Internet tidal wave is Web 3.0 and computing relevance shifting away from PC applications and content to Internet-connected mobile devices.
By the way, Google made an important statement by giving I/O attendees new Android phones: Mobile devices are the future computing.
Desktop software defenders claim that mobile devices and/or RIAs—Rich Internet Applications—lack the utility, features and power to rival PC apps. Oh? Tell that Jorge Colombo, whose June 1 The New Yorker cover, “Finger Painting,” is talk of the Internet this week. Jorge used iPhone App “Brushes.” Yes, he drew the cover on an iPhone. I only received the June 1 issue yesterday, but whoa.
Many millennia ago, artists expressed their work in drawings and carvings on cave walls. New technological advances, granted over many centuries, allowed freer expression using different tools. Now the tools are digital and the canvas is a handheld computer/phone.
People who argue for desktop software and against mobile devices and RIAs either don’t easily accept change or they have vested interest in preserving the status quo. Microsoft represents the status quo.
Microsoft is the new IBM, making some of the same mistakes. IBM protected its legacy mainframe business, even while trying to embrace the dawning PC era. Microsoft embraces the Web, while trying to extinguish its attributes that threaten the PC business model. Like computing and informational relevance shifted from the mainframe to the PC, it is now shifting from the PC to the Web-connected mobile device.
Mobile Web Waves
Web 2.0 was PC-centric. Mobility defines Web 3.0. Your information, the content you want to create or consume will be available anytime, anywhere on anything. This change in computing and informational relevance is inevitable. Microsoft’s challenge: Ride the wave rather than be washed away by it.
Pew Internet report, “The Mobile Difference: Wireless connectivity has drawn many users more deeply into digital life,” published in March, wonderfully lays out the social and technology intersections of mobility and the Web. Pew developed a topology that makes up 39 percent of the U.S. adult population.
Pew Internet’s John Horrington explains in the report:
For these groups, growth in frequency of online use is linked not only to increasing broadband adoption, but to positive and improving attitudes about how mobile access makes them more available to others. Across the groups, a lot of variation exists regarding what these changes mean to users.
Among John’s key findings one stunningly stands out: “Mobile access to the internet constitutes an inflection point in technology adoption.” He’s absolutely right.
During this next Internet wave, people won’t stand for using multiple applications spread out across everywhere. They will demand consolidation, which better fits the mobile device’s size and functionality. Google has one approach, by providing consolidated services available by single sign-in on Android-powered phones. Apple consolidates disparate applications into a single home screen. The approaches, while different, imbue similar design philosophy.
Google Wave, at least as laid out in concept, brilliantly captures this consolidation philosophy—of providing people a single place for managing all their important communications and personal interactions. The key word is “personal.” The mobile handset, particularly smartphone, is far more personal than the PC, whether viewed from its form and function or how often it’s carried and used.
Breaking Waves
Google is ready to make Wave available anytime, anywhere and on anything. Yesterday, Michael Gartenberg tweeted: “Is Wave a Twitter killer? Outlook killer? Something like Notes that few folks use or understand?” To which I responded: “Yes, yes and no. Wave could be to Outlook what Outlook was to contact managers and e-mail clients a decade ago. Impressive.”
Outlook was a novel concept in 1996. Microsoft brought together e-mail, calendaring and contacts in a way no other company had done before. Outlook’s multi-function communications approach and eventual market success led to the demise of a vibrant business in contact and e-mail applications. I remember in 1995 when there were more than 20 contact managers to choose from, like ACT!, Ecco, GoldMine and Starfish Sidekick.
Wave is a remaking of Outlook, but unbound from the desktop and updated with more modern, relevant and personal communications features. You can be sure that Wave will fit nicely with Google’s RIA and mobile strategies. Depending on Google’s execution and developers’ response, Wave could wash out many disparate communications and social media applications like Outlook did more than a decade ago.
Apple isn’t Microsoft’s problem in mobile. It’s Google. Even with all that App Store promises, iPhone has yet to convincingly demonstrate that it has sales and adoption longevity. Google licenses its mobile operating system to many handset manufacturers. Android is coming to as many as 20 different handsets this year—and there will be netbooks running the operating system, too.
Google is quickly becoming an operating system competitor with Microsoft; Android will be bundled with some appetizing Web-centric applications and services. With services like Bing, Microsoft is putting up a backyard fence to keep out Google, when the search and information giant is instead coming through the front door.
Unfortunately, Microsoft’s mobile strategy is weak. The company doesn’t have a sustainable operating system offering for handsets or netbooks. Android is surprisingly robust and scales to netbooks, at the least. Microsoft must catch the Wave rather than be washed away by it. But the company is taking too long about it. Microsoft needs one operating system for mobile devices and PCs—like Apple, Google and Nokia do.
In a December report, Pew Internet predicted that “the mobile device will be the primary connection tool to the Internet for most people in the world in 2020.” I disagree. The transition will happen much faster, easily by 2015.
Google clearly is preparing for that transition sooner than later. Is Microsoft ready? I say no. Do you agree?
Do you have a social media story that you’d like told? Please email Joe Wilcox: oddlytogether at gmail dot com.
I can only hope that you are wrong. On the search front, Bing represents a substantial improvement in search relavancy and results refinement. The UI design appears to enhance rather than get in the way, and the speed has also been improved.
Since the overall look and feel or framework is very similiar in design to Outlook, a competitive feature set could be included in Outlook by 2013 or sooner if Google Wave scares Microsoft deeply enough.
Microsoft already has a competitive advantage since Windows Live also already incorporates many of the features Facebook offers and it shouldn’t be to difficult to tie these into Outlook.
If there is anything I have learned about Microsoft, it’s that they know how to react when threatened. My opinion is that Outlook, needs a competitor, and this will give us the kind of motivation they need to create the innovation it has lacked for quite some time now.
This is nothing like Outlook, it is more like MSN Messenger with added bits (it is based on XMPP).
It is also an open standard which Microsoft finds it very hard to compete against.
I really hope Microsoft do adopt it, then we can have some transparent competition in the market instead of every business being tied to one Microsoft format or another.
Joe, I think you are concentrating way too much on the Mobile side of \’Web 3.0\’ – the fact that you can use these products on any device means that the OS is becoming irrelevant, I think it might be happening much quicker than anyone thinks. Mobiles are great but I cannot see an entire company working from them. Anywhere, on any device means desktops, laptops and mobiles but they do not have to run Windows.
I’ve long loathed Outlook, RDee. The motif is fine, but the software is bulky and doesn’t multithread very well. Microsoft does its best work when competition is greatest. I would welcome Wave competition leading to a better Outlook (or its replacement).
As for Bing, it’s still not available to me. But from the screenshots, I’m quite impressed by the UI.
In the broader context, you’re absolutely right, billybob. The OS should be irrelevant. Web 3.0 is very much about content and services available anytime, anywhere and on anything. But the phone will be the ever-present client.
Right now, applications do matter. Last week i was out with friends, one of whom is an accountant. He got an urgent phone call from a client, to which he responded by transferring money between accounts using his iPhone. I can’t do anything like that on my Nokia N96. As Apple marketing asserts: “There’s an app for that.” If you have an iPhone.
Applications matter in Web 2.0, but the cloud matters more in Web 3.0. Or should.
“There’s an app for that” is a great marketing message but I think that the future will be based on standards. Imagine if all the banks agreed on a money transfer standard, then you could have the app on any phone with an internet connection. The app would be specific to the platform but the protocol would be a well defined standard that anyone can use.
The only reason I was able to make that first post from a Mac with Safari and this one from Linux with Firefox is because of standards. Microsoft has been fighting standards for years because it means they have to compete with other companies.
The browser bundling issue is a red-herring. Microsoft killed adoption of web apps by creating their own standards (MSHTML, ActiveX etc) and then forcing them down everyones throats by bundling. The key issue is the lack of standards with the bundling. Nobody would mind if IE6 was 100% standards compliant and secure and it was bundled, likewise nobody would care if they didn’t bundle a terrible browser.
Look at the recent Opera complaint, the main problem is lack of standards compliance which is made worse by bundling. No wonder Microsoft are going out of their way to support every single item in CSS 2.1, I think the EU is going to start mandating it.
People who fight against standards either don’t easily accept change or they have vested interest in preserving the status quo. Everywhere you look in the real world there are standards so that people can compete on a level playing field, why should our industry be different?