Platform Wars: Facebook, Google, Microsoft
The tech bloggers are all talking about it…. although many of them are talking about the symptoms, not the root cause.
- The Wall Street Journal says “Microsoft Corp. is in talks with Facebook Inc. about making an investment in the social-networking startup that could value Facebook at $10 billion or more, according to people familiar with the matter. “
- Michael Arrington says “Google’s goal - to fight Facebook by being even more open than the Facebook Platform. If Facebook is 98% open
, Google wants to be 100%. The short version: Google will announce a new set of APIs on November 5 that will allow developers to leverage Google’s social graph data. They’ll start with Orkut and iGoogle (Google’s personalized home page), and expand from there to include Gmail, Google Talk and other Google services over time. - Mathew Ingram says “Although the WSJ talks about this sparking Google to pony up for Facebook, however, I think the more interesting question is whether it will light a fire under the new regime over at Yahoo.”
- Google Operating System has a great report on Gmail 2.0 (or is that 1.0, because the current one is Beta?). “Hopefully, Gmail 2.0 will continue to focus on simplicity and user-friendliness, while polishing the interface and adding new features that connect it with other Google applications. One of the goals for Gmail 2.0 is “70% user happiness”, so don’t expect it to be perfect.”
The connection is the Web O/S
The unique thing about Facebook is that end users are regularly installing applications.
People can quickly misinterpruted how important it is that end users are treating Facebook as their “personal server”.
Marshall Kirkpatrick over at Read/Write Web says
“The recent opening of Facebook to outside applications stirred no end of excitement, but in reality the vast majority of those applications so far have been of objects of trivia sitting unused on public profile pages. There’s a lot more at stake with Google than a couple of pokes and some music sharing. Facebook’s momentum with huge amounts of users is because of privacy controls (so far) and the brilliance of the news feeds - almost in spite of the applications, which have been widely derided as MySpace-ish.”
I am a huge fan of Read/Write Web, but I have to partially disagree with Marshall. He is right that the current crop of Facebook apps are nothing to write home about. But the behavior pattern that calls for millions of users to install applications on their section of a server is critically important.
For Google, a social network is only a viral delivery model. As I mention in my IT Flower paper, Google has clearly and very publicly already outlined their vision here:
Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, recently described his vision for the next phase in the Internet:
“applications that are pieced together” - with the characteristics that the apps are
- relatively small,
- the data is in the cloud,
- the apps can run on any device (PC or mobile),
- the apps are very fast and very customizable,
- and are distributed virally (social networks, email, etc).
In other words, the goal is a Web O/S, not just a social network.
Maybe your conclusion is right although an O/S on the web seems to me to be very different from a traditional O/S (like Microsoft Windows):
An O/S in a personal computer or notebook is very hard to remove (or update). So most people chose once when they buy new hardware. That’s what made Microsoft so powerful.
On the web this is very different: When we take social networks as a sort of (future) O/S, we see that users easily switch from one to another.
So in order to establish a web O/S you have to gain the audience first (via attractive services like a social network) and keep it (as long as possible).
The more attractive your platform becomes and the more open it is, the more you can consider it as a sort of web O/S (so there will be a sort of fluent boundary instead of a clear one in the traditional system).
What’s interesting: Google is not only following Facebook regarding “openness” (100% versus 98%) but they also try to build a 3D social network (using Google Earth), as the Google Operation System Blog wrote in a post prior to the one you mentioned in your article.
Obviously web strategists (within Google and Facebook) today are convinced, that (1) part of the future lies in web O/S and (2) in order to achieve this you need to establish a powerful social network.
Hi Mattias
I think you are spot on about this point:
“So in order to establish a web O/S you have to gain the audience first (via attractive services like a social network) and keep it (as long as possible).”
My only thought is that gmail is probably an equally powerful way to keep people. However, gmail is not the easiest way for Google to get people. Google has plenty of daily visitors who love the search engine but would never think of switching from their existing email client. Personally, I think these people are nuts (gmail rocks in my opinion) but I have seen the behavior enough to know that it isn’t unusual.
- Rod
today[10 22, 08]i was in google earth and discovered that in los angeles,calofornia,in a place called coronado,i saw a building that has the shape of the nazi sign.so i just want to know what is it and why does it has that shape.