The Clash of the Titans
Other companies besides Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo are important players in the increasingly web-oriented world of software development and deployment. Some, like Amazon and eBay, have staked out their turf and seem predictable.
These three established powerhouses were once easily definable, too. You could almost do it in a single word. Google: search. Microsoft: software. Yahoo: er, portal? Directory maybe.
Anyway, they are now all radically redefining themselves and their positions in the market, and in doing so are threatening to invade one another's presumed turf. Google has the cash, brand identity, and in-house expertise to branch out into other markets, and many of the experiments in Google Labs look like potential incursions into what Microsoft considers its territory. Microsoft has been retooling to make everything it does more web-centric, moving into Yahoo's and Google's space. And while Yahoo gets less attention than Google and Microsoft, it has also been quietly but deeply redefining its role, using words like "ecosystem."
The changes they make will affect you, through the web development tools that these companies offer, the web platforms they build, or the products and services they deploy. And although they will share some of their plans with you and the rest of the world, they're not going to reveal all their plans, because these three companies are engaged in a battle.
That battle is taking place in cyberspace. It's commonplace to say that it's all about the Web now, but this means something specific to these titans. Take those servers.
You don't invest billions of dollars in server farms to write software. You do it because you expect to take in billions of dollars from hosting. But hosting what?
Hosting software is the easy answer: When software becomes a service, it has to run somewhere other than on your computer. But don't expect these companies to create services and compete on an equal footing with every other developer of web services, including open source and free. They're looking for a way not to get a piece of this new thing, but to own it.
The millions of people who use their products or services are their greatest asset. These companies are intensely focused on how to hold onto those people, how to leverage them, and how to get more of them. How do they do that?
The magazine model of selling advertising on your space is one way, but you've got to have a space. The world of web development is inherently distributed and acentric. Once the space was the desktop, and Microsoft used to get really brutal about what icons could appear on the Windows desktop. Google's restraint in selling space—or putting much of anything at all—on its search page is, ironically, part of its success. Yahoo has intense in-house battles for locations on its front page, and you can tell to look at it.
The search result page is a powerful space for reaching people. All three companies do search, and they all see the temptation to use control over search results for other purposes, but they all see how bad a strategy that would be.
Stickiness is all, but what is there to stick to? Of the three, Yahoo probably has the stickiest front page, but can it keep people coming there in the first place?
The point is, you can logically work out how the web-based app market ought to develop, but it won't play out exactly that way, because Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo need to warp it to serve their purposes, and they have the money and talent to figure out how to deform the geometry of that world.
So you need to ask yourself some questions: What can you determine about where the titans are headed? What are they advising developers to do? What are they enabling you to do? What are they doing that you don't have to? What technologies and standards are they pushing that you need to deal with? What doors are closing and what new ones are opening? Where can you safely ignore them? What are some skills or insights that will serve you well no matter how the clash of the titans plays out?
A Google Cubicle?
Two enduring theories that you can find worked out in rich detail on the Web are (1) that Google is planning to come out with a competitor to Microsoft Office, and (2) that it is developing an operating system. Neither is likely, but both are understandable, because Google is clearly pursuing something like each of these scenarios.
The office-like applications are mostly in place now with the release of Google Spreadsheet. Along with the Writely word processor and other components, Google has what looks superficially like an Office suite.
But a closer look shows that they must have something else in mind with these tools. Google doesn't even seem to be embracing the idea of a conventional app, let alone a suite of them. The spreadsheet lacks many capabilities of a serious spreadsheet app, but it extends an existing desktop spreasheet app in interesting ways. It supports Excel file read and save and extends Excel's capabilities to allow collaboration on the Web. And Google execs are pretty clear, too, in how dismissive they are of the whole desktop shrinkwrap app model. Their thinking seems to be, "Why would we target last generation's platform and application model?" Just as developing countries are not building landline phone networks but are leapfrogging right to cellular, it looks like Google will leapfrog the shrinkwrap desktop app model in which they have no sunk cost.
Where they're jumping to is the question.
Google is developing these apps or app services or widgets, but is not viewing them in the same way as Microsoft views its desktop apps. They will not follow the same financial model, same distribution model, or have similar features or target audience.
Where these apps evolve may in fact be decided by third-party developers who figure out how to tweak or extend or exploit them cleverly. To work with Google, you can visit Google Code and tap into the APIs for Google Maps, Search, Gadgets, Toolbar, Adwords, Data, or Blogger. There are SDKs, and for Google Desktop, free or open-source projects you can participate in. The Calendar app has an API that Python programmers seem to enjoy.
