Steve Gillmor’s GestureLab

It may come as a surprise to many of us, but not Ray Ozzie, that he has won the war. While everyone from Nick Carr to the group of consultants known as the Enterprise Irregulars tilt at the Windmill formerly known as ERP, Microsoft has suddenly emerged with some incredible momentum courtesy of Scott Guthrie, the Silverlight team, and Steve Jobs.

Six years I sat in a Microsoft offsite with Jon Udell and watched Guthrie roll out a slick Ajax-based plug-in for Visual Studio that created ASP.Net apps on the fly. It would be another 18 months before the code surfaced in production, but today Guthrie is the closest thing to Bill Gates at the server level. Asked about Silverlight as a Flash killer, he said:

We’re going to get Flash downloaded onto everything in the universe — Silverlight downloaded on everything in the universe just like Flash. There will be that runtime everywhere. It’s small, it’s no big deal. It used to be that memory was so limited, that you couldn’t have multiple of anything, but here it’s just fine.

Fine, basic Bill blocking and tackling, we’re playing Moore’s Law the Home version. But then a real smoker down the middle:

So, the choice is much more at the designer level, and I don’t know whether we’ll — we’re just investing in it, we think it’s a really great thing. Scott knows a hundred times more about it than I do.

I simply can’t recall Bill Gates acknowledging, no, celebrating a deeper knowledge. Certainly it’s a marker of the transition Bill is in as he moves to his Foundation mid year, but what’s more fundamental is his anointing of Guthrie at such a strategic level. Parse the whole clip again. We’ve got the speed and bandwidth and local storage to make the runtime trivial, we’ve abstracted other runtimes out of any power to disrupt our move onto the browser, we’re within months of injecting .Net into the Web architecture, we have an advanced server fabric and developer tooling to instantiate this platform ubiquitously at the Cloud level, and we have serious revenue at the server layer after years of investment.

What’s transformative about this handoff is the way that this work, under way for easily 7 years, so seamlessly plugs into Ray Ozzie’s memo and press launch of the Software plus Services strategy in San Francisco several years ago. We all know the aircraft carrier analogy about Redmond, where it takes so long to turn the ship. In this case, the rudder was turned just in time — 7 years ago. Similarly, the work on the Tablet PC was forged in the same time frame, the XML framework and communications servers, Hailstorm, and all the other things today instantiated by… who?

Right. Google and Apple. The iPhone is the revenge of the Tablet, as Google Apps is to Hailstorm. Combine the two, and you have a dynamic relationship that is empowering users to switch off of Office and even Windows to the new OS, where Windows and Linux and Solaris and OS/X are abstracted by SilverLight et al runtimes. Does it make a difference whether the runtime is Flash or Silverlight to the iPhone user? Does it make a difference to the user whether the document creation engine lives on the hard drive or is acceptably and intelligently cached where needed between cloud and device?

When these distinctions become invisible to users, the economics of the distributed virtualized model become impossible to stop. With the iPhone, we are already there: despite the ephemeral latency issues of the Edge debate, the on-demand nature of the experience trumps any other system based on access alone. Applications that manage collaborative communications in near-enough real time are not simply competitive with the static firmware model, they force the previous generation of apps to reinvent themselves or be abandoned.

This is not a Google Apps versus Office fight, therefore. This is an Office versus Office fight. If there is no perceptual difference between Office HardDrive Edition and Office Cache Edition, users won’t care and will move based solely on ease and lowered cost of deployment. And guess who knows a hundred times more than Bill Gates about this. Scott Guthrie and at the uber level, The Father of Replication aka sync aka intelligent caching Ray Ozzie. Not pigeonholing Ray here, just pointing out work that in Ray’s case started in the 20th Century with Notes. This is Ray’s plan, folks.

What keeps this strategy on the rails is Steve Jobs and the iPhone. The iPhone encourages Google to remaster their apps on the viral Web platform, and in the process strengthen the Safari/Firefox/Opera alliance and keep Internet Explorer pinned down. This in turn encourages Facebook, Fandango, etc. to write iPhone gateways into their architecture and stitch them into a user-controlled federation of just-good-enough applications that encourage iPhone adoption as a route around IT blocking of social media sites.

This wave of quasi-enterprise apps allows the Office Cache team to gain a foothold around IT similar to the Windows 95/Windows for Workgroups/Office 97 Trojan Horse that sealed the Office suite route of productivity apps. Again, if the server source is invisible to users, they will go with whatever user contract provides the most benefit for them. I don’t care whether it’s a Google server or a Facebook server or Salesforce or whatever combination, as long as it works on my iPhone.

Faced with such powerful forces aligned around the iPhone fundamentals, Ozzie has all the tools needed to realize his goals. Office and Windows revenue will continue to fuel the hardliners inside Redmond who seek to frame the discussion as protecting Office at all costs. But time is on Ozzie’s side, as the only thing Microsoft has every succeeded in overcoming is competition from within, and software plus services mandates that the Office elders bend, not Ray. With allies like Scott and Steve, he’s got all the power he needs.

Friday, December 14th, 2007 at 2:11 am.
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