Steve Gillmor’s GestureLab

Some guy on CNN:

“I can’t think of a single credential the man has. He’s been in the Senate for two years.”

Jeff Raikes in the New York Times:

TO Mr. Raikes, the company’s third-longest-serving executive, after Mr. Gates and Mr. Ballmer, the Google challenge is an attack on Microsoft that is both misguided and arrogant. “The focus is on competitive self-interest; it’s on trying to undermine Microsoft, rather than what customers want to do,” he says.

On The Gang this week, Mike Arrington interrupts a tangent into politics to return to the more comfortable world of tech. Sorry Mike, there’s no refuge there. On Charlie Rose, Bill Clinton talks up John Edwards to downsize the Hillary implosion in Iowa. Obama responds to Bill’s lack-of-experience charge by quoting Bill from ‘92 to the contrary. Stand by your woman, Bill.

Yes, Jeff, it’s true Microsoft is in a strong position, but it’s because of Google and Apple, not in spite of them. If Google’s strategy is misguided, then why talk about it? If Obama is so wet behind the years, then why bring up Hillary, who was there the whole time but as George Will put it, fumbled the only two times she got the ball, the Attorney General and health care?

Arrogant? Competitive self-interest is a Microsoft trademark. And the old “customers aren’t asking for it” is such a pile. Since when do customers want to spend real money on Office instead of free dynamically refreshed apps that just work 90% of the time. If that were the case, then why is Microsoft offering to trade users’ attention data for a desktop full of the latest Windows and Office? This is where the New York Times and Google miss the boat.

Microsoft, for historical and now tactical reasons, is in a strange and very powerful position of underdog in the Battle for Office. They have somehow gotten it into their corporate head that respecting the user is a viable business practice. The real war here is for the user on the ground, just like the caucus goers in Iowa. With Microsoft backend technologies reaching a critical mass just before Election Day, the voters can make essentially an equal choice between Redmond and Mountain View. And it will come down to which candidate they like better.

This wouldn’t be so important if Microsoft were operating in a vacuum, but they’re not. The primaries are about surviving the rush to the bottom, where all the candidates are vetted and we end up deciding who we like best by pushing the others down the stack. Google has been lucky so far in operating in the shadow of Microsoft’s ’90’s mistakes and more recently Facebook’s stutter with Beacon.

But while Microsoft is up-front about establishing a contract with users for their gestures, Google rolls out a feature of Google Reader that ignores users’ privacy. Suddenly the completely unrelated act of chatting on Gtalk with someone who guesses your gmail name is used as permission to reveal your shared feed’s address and data to any of the above. It’s not that I am particularly worried about it; it’s just that the only way people could access the unguessable URL before was by having it publicly shared in email or a blog post. Certainly not by a tangentially-related contract where the only opt is out by manually hiding the contacts of those you don’t want to have see your shares, or by globally deleting the whole store. Now that’s arrogant.

And while the argument will be that Google has not violated the user’s privacy legally, neither did Beacon. Both technologies are early forays into the value of gestural data, about which readers might want to look with suspicion at those who say they don’t understand what I’ve been talking about for several years. Microsoft gets it, and they’re putting their software where your gestures are. And the one who levels with its users will trump the alleged benefits of a manufactured change agent. Get it together Google, the whole world is watching.

Sunday, December 16th, 2007 at 6:21 pm.
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