Steve Gillmor’s GestureLab

Some chickens may start coming home to roost now that Google is going semi-public with their Office strategy. For starters, can we now agree to stop listening to denials from Eric Schmidt and others about this? Doubt it.

Next, can we start watching more carefully who insists the Google Office strategy doesn't exist? Doubt it. Seems some really credible folks are still clinging to the same old story, insisting that

• it's not a direct competitor
• ad-supported apps won't work
• they'll never catch up
• nobody else could pull it off
• there's no offline solution
• more sand-diving

I especially love the one about how some of us have been subtly changing our stories over the years we've been saying this: Office is dead. Of course, I never meant that literally, or metaphorically, or economically, or strategically. That would be foolish, naive, vengeful, pathetic, and clueless. Watch how we change the argument bit by bit, from Office is Dead to Office is really Dead to Office is commonly recognized as Dead.

The InformationWeek story (Dan Farber points at it) is wonderfully balanced, not by whether or not Microsoft has a prayer of staving this off, but by the way it doles out the shrinking thumb-holds by which Redmond is hanging on to its business model. It's offline, stupid–thats it, the last remaining sandbag holding the water back. Yeah, now that Connexion is dead, nobody will ever think of a way to erase the offline barrier. C'mon guys, let's line up on that one. Or shall we just leave it that surely IT won't let this happen.

Remember Saigon, when everybody started running for the helicopters. Imagine IT guys sitting there, one eye on the helicopters, the other on their management console. Imagine that our guy notices his assistant furtively gathering up his pictures of the family, checking his Blackberry for Gmail under the table, knowing way too much about blogosphere crap, ccing his Gmail account to "take the work home with him," reading documents via HTML, suddenly announcing his wife has updated his calendar about an important Little League game he has to attend, and then, leaving for a job building EC2/S3 apps. Elvis, or in this case the new institutional memory, has left the building.

If IT doesn't matter, who does? The new IT, the user militia? Google's opportunity, and potential cage, is the relevance of the relationship with the user. If GOffice can maintain a contract of profitability with the user, how can Microsoft survive? Increased granularity, behavioral transparency, strategic just-in-time resonance — this is the stuff of which marriages are made. On the flip side, what is the stuff of which the Microsoft divorce is conjured?

• loss of inevitabilty
• fear of the static
• the Yankee fan within

Take the hard ones first: all the vertical apps, the business logic, the entropy-laden tools built of the hairball. This is the domain of Open Office, the decrepit notion that you can wean the child off the nipple with a rubber one. This works right up to the moment the child wants to leap ahead, become the big girl, hold the glass herself. This is the "weakness" of Gspread, that it doesn't run the macros.

How does new IT think about this? Do they see it in their interest to perpetuate the business partner lock-in, the connection back to developers that forms the unspoken back-scratching logic of going where the money is? Sure they do, in a world where Open Office promises options but actually delivers a horse race where Office can be declared the winner by comparison. In effect, Open Office validates Office quality in a vacuum where no improvement is either requested or valued over the existing version.

Open Office is the Washington Generals to Office's Globetrotters. Without them there is no game, no score, no halftime, no metrics of success. Owning 95% of the market means what? In a world of show business, it means blockbuster. In a world of productivity it means incrementally little. What if the major innovation possible with Office is to make it obsolete?

Yeah, that does resonate, now doesn't it. That's the aircraft carrier-sized hole Google is driving through. Remember those vertical apps, the LOB apps, the IP of the company, the stuff that is not commoditized. What if a widget fabric comes along that distributes the building blocks of those apps across the GOffice APIs and primitives. What if the cost of the Microsoft server/client equation is undermined by such a strategy, let's call it Salesforce, why don't we. What if Marc Benioff is the ultimate salesman for the Big Switcheroo?

Wait, you mean Salesforce could be a Google New Deal, with subsidies for the development of a widget framework behind the scenes that, when surfaced as a developer pack for small businesses, provides a suck-and-replace kit for migrating Office LOB apps? Naah, that would be… naah.

Wait a minute, so when IWeek says it will take years to undermine those apps, who are they talking about? Let's look at SAP and their modules–like one of Shai Agassi's favorites, the M&A module. If Salesforce is merely the dev front for Google, an abstraction layer to hide the skeleton of the emerging widget framework, a subsidized (read ad-supported) trending-toward-free LOB service farm, then where do you start first? How about an M&A service where multiple LOB apps are harmonized behind the cloud and then rematerialized as a consistent corporate API-driven fabric built on top of guess what, the Google primitives. Beam me up, Sergey.

Monday, August 28th, 2006 at 1:10 am.
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