Steve Gillmor’s GestureLab

Thanks to Dan Farber's intersession, I received a pass to the Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco. With Ray Lane's words still ringing from the Salesforce media lunch on Monday (lots of dead men walking), I arrived too late to catch Dan's conversation with Esther Dyson but did hear Andrew McAfee deliver a well-researched runthrough of the world from IT's perspective. Net: we're info-hoarders at heart, IT will resist at all costs, no workflow built in, don't worry, people move slowly and only when there's a 10x or better improvement.

It's a safe story, and as wrongheaded as it is accepted as value in today's post-Microsoft world. Even at Google, there is a defensive posture of "this stuff is at best for small business, we're not attacking Office, yadda yadda yadda." It took me an additional half an hour after my media peers left a luncheon to rollout Google Office (Google Docs and Spreadsheets) yesterday to get the core team aligned around the actual dynamic of the New Office.

Here's the takeaway I doubt we'll get from any of this conference:

• Office is Dead
• Google is within 6 weeks of establishing IM linkage across most of their Office apps.
• The only oxygen in the system left uncaptured by Google is the vertical stack. Every one of the startups/vendors in this room and lurking sphere-style can only survive and perhaps accelerate by leveraging verticals as a mechanism for micro-community economics.
• Office is Dead, long live Google.

Watch the body language around the Google guys and you'll pick up the real message. It's reminscent of the moment many years ago when Windows NT took root in the corporate counterculture. Savor that phrase — it's the underlying driver of this transformation. The Boomers are driving this bus, and no amount of conservative bullshit will slow this express. While HBS consultants preach the policies of a broadcast trickle-down Grandma ease of use mantra, the high-value micro communities are already formed, have been up and running for months, and are scraping away value from corporations and transplanting them in Third Life salons.

Before the NT moment, Netware was Office. You could string all the reasons why it was an insurmountable fortress end to end and circle the moon, but it all crumbled when TCP IP eviscerated the Novell architecture from below. WIndows for Workgroups was the trojan horse in those days, and Gmail is the trojan horse today. When I ask the question at conferences (for the last year and a half) the number of Gmail users in the crowd regularly exceeds 75%, moving toward 95% in recent weeks.

Not that folks like Doc Searls aren't frozen like some prehistoric dog in Eudora, or that most coprorates are chained in Notes or Exchange. But every new layoff or M&A triggers counter-accounts in Gmail. Gtalk becomes the transport for out-of-band point-to-point conversations, Gcal and GDocs/Spread become the workflow engine, and (soon) GDocs/Greader become the high-value info transport for XML data objects — and most crucially — meta data exchange, aka gestures/attention.

The corporate countercultureists will do will to ignore the baiting tactics of the desktop luddites. Om Malik just tossed a bone to the conservatives (he's the Man) and Shel Israel advised not to approach the set-in-their ways crowd. Countercultureists are apologetic on the panel, but like Mike Arrington, don't need to be. It's a vestigial stutter that will fade within a few months. 

Wednesday, October 11th, 2006 at 10:11 am.
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