Steve Gillmor’s GestureLab

One of the advantages of being so far behind the blogostream is that I get to read Nick Carr after we’ve done a show on his target, in this case Microsoft a year after Ray Ozzie’s famous memo. On this week’s Gillmor Gang, we go slow and deep on the same issues Nick refactors, particularly including Dan Farber’s drive-by conversation with Ray last week. Nick says Microsoft has been distracted.

In another Nick post, Marc Cuban’s Google/YouTube “insider” leak is given a ride. It seems there is some relationship between the deal and the 3 content deals struck earlier that morning, with creators cut out of the deal. What, gambling?

Now, I really don’t mean to snark the Snarkmaster here. But with Mike Arrington on vacation, who is going to put forth the obvious questions here? Like why is Pluck out of business? Why is Scoble so far up Google Reader that he can see daylight for the River of News? Why is Jotspot’s buyout not seen as the beginning of the end of the wiki “business” too? Or if you want to put lipstick on it, a Notes-like development model for Google Office?

Microsoft has always operated on the margins of the venture capital business. It used to be when this unbubble type of activity swirled, we’d see Charles Fitzgerald counter-punch to the stomach with chuckles about the collapse of the Webubble 2.0 ecosystem: What, undisclosed terms? Now that IE7 is shipping, RSS is a feature, not a product. Etc. But so far we’re not seeing it, not even Peter O’Kelly’s timely (for Microsoft) reality checks. What gives?

What gives is that inside Microsoft the word at the highest levels is: We will do anything and everything we have to in order to avoid it being done to us. Distracted? No. Attacking competitor froth in the Web services sector? No, we’re too far bought in to the model to FUD it. The customer is running away from us. It’s Office 97 all over again and we aren’t the vendor. We’re getting Trojan Horsed on our own petard by a bunch of stupid flyweight apps that are congealing as we dither. We know we’re fucked and we’re standing in a circular firing squad. Mommy.

Mary Jo’s fabulous ZDNet conversation with Jim Allchin (another sure sign of the impending Offocalypse) produced some razorsharp focus on the fundamental issue: How quickly can Google integrate the small floater teams in the GOffice solar system? Difficult, he said, but not impossible. Allchin? Those of you Web 2 oh-ers out there should take my word for it. You have never seen this kind of direct , bluster-free, beyond-scared and approaching-acceptance talk from the top of the Redmond Wall. Just because Jim is retiring doesn’t mean he’s wrong.

We’re seeing a vast and super-accelerated purge of industry dynamics. The speed of this is separating the men from the boys. Ask yourself who the leaders really are at this point? Only one in my book: Ray Lane. He’s the closest thing to a mashup of vendor and VX; let’s call it vendor capital. Yahoo is on the ropes, more psychologically then financially, but in the process are abandoning their ownership of the vendor capital meme as they argue about where their offices are really located. The crap about a patent play on attention (even in its parenthetical rider to the Tagging Bill form) is a sure sign of atrophy and chip-counting.

The other Ray is slowed by his lip service to the rich client. Even though he’s already come most if not all of the distance to the new party, he’s not yet found the way to communicate to Ballmer and therefore the board just how quickly the work needs to be done. Somewhere there’s a new Halloween document that says who lives and who gets a nice package. Office Live? Dead. Windows Live, the only chance they have. They have to look at the world through their customer’s eyes.

What do I see when I look out, over the Palisades to California. Yes it’s the new Steinberg New Yorker cover, with GMailReaderCal (don’t blink) in the foreground cityscape, YouTube videos flowing down the Hudson River, Google Docs and GChats streaming West on an unbroken superhighway packed with iPods and cache stations.

I finally finished The Beatles. Damned if they didn’t break up. I had an inkling, what with the Yoko thing and all. But they were just too good, too rich, too far out ahead. It just goes to show you… what? From the time Brian Epstein died to the end — 2 years. Was it because the manager left the company (and the planet?) No. In fact, the other way around. I’d venture Brian died because he fell into a massive unrecoverable depression when he realized he was no longer needed or effective.

It wasn’t the flailing attempts to reinvent business with Apple, or the drugs, or the Maharishi that did it. It was the collapse of the central nervous system — the idea of The Beatles. What came next? Business as usual. Watergate. Peace with honor. Windows. As hard as it was to imagine then or is to imagine now, the Microsoft dream is over. Replaced by Google? No, the Stones didn’t replace the Fab Four. The idea of what was possible changed.

That’s why it’s a losing proposition to look at this logically through Bill’s or even Ray’s eyes. And despite what it may seem, not through Eric’s and Sergey’s and Larry’s eyes either. When I look out the Steinberg window on the world, I see through the interfaces and the services to the ideas, the notes, the coming attractions, the harbingers of fate, the mysteries of the black holes where the truly valuable data live. Each rumble of the Blackberry on the bedside table, the flush of Beale and Hawk and Farber photos swarming around the latest stupid event, the slow, measured steps leading into the Gesture pool, the equally slow dawning realization of a self-sustaining platform built not on disruption but sustained validation by the meritocracy of the Network.

These are not Utopian dreams. The myth of monopoly is utopian, and ephemeral to boot. Survival depends on pragmatic analysis and action, sometimes risky, always an imperative. The father rushes out to push his daughter out of the oncoming truck not of decision but of chemical logic. We’re not predicting the future, we’re practising it.

If you don’t believe me, convince yourself. Take the time to explain how Microsoft gets from here to any possible there. Don’t work backward from IT’s supposed hammerlock on the enterprise. The Gang this week swarmed around a 1 to 2 year window in which Live would emerge to challenge Google. Technically, not a problem. Can they roll out an on-demand rich client in that time frame? Forget that they say it won’t work on the Web, that it needs the power of the client. A year ago McNealy and I argued this very point to a draw, around the notion that intelligent caching wins.

Lucovsky’s Hailstorm project was just such an engine, revolving around a huge in memory database not at all dissimilar in practice if not in scope to the memory pool pushed into GMail and GReader every time you log-in, and periodically expanding and contracting around new data. Elegantly, chats are spooled off into storage; not so elegantly, I can get GReader to lock up Firefox by stuffing too many feed items into the list view by paging ahead (or back in time.) These limits will be tweaked and steadily reduced to non-issues by reducing each individual app’s memory allocation dynamically and taking advantage of common services (chat, blending of incoming messages and stories, and gesture-led intelligent prioritization of all of the above.)

Again, can Microsoft do this too. Yes. Will they? Again, eventually (and probably sooner than Nick and Dan think) yes. But where they have to fight through internal fueds and amortization tables, Google has no barrier to speak of except handling the fundamental shifts in page rank relevance and authority that the gesture disruption unleashes. We’re moving into a time of user control of rank, the access to it and the pricing of that access. Google knows this to be true; otherwise, why on earth would they commit to providing API access to GReader behavior data? Yahoo’s bet: a patent application around “activity.” Again, fuck you Yahoo.

Will Microsoft unleash our attention data? My bet: Yes. Now look again out the Steinberg window. Instead of it being a Google window we’re looking through, it’s a Google/Microsoft frame. Where is the rich client in this picture? Not what Ray is trying to sell us, a transitional Office-controlled window with enhanced network services, where the heavy lifting is around advanced synchronization of multiple stores? Instead, it’s an array of licensed objects — widgets if you will — that are granted access by users and companies to appropriate data about who we are and what we’re interested in hearing about. When I hear someone telling me about a new attention service, and what they are going to “allow” the user to do, I hear the sound of the bullet falling into the chamber in Russian roulette.

For Microsoft, it’s the same simple calculation. How do you level the playing field, paint yourself into the Steinberg window? By intercepting the user at the moment before the data emerges onto the network. Once it’s out of the user’s control, it plays to the owners of the previous model’s power base — Google’s 400,000 advertisers. In a user-controlled model, it’s the user that grants access to the more efficient gestures and pooled behavior that drives advertising impressions past lead gen to a hyper-efficient channel model.

Ray’s choice is stark: Bet against the idea that Hailstorm can trump the rich client, or unbundle the user’s behavior from Windows and deliver it to the user’s control. It’s a bold and dangerous step, but taking to heart what Ray and Steve are actually saying internally, not a great stretch from where they already are, and one which brings their existing assets into play rather than being held captive by them. It’s a two minute offense, but guess what time it is.

Tuesday, October 31st, 2006 at 2:15 pm.
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