Steve Gillmor’s GestureLab

I just wrote the most fantastic post in the press room at Web 2.0 Expo, and then lost it when Wordpress declined to auto-save. Yes, I know, Web 2.0 sucks, Office is not dead, blah blah blah. No matter, being brilliant is not part of my new business model. Instead, I’m all about the Law of small numbers.

You know the Law of Large numbers, of course; that’s the one where Microsoft reached such a large number that its continued growth percentage-wise collapsed. Some are now predicting that with Google. They are wrong. Google will just keep on going, because Google is in control of the exchange rate. Remember when Nixon took us off the gold standard? There is no new Dylan, or Nixon neither.

Web 2.0 Expo rocks. The Expo floor is full of actual real vendors, second and third-stage guys with actual business models, enterprisey, light on the mashup stuff, a dash of RSS wrappers around blocking and tackling, and the smell of happy vendors who for once have gotten a reasonable sample to chew over for the next few months. The sessions? The keynotes? I’ve opted for the press room and hallway conversations. Scoble has the hallway take-down mastered, pumping out Justin2.0 to the Twitterati. Mike Arrington has some new conference with Jason Calacanis called TechLunch 20. Mike begged me for a link. No problem; I’m all about links.

Now we’re sitting around the press room as Mike tries to follow up his eBay StumbleUpon scoop with a Google clone. Mike calls me a one trick pony as I persist in calling Google the only winner from here on out. But the truth is that the Goggle-is-dead antitrust dance is oversubscribed and stillborn. In his keynote, Schmidt pointed out that Google controlled just 1% of the advertising market. Maybe, but what 1%? This is the Law of small numbers at work.

Conferences are about expectation management. I expected nothing from the keynotes or sessions here, and wasn’t disappointed. Good people were booked, but really, what possible information could come from Jeff Bezos’ rehash of the same conversation he’s had for the last two years. Partly that’s due to his being way ahead of the curve with S3 et al, and the rest is due to the impedance mismatch of a developer-heavy focus for a blue collar audience. Or Eric Schmidt denying the war with Office within sentences of his announcement of a PowerPoint killer.

Here’s how this works: Google Office team’s metric for success is amount of time within the app base. Inside Google, where Docs and Spreadsheet, Gmail, and Calendar are deployed, percentage of total time in the apps approaches 100%. Sure, some of the beancounters use Excel. The Google guy in Dan Farber’s keynote panel admitted he occasionally uses Word, though who knows why? I asked Arrington what percentage he thought of corporate email users have private Gmail accounts. “Broken record, dude, we know your position.” In other words, right.

Meanwhile I ran into a friend from the Attention days who’s moved from Microsoft to an Office startup-killer. He invented a key component of what’s going to be announced at Mix. Why leave? WHich 1% are we talking about. If Google keeps winning, what’s left for the rest of us. Either Google does an IBM Global Services and just hires everybody on the planet, thereby forcing user time in Google Office (pronounced OS) up to 100%, or they come to the brands and partner. Who are the brands? 1%?

So it’s Vaudeville 2.0 then. We’re talking small numbers with large impact. Soon I’ll be starting a new show; I was shooting some of it yesterday at Moscone West. When it goes live I’ll be looking for a small number of people who are willing to trust me — full stop. You know me: I’ve been dumping virtually every thought in my head on the network for a long time (here, AttentionTrust, Gillmor Gang) and I believe there’s enough data out there to make up your mind about me. I’ve talked to 3 people about this Law of small numbers so far, and they’re all onboard. I’ll let you know soon how you can help if you’re interested.

Google is not to be feared. Google is big, but so are you in the World According to You. My only (and continued) interest in attention was to harness what Phil Ochs called the small circle of friends. At Web 2.0 Expo this week I spent some time with Dave Winer and John Dvorak. I’ve often joked about John as a proof point in the dynamics of negative gestures. As in, if John thinks it’s good, I’ll bet the other way. In the marketplace of information triage, what you don’t care about is the key to opening the window of time to what you do care about. But now I’ve gotten a more nuanced perspective with John; he laughingly agrees that he actually does believe someof the bait that he throws out for debate. Which some is the key.

The power of which 1% is what I’m interested in. The power of Web 2.0 Expo wasn’t the hallway or the planned sessions — it was the look in the eyes of vendors on the show room floor sizing up their friends. It felt like a little Comdex/CES mashup, big enough to make the numbers work, but small enough to get your arms around what real work is being done with these web technologies. This network thing is counter-intuitive in a powerful way. Lock-in strategies are broken. Look at Ajax, designed as a way for Microsoft to protect Outlook and Office from the Web. Outlook Web Access was crippled at the read/write barrier, but ended up combined with Hailstorm to produce Gmail and Google Office.

Google’s lock-in is based on the user voting with their feet. As long as Google delcares themselves for the user in charge, they will continue to earn my trust. There are a lot of people like me. Or at least a large small number.

Thursday, April 19th, 2007 at 1:20 pm.
Filed under Uncategorized.
Subscribe to RSS 2.0.
Leave a comment or trackback.