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The key to supremacy in the enterprise market is to seize control of the entry point. IBM did it in the 1960s and 1970s with the entry point being a highly ski

by grellas 17y ago

The key to supremacy in the enterprise market is to seize control of the entry point. IBM did it in the 1960s and 1970s with the entry point being a highly skilled personalized sales force in an era where relationships established the trust needed for enterprises to commit to large systems. Microsoft did it in the 1980s and 1990s with the entry point being its proprietary API for its desktop OS which, with the help of OEM hardware partners, it used to choke out anyone who sought to compete with it in the desktop applications market. It then tried (and failed) to use its desktop monopoly as a vehicle by which to dominate the back-end of enterprise computing. Google now seeks to gain similar supremacy with the entry point being superior proprietary products ultimately derived from or at least capitalizing upon Open Source in a web-centric computing environment. What form this will take, I don't know. But it will take a form by which Google tries to seize and maintain control of the entry point and ultimately bend the world's primary computing environments to its proprietary advantage. The Chrome OS is one piece of this effort. The question is one of which company will become the ultimate gatekeeper to all or most of enterprise computing, which is where the money is. Google wants that role and that is where its fight with Microsoft will lie. As they say, "The law of human nature - it ain't been repealed yet."

extension 17y ago
Microsoft's success was based almost entirely on lock-in: they made everyone depend on something that only they could provide. The equivalent strategy for Google would obviously be to hoard the world's data in their private silos, which they are arguably already doing. I would find that scenario more plausible if it weren't for Wave. Wave, by its nature, will obsolete or radically transform, many of Google's existing web apps: gmail, docs, blogger, picasa, calendar.. anything related to communication or collaboration. Yet, it seems as though they've gone to great lengths to make Wave decentralized, even as far as open sourcing their server implementation. They've done this even though a silo style Wave app would likely be a huge success anyway. I can't fathom why they would allow Wave to exist if they were hoping to control everyone's data, as it clearly represents a threat to the control they already have. I'm not dropping my guard, but at this point my best guess is that Google is just trying to create an open and fair web ecosystem, in which they will compete based on their momentum and massive resources, and in which their major competitors lose their existing advantage. Either that, or they don't have much of a plan at all and the company is really just a bunch of smart people doing cool stuff with a huge pile of money that fell from the sky.

by grellas 17y ago

extension 17y ago

Microsoft's success was based almost entirely on lock-in: they made everyone depend on something that only they could provide. The equivalent strategy for Google would obviously be to hoard the world's data in their private silos, which they are arguably already doing. I would find that scenario more plausible if it weren't for Wave. Wave, by its nature, will obsolete or radically transform, many of Google's existing web apps: gmail, docs, blogger, picasa, calendar.. anything related to communication or collaboration. Yet, it seems as though they've gone to great lengths to make Wave decentralized, even as far as open sourcing their server implementation. They've done this even though a silo style Wave app would likely be a huge success anyway. I can't fathom why they would allow Wave to exist if they were hoping to control everyone's data, as it clearly represents a threat to the control they already have. I'm not dropping my guard, but at this point my best guess is that Google is just trying to create an open and fair web ecosystem, in which they will compete based on their momentum and massive resources, and in which their major competitors lose their existing advantage. Either that, or they don't have much of a plan at all and the company is really just a bunch of smart people doing cool stuff with a huge pile of money that fell from the sky.