Gillmor's Internet plate tectonics

Steve Gillmor riffs on my post about Yahoo's lack of a social networking hub, where I state: "Yahoo is about making connections, but right now its more of loose federation of Web applications and services–many spokes without a strong hub to hold together a social Web. Yahoo 360 has been a failure as a social network. There is no ‘YFace.’ "

In this guest post, Steve offers some historical perspective and his version of the Internet tectonic plate shifting that is reshaping the landscape. I follow up with my response to his analysis of my analysis.

Dan Farber's analysis of Yahoo as a loosely coupled bag of services struck a chord when it reminded me of the Y2K scenario. Back then, Y2K (whether perceived or real made no difference then or ultimately) drove a battle for platform supremacy that ultimately prepared the ground for today's new transformation. Today, the Big Three are Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo (more on Apple's role in a minute.) Then, it was Microsoft, IBM/Lotus, and Netscape. The apparent prize was control of email, and by extension the collaborative rapid application paradigm.

Netscape drove the standards dynamic, cobbling together web, collaboration, email, NNTP, and security servers and services to emulate IBM's Lotus Notes product. As Web protocols became more and more strategic Lotus borrowed an HTTP Web server from IBM and quickly bolted it on top of Notes as the redubbed Domino server.

Microsoft, still more focused on Lotus and its Office competitor than Netscape's browser challenge, split the difference between the two strategies, moving toward Web protocol access while cloning some but not all of the Outlook paradigm with a Web-protocol delivered Outlook Web Access, built on the Microsoft-invented Ajax JavaScript libraries.

Of course, IBM got there quickest, exploiting the Notes developer base and a captive audience of IBM workers and the emerging Global Services channel to drive their client base to 100 million.

Netscape never got there, spending so much engineering capital on patching together the various services that the product itself never took enough shape to be enticing to corporations or small business that might drive a stable developer base.

Microsoft, held back by the Office and SQL Server teams' political clout inside Redmond, backed away from Outlook Web Access and a broad HTTP file system strategy and rebooted around .Net. Then Hailstorm was killed by the Passport and anti-trust dynamics, and Microsoft had to settle for half of the email marketplace and the seeds of its destruction in Ajax.

Simply put, today's Netscape is Yahoo, as Dan points out in his grab bag of services comment. IBM and Microsoft are split between Google and Microsoft, with Google taking advantage of IBM's installed base dynamics as well as Microsoft's Office 97 land grab of the enterprise. Instead of IBM Global services buying up corporate headcount and then pushing IBM software across the new reports, Google exploits Google Apps, Gmail, and the information services of Google Reader to populate the work force from the home outward. Today's threat by IT to stop iPhone penetration at the enterprise level is as hollow as the previous threat to stop users from bringing Windows 95 and Office 97 in from home and swamping the office network.

What then of today's Big Three? Google, partnered virtually if not literally with Apple, dominates the collaborative infrastructure of the lightweight Ajax service fabric. Jobs' iPhone routes around the alleged lack of an open architecture by leveraging predictive caching based on Google Apps' attention farm to deliver just-in-time video services over iTunes podcast "analog hole."

Microsoft has the resources and perhaps the will (read: Silverlight) to engage and defend against Apollo/Flex, not by providing a competitive layer of rich media services but by creating the opportunity for price pressure by driving the cost of such services down below the level the carriers can keep off the iPhone. YouTube's announcement of streaming video support in iPhone implies some form of RIA development layer, and Microsoft can align with the rest of the players or risk AIR/FLex poisoning the Office environment even quicker than Google Gears implies.

To recap:

Yahoo? Caught between portal gangrene in the middle and IT myopia and herding API cats at the edges.

Microsoft? Hoisted on its own Ajax and Hailstorm petards and forced to settle for dying a hundred-year death.

Google/Apple? Financing the carrier/cartel takedown by providing a one-punch of latency-busting services and good-enough devices to build content networks that depend on the new channel, not the last one. Following is my response to Steve's post:

As usual, in responding to Steve's ruminations on Internet tectonic shifts from my analysis of the Facebook phenomenon and Yahoo's position in the land of giants, I have to unpack his logic. He travels through ancient history, excavating the past for signals that connect to the post-PC era that is upon us, the dawn of iPhonomics era.

I'll use his recap as a springboard for commenting on his take.

Yahoo? Caught between portal gangrene in the middle and IT myopia and herding API cats at the edges.

We agree that Yahoo is a bag of services without a social hub to make 2+2 =5 or even 10. Portal gangrene is a rather disgusting image, but I get the idea. It's like a mall or a buffet with a mix of content and services you might want in a branded environment, but not necessarily the people you want to hang with or all the loosely coupled pieces you want to have at hand. But, portals are changing, becoming applications platforms and ecosystem that gives users more control and flexibility, with RSS feed, widgets and APIs. Internet users are becoming more sophisticated, with less allegiance to a specific brand, and many choices, such as Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, Netvibes, PageFlakes, Facebook and MySpace.

IT myopia is not exactly clear, unless Steve means that Yahoo is not equal to Google in datacenter prowess, being the Big Switch (see Nick Carr), the turbines behind the curtain powering the applications and services. Herding API cats at the edges? Yahoo was one of the first to adopt RSS and expose APIs. At the end of the road, it is an API war---Yahoo vs. Google vs. Microsoft vs. X,Y,X vs. Facebook. It is a battle for developers and people building off your infrastructure and consuming your services, and Yahoo is not winning that one.

Microsoft? Hoisted on its own Ajax and Hailstorm petards and forced to settle for dying a hundred-year death.

Microsoft hatched concepts like Ajax (richer Web apps) and Hailstorm (users in control of their online identities and managed by Microsoft). Ajax took several years to take root, and by now it is disassociated from its Microsoft origins, which is appropriate.

Hailstorm was introduced in March 2001 in a the storm of controversy. Bill Gates described Hailstorm as user-centric XML Web services that would offer a new model for user-centric computing.

"This is not the world of cookies and things that are very opaque to users. This is a world of a very explicit schema that you choose how you want to control the different parts of that schema in terms of how you fill in the information and where it is made available. This is what we call a .NET building block service. In fact, it’s probably the most important .NET building block service," Gates said.

Hailstorm never made it out of the Redmond, given people didn't see Microsoft as a trusted data bank for their private information. The idea has resurrected in InfoCards/CardSpace, driven by Kim Cameron. Now Google is viewed as the potentially untrustworthy giant monopolizing user data. Bottom line, the most ardent users are

Steve's view is that Microsoft is too stuck in the past and in supporting older business and technology models--like software licenses and client/server application models--to win against the well endowed upstarts like Google, which is rapidly developing its own Internet-based software and delivery platform.

I don't count Microsoft out. It's early in the game, perhaps not a hundred year war, but for the next decade those with the cash and intense motivation will reshape the world of computing, as Apple is doing with the iPhone and in the way Facebook is stirring up things.

While Microsoft is a large aircraft carrier that is slow to respond to new attacks, cannot easily turn the ship around with agility, it has plenty of firepower. Given the battle of the post-PC era in its first stages, Microsoft's petard is not yet hoisted, especially if it makes some smart acquisitions and the company decides to go more on the offensive.

Google/Apple? Financing the carrier/cartel takedown by providing a one-punch of latency-busting services and good-enough devices to build content networks that depend on the new channel, not the last one.

I'll agree with Steve that Google and Apple, separately or together, are disrupting the old order in attacking the fossilized carriers, PC makers and traditional software makers. You can see this one coming, but not around the next corner.