Skype also happens to be Microsoft’s newest acquisition. At the event announcing Facebook video chat, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg enthusiastically touted Facebook’s ability to partner with other companies (especially Microsoft) as an alternative to Google’s (or Apple’s) integrated all-in-one approach.
Microsoft gives Facebook a foothold in voice and video chat (with Skype), search (with Bing), mobile (with WinPhone7) and potentially the desktop and living room (with Windows 8 and Xbox). In exchange, Facebook gives Microsoft an additional boost to its already powerful identity and sharing tools, which it can build into gaming, document creation and management, and other media properties.
Meanwhile, Microsoft’s been using its patents to take a chunk out of licensing fees for Android from handset makers, partly for the revenue and partly to push its own smartphone platform. Microsoft is also pushing Google worldwide, teaming up with global giants like Baidu. Google, in turn, became increasingly alienated from its own partners, including Apple and Twitter. Something had to give.
Google didn’t need to launch a social network to win skirmishes with Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Quora or the rest; it needed a social platform to defend itself against a unified Microsoft and Facebook. Luckily, the company’s been able to defend itself in a way that also puts pressure on all of Microsoft and Facebook’s properties, from Office on down.
That’s what Vincent Wong focuses on in a clever slideshow (posted at G+, naturally), “What G+ is all about (pst!!! it’s not social).” Google, Wong argues, is pursuing a “blue ocean” strategy. Instead of fighting for market share in the highly-competitive “red ocean” of social networking at status updates, Google+ lets Google move into the still-largely-unclaimed “blue ocean” of “fixing collaboration and sharing across apps and across platforms.”
Instead of focusing on the tiny update bar on the far right of Google’s new Plus-enhanced toolbar, Wong says, we should look again at everything to the left: Gmail, Calendar, Documents, Photos, Reader, and Web. “That’s almost everything you use on your computer!” shouts the caption to one of Wong’s slides, pairing Google’s toolbar with the primary corresponding apps on both Windows and Mac OS X.
I think you can see this already in Google+’s just-released iOS app. If Google+ were seriously targeting Twitter or Tumblr, it would make it easy (rather than impossible) to reshare your friends’ content on the go like those two platforms do. Instead, Google+ for iPhone becomes a notification machine, pulling you again and again to your circles, their updates, and the media they repackage.
Like YouTube and Maps, Google+ becomes a slickly packaged trojan horse (in the original sense of the metaphor) inside Apple’s own phones. And Windows Phone? Early on, Mobile Internet Explorer wouldn’t even support G+ — and despite rumors, Google doesn’t even offer a “coming soon” for a native app.
The Store of the Future
Right now, it’s easy to share links, pictures, location and videos on Google+. Soon, it’ll be equally easy to share maps, office documents, news and shopping deals.
That’s where things really get interesting — particularly if Google can turn its identity system into the kind of purchasing system that Apple and Amazon have, pairing it with its advertising power and ever-present mobile phones to create a virtual mobile wallet.
If Silicon Valley were hosting a basketball tournament for consumer money and mindshare in the cloud, right now we’d be looking at a Final Four of Google, Apple (plus Twitter), Microsoft (plus Facebook) and Amazon (especially if they can make a compelling tablet). Apple just had its earnings call; Microsoft’s is tomorrow.
The stakes are high, the players are ready. It’s a fun time to be a fan.
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