Dvorak thinks that there is a Google OS coming soon, and maybe he’s right. But I think that Google doesn’t need to have an OS, a branded computer, or any other conventional consumer electronic/IT product. I think this because I think they already have what they need to unseat Microsoft, and that they can do it by avoiding a head to head competition in Microsoft’s home court. Let me tell you why I think this is the case.
I’ve been a technologist since I first laid eyes on the Apple II in my 5th grade classroom. My childhood wasn’t seeped in phreaking or trolling through the BBS du jour, but I did stay focused on the world of technology, always on the periphery since computers in the 80s were far beyond my family’s means. I served on active duty with communications units in the Marine Corps throughout the 90s, pushing the envelope of what we could do with analog and digital communication networks while the bubble formed and burst. In January of 2000 I began course work at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland where I would make two discoveries – Linux, and with it the Free and Open Source beliefs and Philosophy, specifically the social philosophy of economics and politics. These two concepts cemented for me as I watched the SCO vs IBM case build and simmer. I wrote academic papers on the issues of intangible property, and I worked to advocate the liberation of code and data from within the IT Office of the College. I became not a zealot or a fanatic, but an advocate and an evangelist for the prospect of digital objects that aren’t fenced off from the commons.
I further distilled that belief to the tension between control and command – a pairing taken from my time in the Marines, the distinction is one between dictating the process and ensuring the outcome. Control, so goes the theory, can never overcome the fog of war, but through command armies can win the battle or campaign because the counterintuitive act of accepting the absence of control frees the leader to concentrate on what can be achieved. This concept from the domain of military science is equally applicable to the domain of intellectual capital. Google has positioned itself, in my estimation, to win the day in the battle for the information utility marketplace by eschewing the lure of control and leveraging command of Free, OS agnostic clients for consumers and brokers of information. This results in Google being astride the greatest flow of information – a flow created by the ubiquity of open APIs and clients that can rapidly evolve with the mob, rather than trying to herd the mob into preformed avenues and venues.
The ubiquity and openness required to capitalize upon the unique position Google is in is both an intriguing dilemma and a challenging problem of strategy and execution. If successful, Google will unseat Microsoft as the principle architect of the consumer computing experience, and in so doing, make deep fissures in the foundations of economic theory, if unsuccessful, Google may become the next Netscape, remembered for the flurry of excitement at it’s initial product and IPO, but relegated to being a footnote in the history of the Network Revolution.
If they succeed it will be because they didn’t give into the lure to beat Microsoft at Microsoft’s game. The desktop is a killing field, and it is the real money maker for Redmond, so they won’t give it up without a fight. But if Google is patient and thorough, they can deploy open source code for products that sit on the desktop and deliver as much information into Google’s bit bank as they deliver copies from it. That is key – Google loses nothing when someone views one of their digital assets, but gains everything when someone adds to their digital asset bank.
In their work on the small-world problem, Watts and Strogatz differentiated between the network (the arrangement of nodes) and what happened on the network (the communication of information). Using the brand and OS agnostic clients means Google doesn’t have to worry about the maintenance of the node itself, and they can focus on maximizing the efficacy of the node as it pertains to information utility. This concentration on information utility is the kind of re-definition of the industry that Microsoft accomplished when it convinced IBM to license DOS instead of buy it outright. In one bold move it commoditizes both the operating system and the hardware and shifts the focus away from the arrangement of nodes towards the flow of information; where Google, not Microsoft, has home field advantage. It takes the “technology” out of Information Technology and forces Microsoft to play catch-up in a game in which they have never shown any aptitude – the economics of information.