Google becomes Microsoft as Microsoft becomes IBM

There was a good article in the NY Times business section today about Google.  Mostly about how Google is growing up.  It reminded me of talk around Microsoft at the peak of its ride.  At that time, the last thing Microsoft wanted to do was to become IBM.  But they have.  IBM has done an amazing job of reinventing itself as a consulting company, and Microsoft has taken over as the legacy systems company.

Google meanwhile, is under increasing pressure from governments about its monopoly power, and use of customer information.  All of the sudden, Google is spending just as much time and energy dealing with the government as Microsoft did with the Justice Department in its day.  Actually, IBM had that same problem too.  

So the pattern is:

1. Old monopolist gets pounded by the government
2. New entrant uses the opening to build a new monopoly
3. New company is the darling of everyone (and stock goes to $600)
4. New company becomes old monopolist
5. Go to step 1

Also, today I started a new page where I am tracking the new tech bubble.  Check it out here.

The Cloud is Out of Our Control

Anyone familiar with network diagrams knows that the cloud symbol is used to refer to the things outside of the control of the network owner. In the old days it meant our network connects to the Internet here, or connects to the telephone network here.

Wait, that is still what it means!  By this definition we have had cloud computing since the 50s. What is the big deal about all of this “Cloud Computing” then?

True to the definition, we are shifting more computing from inside our networks to the part of the diagram depicted by the cloud – the part out of our control.

Web email (gMail, Hotmail…) was the first mainstream application of this, but network administrators know that the migration to the cloud started well before that with security services, enhanced phone services, distributed computing grids.  And everyone else is watching as we are now getting cool cloud apps like Dropbox, Evernote, Google Docs, and Office 365.

So are we just back to timesharing the VAX? Well, no.

Yes MS Azure, AWS, Google App Engine, OpenStack, and the dozens of other offerings do look a lot like mainframe timesharing with one big exception – the new cloud services talk to things inside your network, and talk to each other.

All of this talking is done with Application Programming Interfaces (“APIs”).  These are instruction sets that enable people or computers to interact with systems, without being in the system. 

We will all be hearing a lot about APIs in the weeks ahead because how they are used and who owns them is the center of the currently front page lawsuit between Google and Oracle. 

Tale of Two Conferences

I was fortunate enough to attend two Cloud Computing conferences today.  They were right next door to each other in Seattle, one at the Sheraton (CloudFair2012) and the other at the Convention Center (Cloud Intelligence Conference).  It was an interesting study in the current state of tech marketing because the CloudFair was dominated by Google and the Could Intelligence Conference by Microsoft.  While it is not really fair to make a full comparison because I could only attend part of each (the CloudFair is in the workshop day of a three day conference and the Cloud Intelligence Conference was only a one day thing), it was a great way to see the contrast between how Google and Microsoft reach out to their markets differently.

The experience reminded me of the great exchange between Bill Gates and Steve Jobs at the All Things D conference in 2007 where Walt Mossberg asked them what they appreciated most about each other and Steve said that he admired Bills ability to partner, and Bill said he wished he had Steve’s sense of style.  Two great companies, two completely different approaches.  The same can be said for Google and Microsoft.  Microsoft still knows partners and Google’s “style” is to turn as many of its engineers into marketers as possible.

Microsoft Knows Partners

At the Cloud Intelligence Conference, the speakers were mostly talking about Microsoft Azure and Office 365, and most of the speakers were not from Microsoft, but partners of Microsoft that help Microsoft customers run their Microsoft products.  These partners are formidable companies in themselves, and some have products that integrate closely with Microsoft’s offerings.  The speakers were talented, had a great deal to contribute and were not just pitching their own services.  Since just about every company has Microsoft in its IT infrastructure somewhere, it is a given that the audience were already Microsoft customers.  The presenters took advantage of this fact and were helping Microsoft customers see what was on the way to them from the mothership.  The negative of this approach was that the audience did not feel that they were getting the inside view into Microsoft, and there was a bit of a theme of ‘yes we are keeping up with the cool kids’.  Neither of these is going to push customers off of a platform already through their organizations.

Google Is Not Evil and Engineers are Not Marketers

Google as a company defines itself by declaring what it is not (evil) and continues that method with Google engineers declaring they are engineers and not marketers.  These guys were great speakers, very knowledgeable, easy to listen to, and clearly passionate about Google products.  In addition, and in contrast to Microsoft, they did a good job of letting the audience get a sense for the inside Google perspective.  Developers do like that kind of thing a lot.  The talks were clearly aimed right at the users with no reference to partners or how a partner could use this technology to take better care of its clients.  It is very possible that there were partners in the audience that were going to do just that.  It was interesting that the Google guys were both published authors and took the opportunity to plug their books.  I suppose this could be a result of Google’s culture of academia (where college professors are always writing and plugging their books).  It was a bit ironic however, because they did say they were not going to try to sell the audience anything, well except their books.

Great change only happens when innovation makes things 10 times better.  Clearly the tools available to businesses through the cloud are at least 10 times better, so this is going to be a time of great change and it is hard not to be excited about it.  It will be interesting to continue to observe these two great companies build their tools and their markets.  Along the way Microsoft will surprise everyone and innovate, and Google may even surprise themselves and do some marketing.

Apple Wins Again as the World Moves to Tablets

Last week Apple championed the post PC era with the launch of the iPad Third Generation.  HP shot back that the PC is not dead.  I think both views can exist at the same time.  

Anyone who has found themselves in the role of family tech support person has been wishing for the post PC era for a long time.  In fact, most PC users have used remarkably few features of the PC.  Word processing, email, the web, and maybe a spreadsheet.  They don't care about where their files are located, how the machine works or stays healthy, have never installed anything, or backed anything up.  They are just not interested in the PC at all.  As soon as these people got smart phones their PCs go days or weeks without being touched.  Some overwhelmingly large percentage are these non PC users -- and for them the PC was a necessary evil -- they just wanted to send the email.  So Apple is right.

Anyone needing to connect to a corporate network, or that uses databases, or that builds things (web pages, databases, programs), is going to need a PC and because they are the type of person that loves new technoligy they are probably going to want a tablet too.  So HP is right.

According to Gartner, there were 93 million PCs shipped in Q4 of 2011.  According to Apple, they shipped 15 million iPads in Q4 of 2011.  They were just shy of HPs share (17 million) of the PC market.

Up until now, the iPad has been an extension of the users technology portfolio.  From now on, the number of users with just an iPad (or other tablet) is going to go up fast.  So Apple is going to win big and if Microsoft can get to the party with Windows 8, Microsoft will win big too.  The people selling PCs like HP and Dell are going to see their marketplace rotate significantly -- and probably decline.  All HP and Dell need to do is come to market with amazing Windows 8 tablets later this year.

It is going to be interesting.

Golden Opportunity for Microsoft

Microsoft recently reported that the Defense Department repels 250,000 attacks on its networks – every hour.  I suspect that Microsoft has more experience with hostilities in cyberspace than any other company.  I do not know of a published list of the biggest targets for hackers, but the US Government has got to be close to the top of the list, financial institutions are probably next, big companies like GE and P&G and GM have got to be up there too.  Literally every enterprise customer of Microsoft spends a great deal of time and money dealing with these attacks.  I also do not know how much of their budget is actually paid to Microsoft, but with the cloud offerings MSFT is now selling to big enterprises – the number must be growing.

It does seem like Microsoft badly wants to be a consumer focused company.  There is a security need at the consumer level too.  Our citizens may not have the designs of weapons, or the controls to the predator drones behind their personal firewalls, but knowing that half of all credit cards have been compromised by cyber attacks is enough to make the point that consumers have things to protect too.  Once again, Microsoft has more technical expertise and experience data on the consumer attacks than any other company. 

But… Does anyone really want to talk about security?  It does sound a lot like that annual call from the insurance agent who wants to talk about how to increase, well, his commission. 

The changes that Google made last week to further personalize search could be the opening that Microsoft needs to get the conversation going.  Google is increasingly showing you just you want to see – even if some of what you get in your search results comes from things you own – like pictures on Picasa web.  Desktop search never worked for Google or for Microsoft, but as more content migrates to the cloud, we can expect to see our personal, not public, items mixed in with public search results.  We cannot expect Google to be so foolish as to put Gmail into the personal search results, but Google+ posts are sometimes public and sometimes personal.  If these latest changes are meant to push Facebook and Twitter to make their content available for searching, and Google is successful, the line will go too far towards the personal end and consumers will be more than a little upset when their private Facebook posts are next to Wikipedia entries in the search results.

Microsoft could be the safe place to get search of private emails, documents, and photos.  I have Copernic Desktop Search installed on my Windows 7 machine and it is amazingly good.  And I am quite sure that neither Google or Microsoft or anyone else is building an index of my stuff on their servers.  I would trust Microsoft to do this work and the only reason I have a non-Microsoft product doing this is because even after hours of trying, I could never get the desktop search index to work on Windows 7.

My dream, and I suspect the dream of many other consumers, would be to have a company I trust, deploy a capable private search tool, and do it in a way that protects me from the outside (desktop search and security) and then take it to the next level – making all of my private stuff available across all of my devices, all while maintaining my security.

Last Mile to the Channel Partner

Just like with other networks, the Last Mile connecting a Partner Network to its Partners is expensive and complicated.

All channel partner programs have infrastructure designed to manage the relationship with partners.  From the simple to the sophisticated, this infrastructure accomplishes a variety of critical tasks including registering partners, enabling them with sales materials and support, delivering leads, tracking performance, managing certifications, and many other functions.  These processes and systems are in effect a network of sales and marketing people and PRM/SFA databases and applications.

To function, all networks must reach their customers and a partner program network is no different.  The link between the network and the customer is called the last mile, and just like with a phone network, the last mile is the most challenging because the investment required to reach a new partner is uneven, and in many cases will never pay off.  Extending the phone network to the last farm on the road will never make financial sense – that is why the FCC has made the phone company provide service to everyone.

Companies have tackled the last mile problem with their channel partners in three distinct ways:       

• Invest everywhere and dominate the market (Microsoft)
• Invest heavily in obviously high value partners (HP)
• Make the partner come to the network (Google, Amazon)

These differences are logical when taken in the context of gross margins.  Microsoft and other software companies have the highest gross margins, so they can spend much more than everyone else.  HP and the hardware companies have much lower margins, so they have to be more careful to invest only where they know it will generate additional sales.  Google and Amazon and other similar businesses have many more partners, and their transaction size is much smaller – making anything other than a fully automated approach hard to justify.  It is just not possible to cater to the individual needs of partners if there are millions of them.

As the technology industry evolves and these companies move into new markets, they will have to adapt to new margins and transaction sizes.  This will be much easier for companies working up the list, than those working down the list.  Those with skills developed in low margin and small transaction sized businesses will have to learn to invest more in the last mile – learning to spend more is enviable compared to those who have to learn to spend less.

All New Horsemen

Erik Schmidt got some attention at the All Things Digital conference naming new horsemen in the tech industry.  The old horsemen were commonly listed as Microsoft, Intel, Cisco, Dell.  Schmidt rather self congratulatorily named Google,  Amazon, Facebook and Apple as the new four.  Sure things are changing, but a completely new field of horsemen, really? 

What is it with the horsemen anyway?  One must wonder how we got onto the horsemen thing in tech, it seems like we would want to stay as far away as possible from an allegory rooted in conquest, war, famine and death.  If you have some time to kill, check out the Wikipedia entry for the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, for a not so brief introduction to the idea of horsemen.

Is there a new reality in tech and if so is this it?

With the possible exception of Dell, which specialized in advanced supply chain management, the old four developed technology and sold it to individuals and businesses and those customers employed the technology to achieve their ends.  The old horsemen are in fact still in business, and will be for some time.  IBM may not have liked being left off of the old list, but they have done pretty well for themselves in the last decade with their stock up 50% in the last decade compared to losses for the others.

With the possible exception of Apple, the new four don’t sell technology at all.  I suspect they are often thought of as technology companies because of their use of the Internet in their business models.  The wholesale switch is notable, and mostly for Microsoft.  Indeed, Microsoft has not been performing well on the stock market over the last decade with a drop of over 50% while all of the others are up and Apple is up a whole bunch.

These new horsemen are going to drive the delivery of a new kind of computing services. Even if this shift only turns out to be half as big as Mr. Schmidt predicts, it is going to have a profound impact on how technology is sold.  This is commonly referred to today as the migration to the cloud, and is so overhyped that often we forget to stop and think about what that actually means. 

First a review, technology resellers used to make money marking up hardware and shrink wrapped software.  Then they made money adding integration and support services to the sale of hardware and software, and next they will make money delivering innovation.  Here are some examples of this phenomenon:

• DropBox (www.dropbox.com) is a file system in the cloud.  You can get to your files from any device.  It is Amazon’s infrastructure on the back end, but no one has to know that.
• WordPress or SquareSpace (www.wordpress.com; www.squarespace.com ) are content management systems in the cloud.  Anyone can publish a website or blog on these sites and all of the hosing is handled.  Although one step removed, these companies rely on Google for indexing and discovery.  Google is also seeding the next wave of these companies with Picasa and Google voice. These may seem like birds of a different feather, but before you say so think about searching images or audio files.  Google’s partners make money by helping their clients manage content and show up online in the right places.
• Security is making sure content does not show up in the wrong places like when credit card information is stolen, or weapons system blueprints land in Peking.  Facebook has designs on knowing who you are and where you are and (soon) what you buy and what you have access to.  Making sure the keys to the kingdom, your keys that is, remain in your own control is important and will be big business.  Emerging in this field are upstarts like Reputation.com and Klout.com, and established firms like Symantec.

Before you think that this blog post has gone off of the rails, let me state plainly that I am not proposing DropBox, WordPress, SquareSpace, Reputation.com, and Klout.com as services that partners can mark up and resell.  I am proposing that these are the new channel partners and that they exist in a sympathetic ecosystem with the new horsemen.

These forward thinking channel partners do not think of themselves as channel partners.  They think of themselves as the inventors of a new wave of services.  Nevertheless, they are channel partners because they make money packaging new technology into services that add value to consumers and business.

The New Microsoft

The departures at Microsoft have hit a point where local journalists are starting to produce lists.  Nick Eaton at the PI has this great list with dozens of links, and Sharon Pian Chan at the Times has another one here.  Whether or not there is a wizard behind the curtain with some kind of a grand plan, change is on its way.  This kind of turnover guarantees that a new Microsoft is being formed.  A company with 90,000 employees will never be a blank canvas, but new ideas must be working their way into places that have not seen new ideas for a while.

Into this mix we add Paul Allen with his memoir out this week and a less than flattering account of early scheming by Bill Gates.  This will keep Microsoft in the news for a while and start a whole new avalanche of What Microsoft Should Do articles.  This does not take much prodding however.  People have been telling Microsoft what to do for so long that advice sounds like the din of the cars going by on HWY 520.  People suggest that they bring back Bill Gates, fire Ballmer, and ask if Microsoft is still relevant so often that if you want to make a suggestion, just get in line.

In an attempt to avoid adding to the cast of advice noisemakers, I am going to make a prediction or three about Microsoft’s future.  Sure you could say that these predictions are thinly veiled suggestions – after all, the answers on Jeopardy are really the questions.  Either way here are three thoughts.

The Enterprise

Some think this is the name of the ship on Star Trek, but that would be the “Starship Enterprise”.  Others may think of the first nuclear powered aircraft carrier, but that would be the “USS Enterprise”.  Those of us in technology marketing think of the Enterprise as bigger businesses who still control 72% of all technology spending.  A very large part of that spending still goes to Microsoft.  Microsoft knows the Enterprise and even without much innovation - it will take decades to blow that lead.  They cannot coast forever, but I think it is a lot like the USS Enterprise which has to refuel its reactors every 20 years.

Partners

Most of Microsoft’s success in the Enterprise is a result of its ability to sell through channel partners.  No one has the partner reach that Microsoft has with its over 600,000 channel partners.  These companies, ranging from big consultancies like Accenture to Joe’s Computers next door, make their living selling Microsoft’s products and the services required to keep them going.  Salesforce.com has been spending 50% of its revenue for ten years trying to make a dent in Microsoft’s dominance in this area.  Admittedly Salesforce.com’s $1 billion in revenue is a dent.  But as soon as Salesforce.com stops spending over $700 million in sales and marketing every year – then what?

Security

Microsoft knows more about security than anyone.  Microsoft has legions of very smart people evaluating and responding to attacks on Windows and releasing patches every week.  Right now consumers willingly trade their privacy for “free” services.  Consumers don’t care if Google reads their emails and Facebook analyzes their relationships because there has not been security Pearl Harbor yet.  It is coming and when it does, consumers may reconsider.  The galvanizing event does not have to be a municipal power grid take over by terrorists.  It could easily be convictions for treason based on private emails and Facebook updates that consumers thought they deleted, but lived on in the cloud and were accessed by law enforcement and a Committee Against Un-American Activities.  Sound crazy? What about kidnappers, bounty hunters, stalkers, or even paparazzi accessing mobile carrier databases and hunting people by electronic data trail?

Change is on its way at Microsoft and I think many people are going to be surprised.

Bigger Was Better Until Now

The Factors of Production Disassemble and Big Business Dissembles

Companies have been citing economies of scale as reason to acquire, merge, or grow ever since the beginning of industrialization.  It is not hard to grasp the idea that the cost of each additional unit will drop as more units are produced.  There are every day examples of this from ordering business cards to getting the next bigger bag of popcorn at the theater.  Doubling the size of the order rarely doubles the cost.  In addition to increasing competitiveness by lowering production cost, manufacturers have also been heavily incented to acquire their suppliers to secure raw materials consistently.  In addition, when significant research and development investment is required - large scale is required to justify that investment.  Bringing a new drug, airplane, or car to market can only happen when large scale production is the likely outcome.

Natural monopolies are sometimes formed when new technologies are discovered and more so when large initial investments are required.  The first railroad, telegraph, and electrical grid are good examples of natural monopolies.  Once the track was laid down, the cost of running the train was so much less than the next competitor (who still had to build their track) that protecting the monopoly and remaining profitable was not only conceivable by likely.  In the case of the telegraph, the network effect rewarded the first to market because the usefulness of the network increased as more people were connected to it, further securing the monopoly.

For all of these reasons we have lived our entire lives in a world where bigger was better.  Until now.

Over the past 30 years just about every part of business has been disassembled and the parts can now be purchased as needed, when needed, and for cheap.  Big time computing infrastructure is available for rent.  Enterprise quality business process systems from the mundane (travel expense management) to the exotic (advanced materials management) can be provisioned in a matter of days and delivered economically to large and small teams alike.  Anyone with an idea, some know how, and a credit card can bring it to life and to market faster and cheaper than ever before, and tomorrow it will be even faster and even cheaper. 

The railroad company may still have a monopoly on the use of its tracks, but the customer can pick from any of dozens of carriers that are putting containers on the train, so businesses large and small are able to ship their products anywhere for no initial investment, and very low cost.  Amazon.com may own all of the distribution centers, but anyone can sell their products through Amazon.com.  Apple may own the iPhone, but just about anyone can put an app in the app store.  Google may have the biggest search engine, but anyone can buy an ad.

However, before we get too excited about this new world of entrepreneurship we must look at the remaining barriers.  There are still two large hurdles: government regulation and selling cost.  Any large firm not offering access to its railroad tracks is doomed unless government regulators can be deployed to prevent competition. Also, in selling, some large businesses can prevent their customers from being exposed to new entrants by blanketing the market with salespeople.  Oracle and its mini-me Salesforce.com, dedicate $5B (20% of revenue) and $700M (50% of revenue) respectively to sales and marketing.  They have the reach to simply shout down any competition for customer mindshare. 

These government and selling advantages are significant because to date they have overcome the many large firm disadvantages.  Poor performing employees have many places to hide in big firms, even top performers spend an inordinate amount of time fighting internal battles, and real live feedback from the marketplace rarely makes it through the ranks to the top decision makers.  For these reasons top talent gravitates to smaller firms where the opportunities for advancement and the big payday are greater and there is just plain less brain damage.  The small firms have the smartest people, whose motivations are more closely aligned with business success, who are closer to the customer, and who have access to all of the tools and infrastructure previously only available to the big players. 

Both of these problems are self-correcting. 

Government protection may benefit a business but it kills the market.  More people every day make their residential location decisions based on access to high speed internet.  Taken to the extreme, these decisions may not be between one part of a city and another, but instead over an international border.  People went to Canada to escape Nixon’s draft, why not Australia to escape the reach of Genachowski’s FCC?  It is not hard to imagine a young software engineer with school age children attracted to Australia by fiber to the home and good schools.  Comcast and its lobbyists win in the short term, but even they lose in the end as they ride their shrinking market into the ground.

WikiLeaks may offer a middle ground to the all or nothing proposition of killing the entire economy.  They have announced plans to release documents targeting big business starting with the big banks.  It is suspected that the first target is going to be Bank of America.  This will expose the tactics large enterprises use to protect their positions.  In banking it is likely the manipulation of the bank regulators and deceiving their government and shareholders about their financial condition.  In technology it will probably be the anti-competitive behavior associated with patent trolls, mergers, and the implementation of standards.

In Selling, the small firms need to push forward while gravity does its work.  Salesforce.com spends fifty cents of every dollar of revenue on sales and marketing because they can.  With 95% gross margins, they have the money.  The increased competition from the many small businesses offering sales process automation tools will drive gross margins down. Each bee sting may not seem like much to worry about, but even Microsoft expects its margins to drop from over 80% now to 40% as their customers move to a cloud computing model.  This is happening to the entire industry and the big spenders on sales and marketing are going to either get crushed, or adapt.  Either way, there will be much more oxygen available for the little guy at the customer’s table.

As the disassembly of business offers opportunity to small up starts, the big established firms will dissemble.  Watch for support of entrepreneurial activity while absorbing potential competitors, claims of working with the government to open markets while increasing regulatory burden, and ever increasing attorney headcounts.  Change is hard for anyone and really hard for the big guys.  

A Tale of Two Restores

About a week ago I had been playing with the passcode lock settings on my iPad -- and the thing stopped putting itself to sleep.  So if I left it overnight it would be 100% dead in the AM.  I worked to change the setting back, searched online, but could not figure out what to do about it.  

So I clicked restore and just like that, Apple rebuilt my iPad in about half an hour.  Asside from a few minor issues where I had to download apps over again -- it worked like a charm.  My email set up was undisturbed, my paid apps were all there.  

About every quarter or so I completely rebuild my Windows 7 machine.  I have set the machine up to make this as easy as possible -- with two partitions on the SSD drive, one for my data and one for the OS.  This way I can re-format the OS partition, reinstall Windows 7 and all of my programs (I keep an external hard drive with a folder I call program installers just for this purpose).  Each time I get 10 GB of disk space back -- and on a 36GB SSD that is a big deal.  Each time the machine runs like a dream afterwards.  The only problem is it takes me about 10 days to really get back to a place where everything I need is installed on the computer.  Not 10 days of non stop work, but 15 minutes here and there when I find a program that I need for the first time and have to find its installer, install it, update it...  I am sure you have been there too.

Luckily I have an older Vista machine that I can work on while the restore is going on.  Also luckily, more and more of my work is being done using online services like Socialtext, Evernote, Squarespace, LinkedIn, and Twitter -- so it doesn't matter all that much that my Windows 7 machine is sidelined for a while.

I suppose it should come as no surprise that each time I go through this, I have a reason to migrate more of my work to the cloud.  

I wonder if anyone at Microsoft is working on this problem.  I would love to have a restore button that works like the restore button on my iPad.

Wait!  Before you post a comment saying that Microsoft already has restore points built into Windows 7, here are a few questions:

• Has going back to a restore point ever actually worked for you?
• Did it give you back space on your hard drive?
• Did it accurately create restore points per its design (before each install or dll change)?

Unfortunately, like the comical troubleshoot window that offers to help fix problems but never can, Microsoft has over promised and under delivered in this area.

I will wait eagerly for someone to close the gap between these two restore experiences.