In the past, you could measure Microsoft’s success by others’ weakness. This time it’s different. Google rolls out a five-pronged disruption to the smart phone, the Visual Studio developer base, social media, offline storage, and Webtone pricing - and it bolsters Ray Ozzie’s hand. With a month to go, Bill Gates’ “transition” from 80-20 to 20-80 has Redmond shaking.
The old games just aren’t working. Windows chief Steve Sinofsky spends a ridiculous half hour fending off CNet’s Ina Fried with zero information on Windows 7 and way too much repetition of the purpose of the interview: to discuss the process by which information will be given out in the future. We get it, Steve. You’re not telling the media anything except the ground rules for what you’re not telling the media. Thanks for the heads up.
In classic media terms, this is a Microsoft death spiral story. Vista sucks, Apple market share grows, the PC/Mac ads win awards. iPhone 2 approaches, Android looks cool and competitive, the AT&T WiFi takedown looks like it’s spreading to the Blackberry, the N95, and maybe, just maybe, the other carriers. The Google Web Toolkit harnesses Java developers, the Eclipse dev environment, a growing number of APIs and Javascript libraries hosted on Google servers, and Amazon-slashing AppEngine pricing. Developers, developers, developers.
But each chink in the old Microsoft armor cuts two ways - as a minor glitch in the continuing revenue power of the IT-controlled Windows and Office upgrade path, and a strategic boost for Ozzie and his Mesh strategy. When you hear the open crowd attack the notion of trusting Microsoft to route our data a la Hailstorm and its Passport albatross, you’re also hearing the first stages in acceptance of the new Microsoft mantra.
Mesh abstracts devices and operating systems into objects that can be coordinated and orchestrated to deliver the appearance of a single or composite device. That’s the guiding principle behind virtualization, which permits applications to address these virtual devices as single entities while spreading computational load across machines, domains, and business processes. When you hear people both outside and inside attack Mesh as a synchronization technology, you are hearing political spin about a strategy that has not yet been fully implemented or acknowledged.
From a technical perspective, the largest chunk left to be finished is affinity grouping - taking the atomized identity and social metadata and organizing micro-communities that can act as power brokers in the new information model Mesh creates. From a political perspective, these groups will quickly produce revenue in much higher proportion to the broader less targeted audiences of existing clouds. As that power is increasingly parceled out via Silverlight to the enterprise crowd, Windows and Office become services to be maintained much in the same way that IBM uses open source via its Global Services group.
Key to the transition is the interactive two-way nature of the communication services of the Mesh and Google platforms. Google collects behavioral data from Gmail, Apps, and search, but increasingly the roundtrip between Gchat and Google Reader is producing the high value signals (gestures) that fuel affinity group formation and targeted feedback loops. Mesh atomizes the Google, Facebook, and other social constructs into virtual devices that can be combined from the ground up to attack viral opportunities as they emerge.
If that sounds like Twitter, that’s because Mesh is Twitter’s Plan B. In recent weeks, we’ve seen Twitter quickly come to terms with the underlying problem of their viral success, and particular the unique but transcendent power of swarm characteristics that the (mis)use of the service has created. The very real time XMPP stream that proves irresistible to Twitter power users and its “track” conversation enabler are at the heart of what Ray Ozzie and his team discovered when they first began testing Groove . Mesh leverages that emergent behavior as the central construct of a virtual device router.
The conversation with Twitter and its satellites FriendFeed (listen to the recent Gillmor Gang with the FriendFeed founders), Twhirl, and to some degree Facebook, in recent weeks has really been about Twitter’s sole asset: its people. It’s taken a few punches to the middle to soften things up enough to encourage more transparency on Twitter’s part, but now that the dialogue appears engaged via the media, the real work needs to begin in earnest with Twitter’s owners in the Track cloud. Because Track requires the availability in real time of a dynamic swarm of affinity members, that service makes maximum use of the system, which still can’t deliver it.
Twitter’s problem, then, is to convince its users that they will restore that feature. Those that reject that as important can remain secure knowing virtually every Twitter clone can provide the basic commoditized services they require. In other words, they don’t need Twitter, just Twitter-like functionality. Those who are addicted to Track and real time services know otherwise. In aggregate, as affinity groups, they derive much greater yield from their behavior and micro-cast contract offerings than the rest of the marketplace - better resolution of information streams, increased economic clout, and the Darwinian favoritism of swarm resolution over less dynamic and more static problem solving.
Plan B is not for Twitter, or even Microsoft; it’s for us to do. If Twitter execs respond directly to the marketplace with straight talk, we’ll likely stay with them. But it is incumbent upon us to begin Plan B now, by beginning the process of harvesting our Track/Follow clouds and readying them for the day when other more robust services arrive. Starting now, we use Twitter behavior that reinforces core constructs (140 characters, TinyUrl pointers, Track, asynchronous follow) while discouraging features such as @replies which encourage non-real time use.
Syntax that records conversational techniques needs to be baked out across our affinity groups, for example dropping not just the @ sign but the Twitter name as well after the first citation, only reading upon a context switch. With XMPP and Track down, we have no way to archive via Gmail, but Summize and FriendFeed offer workarounds. If FriendFeed quickly implements XMPP as we discussed on Friday’s Gillmor Gang (you decide whether that will happen) we will have some redundancy on our side sooner than later. Plan B makes sense for more than just tactical Is Twitter Up reasons, but also because Google has similar services available. Adapting and morphing the Gmail/Gchat/Greader tool set to emulate the core Track model is doable, but requires some incentive for the company to move up the stack.
Google’s recent efforts suggest they understand the reality here, that this effort will not be about damaging Microsoft but closing the sale with their users to allow them legitimate trustworthy access to all the data they are collecting. On Microsoft’s side, Twitter needs to end the rivalry between Exchange and SQL Server on the delivery side, and (to be blunt about it) put Office and Windows in their place down the stack. And every time Google announces another disruptive chapter in their creation of the collaborative social network, the champagne flows in Ozzie’s group. Welcome to Plan B.
I am personally excited about all of the changes that are coming about from the major players out there. The more they compete with each other, the more routes it opens up for us, the consumers.
I’m personally on the side of Google in this war, if for no other reason than they have swimming pool at their HQ for their employees.
http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowP.....531#407531
“I don’t get what we have to do to prove that we can innovate. We do innovate. In fact, it’s what we do best. Where we need work I guess is in how we package and hype our innovations such that it’s readily obvious to you that we have, in fact, innovated.”
Microsoft says you are full of crap. They’ve been clapping with one hand says Charles Torre, PR person, you just haven’t been listening.
Charles proclaims he just doesn’t get it.
Is it just me or does this not make sense? Microsoft is strong because it is weak, Mesh will make everything better, and Twitter is the key to Microsoft’s future success?
Interjecting tiny Twitter into this delegitimizes the article completely by the way.
That’s like interjecting pet rock into a discussion about IBM and Microsoft.
It’s just you, Bob.
Okay Steve, thanks for clearing that up for me, then.
me too.
http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowP.....531#407531
“Perception is reality.
C”
He is right about this though. Twitter as far as web metrix doesn’t even exist though if you came here and read Scoble’s blog for the past year you would think they passed MySpace 6 months ago.
There is reality, then there is blogger reality, and the 2 don’t mix worth a damn.
Long winded editorials (in my mind) aren’t what Techcrunch is all about. Someone needs to stuff a sock in it.
Wow - really didn’t understand a word!
It’s not just Bob.
Steve has made this argument before, that Microsoft can capitalize on its rivals ‘ “warming the door” for new services that MS can then migrate its huge installed base to:
http://gesturelab.com/?p=105
I think he’s right. But the Twitter stuff… I’m lost.
This article is like some drunk guy rattling on about nothing in particular.
WTF, too many buzzwords for me to understand.
WTF, are you people high?
Rambling nonsense, full of non-sequiturs, and otherwise complete misunderstanding of the technologies involved. Apparently implying the user of sync to do messaging. You can’t build effective real messaging systems via general purpose sync protocols. It’s hideously wasteful and full of problems. Lotus Notes tried it, and got smashed. OMA/IBM tried to use SyncML for mobile email, another complete disaster. They gave instead chose SMTP+IMAP once again. You as well claim that distributed VCS systems like GIT are the future of internet protocols.
But if you want to buy into that koolaid, Google is in a much more effective place to play the data-sync/replication game with Gears than Microsoft is with Mesh.
The idea that MS has the upper hand in wrapping/virtualizing someone else’s API or devices is without merit as well. Whomever becomes an aggregator/wrapper can also be wrapped/aggregated by others. The real issue is, are developers willing to use crappy proprietary Microsoft APIs, or use Google’s open alternatives (e.g. SyncML gateway wrapper around Mesh sync services)
The answer so far has not been good for Microsoft.
It’s hard to tell if Steve knows what he is talking about because he writes in such a convoluted fashion.
Substance, er, I mean twitter abuse leads to incoherent rambling such as above. Or the previous instance:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008.....n-barrier/
Time to lay off the pink dragon and start working on “rehab hero”.
@13 - True dat
I brought this sentiment to it’s pictorial climax in this shot I title:
“The truth behind the greatness of Twitter”
http://www.flickr.com/photos/8.....5/sizes/l/
This will all make sense later tonight when I’m done coding.
I have a friend who is a member of the board of our local Mensa group and they had their meeting today. So I shot this paragraph over to his iPhone via gmail.
“Key to the transition is the interactive two-way nature of the communication services of the Mesh and Google platforms. Google collects behavioral data from Gmail, Apps, and search, but increasingly the roundtrip between Gchat and Google Reader is producing the high value signals (gestures) that fuel affinity group formation and targeted feedback loops. Mesh atomizes the Google, Facebook, and other social constructs into virtual devices that can be combined from the ground up to attack viral opportunities as they emerge.”
The end result, there were a lot of theories but not one of the people he was still with (some had already left) felt they could definitively determine what exactly this paragraph means.
So I think, at very least, “Bob” is owed an apology.
Plan B:
http://www.go2planb.com/ForConsumers/Index.aspx
Subset
Lotus Notes got smashed? Sure Google is in a good place, but much better? Kool Aid flows in both directions. Your open religion is all well and good, but don’t discount Microsoft based on cant and FUD. May not work any better than it did for Hillary.
I have no idea what this post was about. But what you’re typing *sounds* very exciting. Can you add an addendum to put it in a short plain summary?
The other thing is, viral growth is highly overrated. It leads to rapid growth of user base, but rapid drop off as well, because most of it is essentially fad driven spam, with no user retention ability.
The stuff about GChat/GReader is purely speculative fantasy, and stated in techobabble that would make the writers of Star Trek The Next Generation proud.
“Key to the transition is the interactive two-way nature of inverted deckion fields. Behavior data from GChat/GReader allows creation of rentrillic trajectories (gestures) that fuel static warp bubbles. Microsoft atomizes the omega particles creating a static warp shell, which when collapsed, can attack viral bio-neural energies as they coalesce around superscalar verteron particles.”
*cough* Since you aren’t Following me I’ll tweet here:
Slightly related: http://snipurl.com/2byul
“The Microsoft vs Google Endgame” - Harvard Business Onlines Umair Haque [discussionleader_hbsp_com]
Another of Gillmor’s posts that seems mostly about his own chance to practice typing.
Twitter is completely irrelevant in this situation. They have almost no presence or mindshare outside of tech bloggers! If ATT/T-Mobile decided to put a Twitter clone on their phones, BAM they are a thousand the player in microblogging than Twitter in about four seconds.
But this won’t happen, because most people find publicly broadcasting 100 characters about their life to be a) vain, b) stupid, c) vainly stupid.
I understand how important it is for tech bloggers to be able to keep buzz about their blogs in real time, but for EVERYONE else it’s useless. It’s asynchronous AIM, where your conversations are public.
Stick to twitter. Anything over 140 characters and people start to forget how to put all the words together coherently.
I have to agree with the masses…and would recommend using a comma every now and then.
Yes, Lotus Notes’s replication architecture got smashed. It was an administrative nightmare. In case you haven’t notice Steve, SMTP/IMAP/POP won. Go ahead, quote Notes or MS FUD about installed email accounts. It’s a drop in the bucket compare to total number of SMTP/IMAP mail traffic.
That you don’t know how nasty Notes is, and how sync-based mail utterly failed (dismissed essentially by every major standards consortium)
You like to make Microsoft sounds like a one trick pony but it isn’t - SQL Server, Dynamics and Sharepoint are all 1 billion dollar businesses that I rarely hear mentioned anywhere. Microsoft makes big money off of businesses and has figured out a way to continue to do so.
It’s clear that they still haven’t figured out how to to make money off of consumers (Zune, Xbox, Live Search, etc) doesn’t mean that their main source of revenue (um, what was it 51 billion) is being depleted. Live mesh is just another puzzle in the equation.
@SteveGillmor
Roughly 0.17% of the Twitterverse uses it like you, and that is being generous, scientifically.
Most simply use the web interface. A significant, but smaller, group uses a client like Twhirl or Twitteriffic. Only a small percentage uses text or an IM interface.
XMPP and Track via GTalk? You’re talking minuscule numbers. It’s even less than the percentage of Twitter users that have something interesting to say, which is around 1.4%.
On a related note, nearly 100% use the current @ functionality.
While I admire the gumption to drag this “community” into your camp of real-time, high end, mover and shaker economic clout Power Users Swarm (TM)…the reality does not come close to hitting the target.
In fact, one could make the argument that - rather than cater to Power Users who use up an inordinate amount of Twitter system bandwidth by demanding real time tracking - those in charge of scaling Twitter for mainstream success should instead limit such use and take a ’slow-go’ approach during the growing pains era (which they are clearly in right now).
—
Oh…and “Darwinian favoritism of swarm resolution” - now you’re just making shit up that sounds cool (or Orwellian, I can’t tell yet).
DJ
It’s remarkable when a small innovation or linear leap can begin the moving of the big ships back to port. All of a sudden there is a buzz that makes it to the early adopters that gets the attention of a large company which has to decide if it’s worth their while to follow the lead they have been given. Can they swing around in time to not be an also ran? Do they let the 3 guys huddled over the cherry red server do their R&D for them, make all the initial mistakes and either clone, buy or steal it as it hits critical mass?
There are far too many people who have an idea, build a house like a movie set and try to sell it to the highest bidder. When there is a true passion to see an idea go online, grow and become something they never imagined, there is the will to take it to the next level. What remains to be seen is if this nearly 2 weeks of service suspension of the IM client won’t give someone else the chance to poison the well in the center of the community.
The last day the IM gateway was still up I heard about a band’s viral video that was breaking and put their name into Track. The amount of realtime information flying into my phone was breathtaking and actually had me worried for the OS of the phone. It was just another example of standing in the center of the swarm rather than seeing the wreckage of it. I actually showed the power of Track to a co-worker as we looked out over a field of 40,000 strangers and saw their posts coming in sharing their individual experience in a group setting.
I miss this feature and hope that they find a way to harness the power of the swarm. The opportunities could be huge for the right people but watching it and being in the middle of it have a connection unlike what I have experienced in the past. If they don’t fix Twitter, I guess in some way, we will. It’s not like we haven’t had to figure out work-a-rounds before.
Perhaps Bill needs to go back to 100-0 for a year’s time and actually turn the company in the correct direction. He couldn’t be leaving at a more critical time.
WTF? Koolaid might flow in two directions but you defenitely need to lay off of it
Ohh goody, I love Sunday evening puzzles.
P.S. The clues are in the Gangs stream from friday’s previous.
P.P.S I don’t agree, but time will tell. All I see is a bunch of “me too” syndrome that is missing the wave out of which will come the next game-changer. I would agree that twitter is adjacently related.
I am tired of these long-winded rants from Gillmor. They never make much sense and stray from what I think we all like about TC, their ability to report the important things in a clear and concise way.
Also, cocks.
I also noticed that Steve doesn’t have the Scoble’s ability to do a 180 after an unfavorable post, feigning humility then cry about something Microsoft made to change the subject.
Mmmmmmmm,
- How many products Microsoft has? and how many Google?
- On the mobile side Microsoft still has a lot of space to grow. Currently it has a low market share of ~12% but windows mobile it’s not that bad.
Comparing it with other alternatives like Blackberry, Symbian based and Mac OS X based (iPhone) I can say that from a developer & business perspective Microsoft is in a better position. iPhone SDK is promising but Apple (Steve Jobs?) try to kick developers instead of attracting them, they ask for paying $ 99 & $ 299 for entering the program… Symbian development is slow and Blackberry is so propietary. Google came up with Android but it’s not a really open platform and you must develop in Java.
The average programmer develops faster with Visual Studio, just try it yourself.
- Silverlight is what many developers were expecting from years and Macromedia(now Adobe) was “lazy” to deliver. And Silverlight is more open source oriented (see moonlight) than Adobe Flash was (JavaFX? does it exist?)
- Google spreadsheet? Yes I use it for simple calculations and sharing, but if you are really serious look at solutions like: http://www.gigaspaces.com/excel
OpenOffice? very nice, but can you integrate it with your organization in an easy way? have you visual studio (eclipse) wizards/integration like http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-u.....05533.aspx
It’s true that Microsoft doesn’t have a clue about how to deal with Google (or Apple iPods)! The Google system is awesome and seems very difficult to copy (overture & microsoft ads are a shame) but Google is very greedy now (how can a click costs $ 6?) and we need alternatives. If something like: http://www.adecn.com/ gain momentum it’s a good starting point.
Dave Johnston
Good data. Reminds me of the RSS conversation when it was similarly (and incorrectly) trivialized. As to your resource allocation point at the end, that is exactly the calculation Ev and Biz need to make. I doubt they’re stupid enough to bet the farm conservatively as you suggest, but if they do, the market will shift rapidly.
Look at it this way.
Track is a VRM answer to Search but spawns an even more disruptive paradigm.
By bringing the gestures to us rather than going out and searching for them (sounds like the RSS use case) we can create ad hoc communities that rally around a meme and dissipate just a quickly.
It’s an RFP for a social interaction.
One thing to consider though is that as it gains traction we’ll re-live the same problems we have now.
RSS helped us cope with too many sources. RSS added many more sources and the information overload monkey was on our back again.
So the next logical step is the filter. That’s an interesting, critical and extremely powerful valve to control. How the water goes from firehose to faucett is the way the next billionaire gets made.
# of times twitter was mentioned - 19
# of times microsoft was mentioned - 7
# of times google was mentioned - 9
# of times i read it - 3
# of points i got out of the article - 0.
Plan C - stick to phone interviews.
“Reminds me of the RSS conversation when it was similarly (and incorrectly) trivialized.”
bzzttt, RSS, like Bit Torrent is open and free to implement on both ends for anyone and also free to use.
You’re comparing a protocol to a closed service.
That would be like comparing the RFC for email to hotmail or the IRC protocol to mIRC, except in this case there is no RFC. It’s just a closed SMS service by one provider.
If Kevin Pereira was pimping this with hot girls on G4/AOTS, I would say it was a lock, there is no stopping it. That’s what drove MySpace. The music/entertainment support with comcast.
This has the support of geek bloggers. That’s just not cool to most people. That’s reality. That’s the difference.
I don’t agree that XMPP is resource intensive. Well it is, yes, but it all depends on how you look at things.
Polling the server the way the clients do now is probably harder to maintain than a world of XMPP clients only.
The Twitter developers argue that the polling API’s are more impotant because Twiiter is more than just real-time messaging, it’s history as well.
So, if cutting off parts to save another were to happen it might mean the APIs. But that will never happen.
Wow. As a long time TechCrunch reader this post seems to be a real shark jumping moment for what once was such a great blog.
Micheal Arrington wrote daily posts for three months about how Microsoft buying Yahoo is a foregone conclusion ( uh-hem ). Then followed that bit of Carnac the Magnificent-ness with his current daily posts on how awful Twitter is and its doomed to fail and we should all stop using it.
Now, if I am reading this post correctly, TechCrunch is going on record saying Microsoft will somehow reclaim their lost mantel and defeat Google with their lame, proprietary Mesh thing, and that Mesh will be adopted by Obvious as the technology that will “save” them?
I can’t tell if you guys are truly lost, or if you have had too much wine, or both. Please return to the old TechCrunch when you blogged about interesting new ideas from start-ups and abandon your Microsoft-ass-kissing, Twitter-employee bashing ( disgraceful BTW ) ways before you become the Weekly World News of Tech.
Yes, Chris, there is only one Track mechanism at the moment, but there were closed syndication methods before RSS.
An open protocol for track might be an interesting spec.
No one REALLY cares whether the functionality comes from Twitter or not. they are just the only ones that can supply it at the moment.
Mike, how many people need to complain about Steve Gillmor’s long-winded, low-value posts before you pull him? When will you start listening to your readers?
You have a good brand but you don’t have a strong barrier; a tech blog with some cogent, hard-working writers who don’t tell readers they’re stupid will mean trouble.
Please, listen to your readers and choose one of the many tech writers or VCs who can provide interesting analysis. Here are some suggestions; some may be half-competitors but at least they’ll add value to you:
-Brad Feld: insight into how VCs think
-Mike Speiser: covering a new company idea a day
-Andrew Chen: great thoughts about virality and metrics
-Josh Kopelman: excellent marketer
-Marc Andreesen: one of the smartest guys in Silicon Valley
-Mark Pincus: off-color, low-key visionary entrepreneur
I want to see TechCrunch succeed; please don’t waste your space on this.
“Twitter-employee bashing”
I 2nd this, you should never ever bash programmer/employees like Blaine. They are the good people.
@Steve, you just proved why I like the 140 character limit on Twitter. If a tweet doesn’t make any sense, at least I only lost a few seconds
Joel
Unfollow
Be sure to check out the discussion on friendfeed, it is very interesting. Many people have begun to discuss there exclusively. I guess nobody is spamming their links there yet.