Is Microsoft a Web 2.0 company? (alt title: The Center of the Universe)
Summary: Yes Microsoft is a Web 2.0 company, because their goal is to use the Web as a Platform. The difference is they'll use the Web as a Platform via millions of Windows-run 'devices'. That'll be their interface into Web 2.0.
The Yahoo Search team has a vision called FUSE - which stands for Find, Use, Share, and Expand. Apparently it represents the use of search "to fuse a myriad of services and applications". Basically, search is the center of the universe for Yahoo - and Google too.
Compare this to Microsoft, which has at the center of its universe the Windows OS. Microsoft is currently celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Windows Operating System (OS) and in a recent Microsoft press release Jim Allchin, the Group VP of Platforms, updates us on Microsoft's vision:
"Our initial vision was "A PC on every desk and in every home." Now we’re envisioning a PC for every person and in every room – almost in every nook and cranny."
Well I don't particularly want Microsoft to be in all my nooks and crannies. They've certainly targeted the nooks and crannies of many an Internet company over the years (Netscape especially)! But seriously, what this vision entails is that Microsoft want to have Windows running on a multitude of Internet-connected devices in the future.
Back to Yahoo's search-centered vision. John Battelle writes:
"...at the center of the idea of FUSE is what's happening to media - how every single medium - music, TV, print, telecom, even our first versions of the web - is being remixed and reordered by Web 2.0. It's an old saw, but mass media really is becoming my media - through RSS, podcasting, iTunes, Tivo, blogs, and many innovations to come. And central to navigating a my media world is search. Hence, the FUSE vision holds water for me - search is not just about a web index. It's about my interface to the world."
Yahoo and Google are both basically Internet services companies - and no doubt both sees its search platform as the center of a "my media" universe. How does this compare to Microsoft, who are still essentially a device-dependent company?
While the main 'device' over the past 20 years has of course been the Personal Computer, Microsoft recognizes that in future other devices will be more important - mobile, television, so-called "media centers". They may still call them PCs, but these devices will be much more varied than in the past 20 years.
Is Microsoft a Web 2.0 company, like Yahoo and Google?
Yes Microsoft is a Web 2.0 company, because their goal is to use the Web as a Platform. The difference is they'll use the Web as a Platform VIA millions of Windows-run 'devices'. That'll be their interface into Web 2.0. Microsoft is doing this instead of going the direct route - as Yahoo and Google are - through search engines and all the usual Web 2.0 technologies (RSS, Web Services, APIs, etc).
Oh Microsoft will do things in those domains too (e.g. start.com), but the Windows OS is at the heart of Microsoft's Web 2.0 strategy.
The way I see it, Microsoft really has no choice but to try and dominate Web 2.0. Much as they corralled Web 1.0 via Windows and the Internet Explorer browser.
So will the center of the Web 2.0 universe turn out to be Longhorn, the next generation Windows OS? Well if Microsoft gets its new OS onto millions and millions of Web-connected devices over the next few years, then they'll essentially control all those "my media" interfaces to the Web 2.0 world.
Don't count Microsoft out of Web 2.0 yet.
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I hadn't heard of "FUSE" before. I really like it, especially the Share and Expand part. That's the social part, and the important, word-of-mouth part.
My vision for the future is to have MS be reduced to a software application vendor. I'll give them Office, especially Mac Office, because they make the best office product (right now, anyway), as long as it writes to a common XML format. They'd still be making huge revenue, and we would be free of their attempts to tie in at every moment. It does get tiring after a fashion.
What would be great is if we had open file formats (for everything) with competition resided on the interface level. So, the best HTML editor wins. The best AAC encoder software wins. The best SVG editor wins.
In other words, information should not be proprietary, but the tools for manipulating it can be.
MS dominates the client-side persistant data containers/file formats in which granular data required by more sophisticated web services usually resides. MSExcel is the most common/fullest/most portable database on earth. Extracts from Excel can be converted into freely-licensed basic (MS)XML schema files by anyone who can do "Save As..."
Even most text files that circulate as .pdf start off as MSWord documents- which are more easily converted into web service-accessible XHTML. (How do you extract anything (re)-usable from an AdobeMedia .pdf... convert back to XHTML?)
IF the inputs required for a web service are typed directly by the user, i.e. a search of Yahoo/Google for "something I want"... THEN there is no need for a client-side persistent data repository or file format. For web services based on inputs the user can find, remember and retype quickly, Yahoo,Google,Amazon and other search-oriented providers with broad and deep indexes, clean interfaces and graceful user interactions need only fear clone offerings from MS...(rather like Netscape..)
HOWEVER, whenever the detailed, granular, dynamic tabular data sets required by more sophisticated web services need a local persistant data store to help the end user keep current and avoid retyping, the story will be much, much worse. How many 15- character alphanumeric Serial or SKU numbers do you want to remember and re-type every day?. Can you really cut and paste it all from (Star Office) NotePad into a web-service search box?
The granular data and key identifiers necessary for more industrial web service requests will usually persist on the client side as tabular data...i.e. "here is my shop's current inventory with all its characteristics which I am offering for sale". The persistant storage must be at least as accessible and manipulable on the client side as Excel. For most users, a (MS OR non-MS)database table is overkill for maintaining tabular data...hence the widespread use of Excel as a tabular data repository... something it was never really intended to do...(just as HTML was never really intended to display remote search boxes to SQL-query remote databases...)
BECAUSE it has proved extremely difficult to establish industry-wide agreements on general or even multi-purpose XML tagging schemas at the point data originates;
AND BECAUSE scaling live-user web services in the face of the processing overhead imposed by the combination of XML-tagged file size inflation, and the parsing and service specific (RDF anyone?) XSLT transformation on the server side is proving a major architectual headache...
The above 2 points suggest that the way forward for most web services of any power will include the distributed option of applying tags ONLY to the user-selected subset of data that is about to be re-used, THEN applying a user selected XSLT for the (MS certified?) web service about to be requested (Gulp!) and even generating the resulting SOAP requests or serialising the SAX event streams ON THE CLIENT SIDE...
This distributed(tabular)data vision of the Read/Write Web will give MS a very, very big footprint in the Web 2.0 world...
UNLESS a truly portable, consumer-oriented, persistant tabular data management application that can compete with Excel becomes available...a sort of .pdf for tabular data with end-user selectable queries, tagging, transforms, SOAP menus and even SAX serialisation and XML-RPC for power users.......are you listening AdobeMedia? Anybody else....?
He said:
"a truly portable, consumer-oriented, persistant tabular data management application that can compete with Excel becomes available...a sort of .pdf for tabular data with end-user selectable queries, tagging, transforms, SOAP menus and even SAX serialisation and XML-RPC for power users"
The problem is not that the previous doesn't exist. The problem is that:
1) There are too many options for choosing that: they're called a plethora of scripting languages and add-on libraries for them to use. (Python can do all that and then some, for example - and for granular store, using Python's pickle module is really easy, IMHO.)
2) The power of a scripting language has not yet been concisely represented in a form that non-programming users can easily choose to relate to.
3) An application that does managet to remedy problems (1) and (2) has to deal with the proprietary format problem - namely, that to work with those proprietary formats either request that the user convert it to something somewhat open (which requires owning the proprietary software) or that the application know how to read such files (not something encouraged by the vendor of a proprietary format).
4) (3) gets compounded if the proprietary format has a substantial market share as people are more likely to use that than an open interoperable format.
Where am I going with this?
a) There are two viable business models which usually don't go together: (i) pay for content, (ii) pay for access.
b) Most Web 2.0 companies, IMHO, are going for (i), not (ii), but those that do go for (ii) are still keeping the content in a format that other tools can access and/or work with, because few have the audacity to think they can write end-to-end toolsets for working with content (here's where Adobe has great potential), and most know that they're better off not making a tool at all than making a proprietary tool and telling people that that is all they can use.
c) MS goes for (ii) in a very indirect way: pay not for the access per se, but for the OS to run on the device to do the access.
d) Apple goes for (i) in a very different way: pay for the content (iTunes Music Store), but Apple still has end-to-end proprietary tools (given away freely) for accessing the content (iTunes) and also does the MS-style route for mobile playback (iPod). Apple also does (ii) with its .Mac offerings.
In summary: it is all about whether or not the file format is open or not. If/when all data is easily open, migration away from MS (or Apple's iTunes, for that matter) to something technologically superior (if one manages to hear about such a thing - this is an entirely different matter) becomes easy enough to break any device-control hold and Shirky's "free is a stable strategy" can come into vivid resolution re: OS. Until then, the king of the mountain keeps control by preventing people from even seeing a map of the mountain top (sorry for the bad analogy).