Services, Ownership, and the Rise of an Empire

I recall several years ago - around 2000 - a professor told me of Microsoft's plans to make Office a web service. No longer would people actually buy and install Word, etc.; rather, they would subscribe to an online Office service and edit their documents online.

I scoffed at the idea. No way, I thought, would anyone want that kind of model of software. I based my reasoning on the resultant lack of ownership and also on a profound distrust for Microsoft: with my documents on their servers, what was to prevent them for reading my information? "But," you say, "why would they care about your information?" Not mine, perhaps, but Lockheed Martin's? Dell's? IBM's? You see my point. What's "proprietary" if the company that makes your word processor can read your documents right off their servers?

Of course, as yet, Microsoft has not succeeded in migrating Office to a web service. But Google has introduced something along those lines. And, while our core productivity applications might not yet be services, so much of the rest of our tools are. Like email: GMail, Yahoo!, etc. Like Blogger. Like Picassa. Like Flicker. Like MySpace and Twitter. You get my point. Sure, all of those are free, but they're still web services. And if you'd told me in 2000 that would happen, I'd not have believed you. Proof of my naivety? Perhaps. Or proof of the radical pace of technological and sociological change (in response to the change of technology).

It doesn't bother me, anymore, that I don't "own" my email service or my blogging service. Not sure why, but it doesn't. Perhaps it's the convenience. For some time, I tossed my own photo library in php and MySQL; more and more, I'm thinking of using something like Picasa to share my photos over the 'Net. So much easier than maintaining my own thing, finding my own hosting, etc. Sure, I have the technical skills to do it.... But I'm a bad computer nerd: by the end of each day, the thought of interacting with a computer is rather unappealing. Certainly the thought of doing anything "computer sciency" is unappealing. Designing, implementing, and maintaining a website counts, in my mind.

Something else has happened with the rise of Internet services: the rise of a new (or several new) empires. Just as Microsoft generated synergy for its products by releasing a Microsoft version of everything, Google is building itself an Internet empire based on an ever-increasing collection of services. GMail. Google Documents. Google Analytics. Google AdSense. Google AdWords. Google Calendar. Blogger. Picasa. All the Google search tools. I'm sure I'm missing others.

It's daunting. And they're all free. If I stop and think about it, it's a bit unnerving, this spiraling increase in Google's presence on the web (as if their search engine wasn't enough presence on its own!).

And then there's Apple. Which struggled for so long. With Mac OS X, they gained a superior OS with a vastly superior user experience. They've always had excellent hardware (excepting, perhaps, the early iMacs). And then came the iPod. And iTunes. And iTunes Video with TV shows. And now iTunes Movies. And now the Apple TV. And now the iPhone. The rise of another empire - in multimedia rather than web services - based on the synergy of related products. Sony should ph34r Apple's power - perhaps not yet, but they'd better be looking down the road: I see only Apple dominance there. (Naivety, again?) And no complaints (yet), as Apple's done a better-than-average job of not taking advantage of its placement, just as Google has. Though I'm sure some would disagree, I point out that both are committed to open standards. (Yeah, FairPlay DRM is not open - but Jobs defended that quite well in this essay.)

Now here's a thought: imagine a merger between Apple and Google. Google's technical expertise in Internet services, distributed computing and file storage, ....; Apple's decades of experience in design and user interfaces. Currently, they have (mostly) non-overlapping technologies. Together, well, I foresee the potential for some amazing innovation.

And then we could watch Microsoft run for the hills. That's a nice thought, I must say.