The Coming Cloud Wars Google+ vs Microsoft (Plus Facebook)
The Coming Cloud Wars Google+ vs Microsoft (Plus Facebook)
The next year in tech will be all about building connections between PC and post-PC devices, whether phones, tablets, game consoles, e-readers or next-gen SmartRoombas. They’ll be connections without cords, built on shared interfaces, proximity-based communication, and storage, syncing and computing infrastructure increasingly shifted to the cloud.
That’s what Tuesday’s release of OS X Lion is all about: building on the App Store and iCloud. That’s what Microsoft’s forthcoming Windows 8 is all about: building on unified IDs on everything from Windows Phone 7 to Office to Xbox and Skype.
And I’m going to convince you that this is even what Google+ is really all about. You can see this already in Google+’s mobile apps for Android and iOS; we’ll see it more as Google continues to integrate more of its web properties into the social network.
The company-wide rollout of “+” is Google’s play for the whole stack — half Trojan horse and half battering ram.
Identity and the Social Layer
If you’re thinking of Google+ solely in terms of social networking and comparing it head-to-head with Facebook or Twitter alone, you’re making a mistake.
We’ve long passed the Friendster moment of making and browsing stand-alone databases of profile pages. Social networks don’t work that way any more, just as PCs aren’t stuck with sorting and saving local files in folders.
Today, social networks maintain your identity across a wide range of cloud-based services spanning multiple devices. Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Twitter aren’t just providing you with the digital equivalent of your mailing address, but also your driver’s license, passport, car keys and credit cards.
At O’Reilly Radar, Edd Dumbill offers a helpful anatomy of social networks’ new functions:
When Google’s chairman and ex-CEO Eric Schmidt talks about Facebook’s achievement, he almost never uses the word social. Instead, he talks about identity:
At a minimum, Google+ will do the same for Google’s webapps, browsers and operating systems — and potentially many more third-party partners who want to take advantage of that sheer number of accounts. Google’s chief advantage is that unlike Facebook, it has direct access to its own giant mobile computing platform: Android.
For Schmidt, mobile computing, too, is about identity and personalization, not just communication:
Google’s Strategy: The Best Defense Is A Good Offense
This is why we can’t just look at these social networks head-to-head to understand what they are or what’s going to happen next. To borrow Google+’s guiding metaphor, we have to look at their extended circles. And the most important intersection of Google’s and Facebook’s extended circles is Microsoft.
Google+ mobile apps on Android and iOS.
And I’m going to convince you that this is even what Google+ is really all about. You can see this already in Google+’s mobile apps for Android and iOS; we’ll see it more as Google continues to integrate more of its web properties into the social network.
The company-wide rollout of “+” is Google’s play for the whole stack — half Trojan horse and half battering ram.
Identity and the Social Layer
If you’re thinking of Google+ solely in terms of social networking and comparing it head-to-head with Facebook or Twitter alone, you’re making a mistake.
We’ve long passed the Friendster moment of making and browsing stand-alone databases of profile pages. Social networks don’t work that way any more, just as PCs aren’t stuck with sorting and saving local files in folders.
Today, social networks maintain your identity across a wide range of cloud-based services spanning multiple devices. Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Twitter aren’t just providing you with the digital equivalent of your mailing address, but also your driver’s license, passport, car keys and credit cards.
At O’Reilly Radar, Edd Dumbill offers a helpful anatomy of social networks’ new functions:
Dumbill calls this “the social backbone of the web.” It’s already a much bigger part of the tech ecosystem than any particular portal you may log into and stare at for part of the day reading status updates.
- Identity — authenticating you as a user, and storing information about you
- Sharing — access rights over content
- Notification — informing users of changes to content or contacts’ content
- Annotation — commenting on content
- Communication — direct interaction among members of the system
When Google’s chairman and ex-CEO Eric Schmidt talks about Facebook’s achievement, he almost never uses the word social. Instead, he talks about identity:
Fundamentally, what Facebook has done is built a way for you to figure out who people are. That system is missing in the internet as a whole. Google should have worked on this earlier. We now have a product called Google+, which has been in development for more than a year and a half, which is a partial answer to that…Facebook, the biggest social network, is already using its identity machine to power login credentials for cloud-backed client apps like Spotify, comment threads for web sites like Gawker Media, personalized search for Bing and integrated contact management for Windows Phone 7. Twitter plays a similar role with a huge ecosystem of sites and applications, and increasingly inside Apple’s iOS.
I think that’s the area where I would have put more resources, developing these identity services and ranking systems that go along with that. That would have made a big difference for the internet as a whole.
At a minimum, Google+ will do the same for Google’s webapps, browsers and operating systems — and potentially many more third-party partners who want to take advantage of that sheer number of accounts. Google’s chief advantage is that unlike Facebook, it has direct access to its own giant mobile computing platform: Android.
For Schmidt, mobile computing, too, is about identity and personalization, not just communication:
Mobile devices… are inherently better [than PCs]. They’re more personal; with your permission, they know who you are [and] they can make suggestions for you.Facebook may know who you are, but it doesn’t have Google’s or Apple’s vertical control of the computing platform on desktop or mobile. Instead, it has a trusted, longtime partner and investor who does: Microsoft.
Google’s Strategy: The Best Defense Is A Good Offense
This is why we can’t just look at these social networks head-to-head to understand what they are or what’s going to happen next. To borrow Google+’s guiding metaphor, we have to look at their extended circles. And the most important intersection of Google’s and Facebook’s extended circles is Microsoft.
