Google competing directly with MS? No, why should they?

Jason Salas wonders what will happen if Google got into the developer tool business. Interesting thought which I'm sure, among other thoughts, has bounced inside Microsoft's exec's minds a couple of times. Though, with all the hoopla about Google picking up the gauntlet and heading over to Redmond to conquer the first house on Microsoft Way, one would almost forget that it would be a silly business decision to do so.

Microsoft is incredibly powerful. And no matter what old literature you tend to read in bed, David and Goliath's role playing game is fiction, at least when you project it onto modern day's society in general and this situation in particular, simply because Microsoft is beyond Goliath: it doesn't have just two legs to stand on, but 10, or even more. So even if Google rail-gunned some of these pillars directly, it wouldn't bring Microsoft down to its knees, and Google knows: also in this game, ammo is limited.

So what do you do if you're Google? Well, competing directly with your competitor in markets completely dominated by your competitor is, like described above, not very smart, though also not that necessary. You see, to extend the skewed David/Goliath metaphore a bit, Goliath has to eat too. You can, being Google, try to steal his food directly from him when you're in the area but chances are the big arms and legs of Goliath will hit you while doing it and it might be you need some time to recover from those 'interactions'.

A much better strategy is to talk to the people bringing the food to Goliath. They're not armed with big strong legs and it's likely they might be very interested in what you, being Google, have to offer to them. The keyword here is 'interested'. You, being Google, have to offer them something that's worth taking, why would they otherwise switch over to you and leave Goliath without food?

You can of course offer the double of what Goliath offers them, and some of the food-boys & girls might think that offer is one you can't refuse. But will that be enough? You need to persuade all of them, or at least a significant amount. And offering the same goods as Goliath offers them might also have no effect at all. Perhaps the food-boys & girls already have enough and are happy campers with what they got from Goliath. After all, more of the same is still getting the same.

Better is to offer something new. Something which fulfills their wildest dreams. Something which Goliath sometimes mumbled about during coffee breaks or around 3 pm on a sunday morning in a deserted pub but never actually offered. Something which was never seen by the food-boys & girls.

Offering something new, something you didn't think of but the second you saw it you realized: this is it, this is something you really could use and would have wanted ages ago. That's the kind of stuff Google will use to compete with Microsoft. Not in the same markets, but in different markets. Sometimes created for that purpose, sometimes simply in markets which were very small due to the lack of a good product, but in all cases in markets where Microsoft isn't dominant. The net effect is that these new markets can make other markets obsolete or insignificant. I'll get into one example in a second. By starving another market by luring away customers from that market with your own, you can starve a big company which controls that other market, without even competing in that market. The main cause this is possible is that a given market M has become a market based on the solution, not the problem: instead of focussing on the problem and then seeking the best fitting solution to that problem, you start with the solution and arrive automatically in the market of that solution's offering. By making people aware of the problem again and at the same time offering a different solution, you have a big chance the solution you're offering is very appealing, also because you explain the problem very well. This is the strategy I think Google will follow.

An example of such a market could be something which simply makes other products obsolete by offering different functionality to solve the same or similar problems. Take for example information workers in an average office. What do they do, on an average work day? They make sure the information flow inside an organisation keeps flowing. They do that by spending large amounts of time in outlook and office, and the backbone is controlled mostly by Exchange. People on the sales force on the road who want to access that information have to log into the exchange system, probably using a laptop. All employees use PCs, the backbone is stored on large PC's/servers, the whole architecture is controlled, monitored and administrated by a couple of system administrators which have a full time job administrating. No-one wonders if all these pc's and all that software are really necessary. After all, it's pumping data around which is transformed into information, and the access to that information is, in my example, performed through extremely expensive pipelines.

What if that backbone isn't inside your company but on a virtual space in the Google universe? And you get there by simply booting from a CD, within 15 seconds? Or accessing the same system, information and functionality (and more) via handhelds, smart-phones, laptops, even a set-topbox on your TV at home? Don't think in terms of Microsoft Office, but in terms of functionality elements. Which functionality do you need to get things done. By answering that question, you'll find out there are several ways to offer what you need, not just one.

My example above is obviously flawed and not likely what Google will do tomorrow, but I hope you'll see through the metaphore and understand what I mean. The example does illustrate that by offering an alternative which works completely different, you can limit IT costs with a tremendous amount, without jeopardizing the most important thing: keeping the information flow flowing and accessable without paying a huge price.