Google is Changing the Game

As has been shown over the last decade, it is basi­cally impos­si­ble to cre­ate a tra­di­tional soft­ware pack­age to com­pete with Microsoft’s Office Suite. Many have tried and many have failed. The pri­mary tac­tics that com­pa­nies have used have been to com­pete by adding fea­tures, or just mak­ing basi­cally the same prod­ucts for free. Still, peo­ple con­tinue to use Microsoft. They carved out a dom­i­nant place in the mar­ket, and have lever­aged it into bil­lions of dol­lars. All that may be chang­ing. South of Wash­ing­ton on the Pacific coast is a lit­tle com­pany you may know called Google, who is try­ing to change the game entirely. Yes­ter­day Google pur­chased a soft­ware pack­age called Writely, which is a web-based word pro­cess­ing appli­ca­tion. (Microsoft Word that lives on the net instead of your computer’s hard drive.) Google is also rumored to be releas­ing a cal­en­dar pro­gram that will com­pli­ment its fan­tas­tic gmail pro­gram. (Out­look based on the web with free e-mail built into it) Why is any of this impor­tant? Well, imag­ine that all of your soft­ware was free. Imag­ine that you never had to pay for soft­ware upgrades again. Imag­ine that you could access all of your doc­u­ments from any­where in the world with inter­net con­nec­tiv­ity, which is pretty much any­where you are likely to be, just by log­ging into your account. Imag­ine that instead of your com­puter being bogged down with hun­dreds or thou­sands of doc­u­ments, you only had to save those that were crit­i­cal or that you needed to backup. Imag­ine that your cal­en­dar, e-mail, search, rss, doc­u­ments, and inter­net were all in sync with one another, and could work together to make your life eas­ier. It is hap­pen­ing right now. Let me clar­ify that I am not a Microsoft basher. While I rec­og­nize they have had some issues, I use their prod­ucts daily. Win­dows and office have changed my life, but will I be using them 2 years from now? 5 Years from now? Will I con­tinue to use Office, which I will cer­tainly have to pay for, or will I switch to Google, or to some­thing entirely dif­fer­ent. The les­son here is that Google is approach­ing soft­ware dif­fer­ently. Rather than com­pete head to head with the estab­lished mar­ket leader, they are cre­at­ing an entirely new mar­ket. They are giv­ing soft­ware away for free, in exchange for atten­tion. This is a dras­ti­cally dif­fer­ent model from the Microsoft plan of old (buy, use, upgrade, buy, use, upgrade), and it appears to be the emerg­ing vision of Google. Strate­gi­cally this is bril­liant, but the exe­cu­tion of the strat­egy remains. You can bet that Microsoft (and Apple and Yahoo) will not just pas­sively watch this unfold. It is a les­son in com­pe­ti­tion, and it will be amaz­ing to see how this will all play out in the mar­ket­place.
Writely