Remember back when?
Redmond’s mantra [unuttered publicly] of “a chicken in every pot, and Windows on every desktop” seemed an elusive, if not laughable goal less than twenty years ago. IBM was firmly and seemingly unassailably entrenched in the enterprise.
When Microsoft first began to appear on the information technology horizon, it appealed to the individual computer user. Windows was pushed as a fun personal productivity tool. And though it was never spoken of, if you had a Windows PC on your desktop, you could sneak in a game of Solitaire when no one was looking. Back then, the “real work” of computing was done either on terminals hard-wired to mainframes, or in a window on a PC running a terminal emulation program. Windows was used at work primarily for prestige, for word processing, for spreadsheets, and for terminal emulation.
Windows was utterly reviled by corporate IT departments, desperate to hang on to the closed environment they had thrived in for years, and where they and only they had the absolute lock on what users could access from the desktop. Feeling very threatened by all the “islands of automation” that began to spring up everywhere, IT fought back. Windows was initially banned from many corporate desktops as “too open” and as a security risk. Microsoft’s development tools, such as Visual Basic, were derided as toys (real developers wrote in C) and colorful graphical user interfaces were seen as merely time-wasting “eye candy.”
Ultimately, pushed and prodded by the users who demanded increased productivity and reduced development cycles, both IT shops and Microsoft learned how to better “protect” the enterprise, to scale applications, and to administer thousands of desktops centrally. Slowly, Corporate IT shops, actively courted by Microsoft, began to adopt, if not embrace Microsoft’s email and rapid development tools.
Today, it’s a different story. Microsoft still pushes personal productivity, but today it enjoys a solid place in Enterprise computing, with Windows and Office on practically every desktop, tools like Microsoft Exchange delivering email to millions of corporate users, Microsoft’s servers in use (perhaps not exclusively) in nearly every enterprise, and Microsoft’s Visual Studio and .NET development tools are pervasive in the corporate environment.
Team Google saw and learned.
Their goal, too, is to be pervasive, and at the core of enterprise computing. But Google seems determined to avoid the painful missteps of IBM and Microsoft in earlier generations. They learned from what IBM and Microsoft did right, and maybe more importantly, where they went wrong. They understood that “push” from users is more effective than “pull” from the IT guys, so they started with Google’s ubiquitous Search, a personal productivity tool. They certainly understand that computing needs to be fun and a little bit whimsical. More importantly, they saw both Microsoft and IBM before them build up a large base of enemies who resented high costs per seat, and the arrogance of power. Google’s philosophy (enunciated here) and encapsulated in its “Do no evil” motto, is primarily designed to to protect Google from the pitfalls of the “arrogance of power.” Right at the outset, they figured out that “free” is good, and “let Joe pay for it” is even better. Giving things away free engenders love. It’s hard to hate when you’re not paying for it. Just as “users” (viewers) tolerate some amount of advertising on TV in return for “free” programming, so too, users would accept some amount of non-intrusive advertising in return for free information and services. A key Google insight was that if the ads it served up were unobtrusive and truly relevant, users wouldn’t resent them at all.
These insights, revolutionary back then but which every schoolboy today takes for granted, are what got Google to this point. Now, they feel ready to tackle the enterprise. In upcoming posts, interspersed with our usual reporting on the comings and goings of Google, its friends, and its enemies, we’ll take a hard look at Google’s first steps towards taking on the enterprise.
Filed under: IBM, Uncategorized Tagged: | David Sarna, enterprise computing, Google, graphical user interfaces, IBM, Microsft, Microsft .NET, Microsft Exchange, terminal emulation, Visual Basic, Visual Studio
