Blurring the line: Google Desktop

Today, Google unveiled a new appli­ca­tion that allows you to search your desk­top, blur­ring the lines between desk­tops and the web. This is yet another exam­ple of what I call hybrid com­put­ing, the new class of soft­ware that can be aug­mented through web use. It also has stag­ger­ing impli­ca­tions for a lot of players.

Microsoft

Of course, every­one will focus on how this move puts Google and Microsoft in a com­pet­i­tive sit­u­a­tion. Microsoft rep­re­sen­ta­tives have said they con­sid­ered search an impor­tant space, poten­tially putting Google on the defen­sive. The inter­est­ing thing in the way Google approached this is that they did not react as Netscape did, launch­ing into announce­ments about the future irrel­e­vance of Microsoft; they did not take Microsoft head on in a mar­ket (Oper­at­ing Sys­tems or web browsers) that Microsoft cur­rently dom­i­nates. What they did was lever­age off a mar­ket in which they had the advan­tage: Search. While they did not come out and say it out loud, the mes­sage is clear: you can have search in Long­horn when it comes out or you can have it now. Try Google today and maybe you’ll want to stick around in the future.

Apple

Apple has already announced an inter­est in search, with the unveil­ing of Spot­light, a new search fea­ture avail­able in the next ver­sion of their oper­at­ing sys­tem. Google has not released a prod­uct on the Mac plat­form but I would not be sur­prised if that were com­ing… after the prod­uct is avail­able for Linux. The con­tin­u­ing decline of the Mac plat­form seems to push it fur­ther and fur­ther into irrel­e­vance. Now, Google attacks the mac plat­form by tak­ing a fea­ture that was sup­posed to be a dif­fer­en­tia­tor, com­pared to Win­dows, and mak­ing it avail­able on the Win­dows plat­form. This is poten­tially dan­ger­ous to Apple, a com­pany try­ing the mono­lithic approach at offer­ing solu­tions: Use Apple and that’s all you need.

Mod­u­lar by Design

I recently high­lighted what I call the Mod­u­lar by Design approach, which is pred­i­cated on 6 basic key points: stan­dards, focus, flex­i­bil­ity, speed, com­mu­ni­ca­tion, and stealth. In unveil­ing this new tool, Google seems to be adopt­ing the approach as a com­pet­i­tive advan­tage. If you con­sider Google as the stan­dard for search (and it seems there is a con­sen­sus agree­ment that, for the time being, that’s the case), they are fol­low­ing a pretty standard-based approach. Their focus is on search, obvi­ously. Their flex­i­bil­ity comes from the abil­ity to adapt that focus to tar­get key mar­kets. In terms of speed, it is hard not to see the speed of growth of the com­pany (which did not exist 7 years ago and has rolled most of its new offer­ings in the last 2–3 years). From a com­mu­ni­ca­tion stand­point, they are involved in get­ting feed­back from their user com­mu­nity, often releas­ing prod­ucts as very long beta (for exam­ple, Google News and Froogle, their shop­ping search engine, are still in beta even though both have been out for over a year). And moves like the announce­ment of Gmail and today’s new offer­ing show a strong abil­ity at oper­at­ing stealthily.

On the rel­e­vancy of the Oper­at­ing System

Almost as impor­tant in the blur­ring of the lines between desk­tops and the web, as illus­trated by Google desk­top, is a dis­cus­sion about the long term rel­e­vancy of the oper­at­ing sys­tem as an appli­ca­tion plat­form. It seems that increas­ingly, the appli­ca­tion plat­form is becom­ing the web, with oper­at­ing sys­tems being roughly a way to run con­nected soft­ware. Already today, more and more of our daily tasks are run­ning through the Inter­net, whether it is com­mu­ni­ca­tion (email, IM, VoIP), research (web surf­ing, infor­ma­tion con­sump­tion from news sites and blogs), cre­ation and dis­tri­b­u­tion (weblogs and their exten­sions like pod­cast­ing, pho­to­blog, etc..) or enter­tain­ment (music, movies, games…)

From there, then comes two poten­tial areas of inter­est for new soft­ware devel­op­ers: tools that can help the cre­ation of new things (weblogs, photo-editing soft­ware, music edit­ing soft­ware, other data-type cre­ation tools like Flash), tools and pro­to­cols that can help their dis­tri­b­u­tion (RSS, search tools, servers), and tools that ease their con­sump­tion (News­read­ers, picture-viewer, plug-ins, etc…) Most of those, how­ever, seem to be increas­ingly able to run within the con­text of a web browser. So what hap­pens when tools that bridge the gap between the browser and the desk­top become more impor­tant? Google desk­top does pro­vide one of those points of inte­gra­tion and if you look closely, it seems that Google is plac­ing itself at the other end, pro­vid­ing tools for cre­ation (Blog­ger, Picasa) and orga­ni­za­tion and dis­cov­ery (search). This could be a pretty large mar­ket­place for them and could help them con­trol a sub­stan­tial part of the dig­i­tal future. At the same time, the move of those tools con­tin­ues to erode the rel­e­vance of the oper­at­ing sys­tem as the plat­form as more and more ser­vices move to browser-based sys­tems. Google fir­ing this shot across the bow of the Microsoft ship is not only aimed at Microsoft but also at other OS vendors.