Will History Repeat Itself With Google Playing The Part Of Lotus?

from the could-be-a-stretch dept

History often repeats itself in the tech world and Joel Spolsky is seeing history repeating itself in the web application space. Using the example of Lotus in the office software space, he argues that the company lost relevance to Microsoft because it (wrongly) focused on optimizing performance and features for a platform (DOS) that was quickly becoming obsolete. In the meantime, Microsoft and Apple built really cool features for their office software and waited for platform capabilities to catch up (inevitably) due to Moore's Law. He then equates Google to the latter-day Lotus, painting a scenario where Google smugly laughs off a bloated but feature-rich (imaginary) NewSDK from a bratty startup, only to then get disrupted by this SDK when browser capabilities improve. Of course, part of the analogy breaks down because Microsoft was hardly a bratty startup when it succeeded where Lotus failed.

The prediction was serious enough to elicit a response from a Googler who disagrees with this association. The analogy is very interesting, and in many ways, we are indeed seeing a similar evolutionary path in web applications. Joel identified three platform characteristics, namely, a portable programming language, high interactivity and UI standards as important phases in the desktop world, that will eventually happen in the web world. And, he suggests, whoever can gain traction doing all three will have as much impact as Microsoft Windows back in the desktop era. This might be the case, but the more interesting question is whether it is even possible to achieve dominance from scratch just by doing all three?

On the web today, we are not seeing a lack of effort towards language portability (open-source Javascript libraries like Prototype, JQuery or Dojo) high interactivity (Scriptaculous, Yahoo/Google Developers API, Google Web Toolkit) and UI standards (all the CSS frameworks and Yahoo UI Best Practices). There are even efforts that are heading towards a "cut-and-paste" functionality on the web, with efforts like Microformats, the Semantic Web, GData API and even XML standard markups in different domains. There are also companies (Backbase, Nexaweb, Bindows, Tibco General Interface, Bindows) aspiring to be Joel's NewSDK by providing comprehensive tools for AJAX development. In some regards, you can argue that through Flash, Adobe has achieved all three in some important domains like video streaming, video conferencing and animations on the web, and with Flex and AIR, they are extending their ambitions to more general domains. The reigning giants are also not without ambitions in this area, with efforts like Microsoft's Silverlight, and Google hiring Mozilla developers and developing client-side technologies like Google Gears. As you can see, many players, ranging from big companies to small startups to open-source projects, are already pretty active in moving web applications along its maturation path, but still no one is as dominant on the web as Microsoft was on the desktop.

Perhaps one needs to remember that Microsoft became dominant on the desktop through shrewd business tactics, not by being the OS that developers love best. BeOS, Next, Apple and Linux have all tried to challenge Microsoft directly on the desktop by providing more compelling features but Microsoft remains undefeated. Perhaps having massive distribution (whatever way you get it) is an important factor? There are a handful of companies who have varying degrees of massive distribution on the web; Google (through search), Adobe (through Flash), Yahoo (through the portal), Firefox/Mozilla (through the browser), Apple (through iTunes/iPod/digital entertainment), Facebook/MySpace (through social networking) and not the least, Microsoft (through Windows/IE, and not to forget, the inventor of Asynchronous Javascript, the AJ in AJAX). Would these companies be in a better position to be Joel's NewSDK?

Yes, Joel is right in that history is indeed repeating itself in many ways, but it seems unlikely that anyone (especially Google) will be blindsided by a bratty upstart. If so, that startup will be making history, not repeating it.

Teck Chia is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Teck Chia and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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