Posts tagged google
The pendulum of the OS
May 8th
Photo: collinox - http://www.flickr.com/photos/collinox/
After decades of domination with their ubiquitous Windows operating system the planets are aligning to put Microsoft on the defensive and open the door to other operating systems becoming a viable option for the future. While many of my colleagues might argue that this day is unlikely to be nowhere on the horizon, I beg to differ. When you can see the signs (and products) on the market it means were only really a couple years away. Consider the following:
Rise of the smart phone This should seem obvious. For years most people still remained ensconsced in their perception of the cell phone as something akin to the Startac, a device which made communication truly mobile. Then the Handspring phone hit the scene and we saw our first generation of the Palm OS phone. While the Handspring was somewhat of a failure the Palm Treo certainly did quite well. Soon we had Blackberries and Windows Mobile and the smartphone was the latest geek chic accessory. But the team that had imagined these phones had visions that didn’t depart far from the email/address/calendar on your phone theory. It took a truly inventive company to change the rules of the game, and it happened 2 years ago when Apple released the iPhone. Here was a device that while described as a phone is truly nothing more than a portable computer. With the fully functional browser, camera, MP3 and video player, it was and still is the ultimate convergence device. The other thing it undoubtedly represents is the future of computing. The iPhone might be too small to be a productive day to day business tool but that a simple engineering problem. What it excels in is bringing a new easy to use computing platform to the masses, once the device is scaled it’ll likely push stronger market share for Apple.
But let’s not be so quick to hand the mobile OS crown to Apple. Last year we saw the release of the first Google Android phone and later this year we’ll see a new phone OS from Palm. What’s most important about these OS’ is that they introduce consumers to new computing platforms disguised as a phone. Google’s the first we’ve seen make a concerted jump from the phone to the PC and it’s likely we’ll see more.
Cloud computing has been a new buzzword of late but it’s one which has big implications for the future of the operating system. When I look at computing over the years I think of the progression through the visual of a pendulum swinging. Back when computing was the realm of big companies and universities, access to computing resources were through dummy terminals hooked up to mainframe computers in a back office some where. Of course you still used keyboards and monitors but they were tapping into the same computer everyone else used instead of a local processor. This shared environment changed when the pendulum swung far to the right through the introduction of the personal computer. No longer did you need to share resources on one machine but you had your own machine with it’d own processor, hard drive, memory and operating system. The pendulum has been leaning toward the personal computer for some time now, but the combined forces of Moore’s law driving down the costs of computing and increasing availability of high speed internet access are enabling the rise of cloud computing, a force that is driving the pendulum back in the other direction.
Cloud computing, perhaps more accurately described as distributed computing, is nothing more than many computers operating in parallel for the purposes of enabling a shared platform for running programs in an environment where the inputs and outputs are coming through the internet. In effect, a distributed computing platform is a shared computer, not unlike the mainframe, and the only tool needed to access the platform is a web browser.
The browser is the key to my belief that change is on the way. If you run your word processor in a distributed computing environment all you need to access it is your browser, the same is true of email, or file storage. If you look at some of the big initiatives the power players are working on you’ll see distributed computing all over the place (Amazon EC3, Google App Engine, Microsoft Live Mesh). These companies are banking on the fact that in the future you’ll be running all of your software on the internet and not on your local computer. If that is truly the case we’ll soon see operating systems geared around the browser more than the hard drive.
Admittedly the software available through the browser doesn’t yet rival what’s available on the PC, but things are getting better every day. I’m not quite sure if we’ll see a gradual migration from hard drive computing to browser based computing or if someone will release a dream app that speeds the migration along rapidly. Regardless change is coming, and no matter what form it takes companies are already lining up to grab a share of the OS market (Presto, Hyperspace, Winki) and their key selling points hit Microsoft where it’s weakest – a shorter boot-up time. The question of who’ll win the battle for the operating system has yet to be decided, but with Google’s move into Netbooks it appears the skirmishes that smaller companies have brought to Microsoft are over and the real battle has truly begun.
Oh how I miss Firefox
May 1st
Way back when Google first came onto the scene I was blown away with what they’d been able to make happen with search. Needless to say I’ve become somewhat of a Google junkie, willing to try everything they’ve come out with. I’m got my love it – hate it list (reader, voice, gmail, definitely love it; docs definitely hate it), and was willing to give the chrome browser my full attention when it came out late last year. I immediately downloaded the software and was wowed by the interface but went back to Firefox out of familiarity. Around 4 months ago I decided to give it another shot and can honestly say that I love the browser and have been a pretty hard core convert based on three key features: the omnibar, the interface and the speed. Let me tackle them in reverse order.
- The Speed: You never know how much you appreciate speed in a browser until you don’t have it. The start-up is blazingly fast. I click on the logo and within seconds I have a window. Not something I can say for Firefox which takes for-e-v-e-r to load. The handling of pages in Chrome is much faster but I’m not sure many users will see the difference.
- The Interface: Nice and clean. I like how the browser gives way to the content, no clunky toolbars, no excess of icons, it’s all content. On the downside the lack of buttons can make it difficult to find some features (bookmarks are complicated to access).
- The Omnibar: Simple innovation. I’m not sure why this hasn’t happened before but the idea that you can use one entry field for addresses and search certainly simplifies the navigation experience. Now that I’m chromified I find myself trying to use Firefox and Internet Explorer the same way – completely frustrating.
Now on the downside it is a beta (or at least the version I have installed) and tends to crash on some pages. I’ve also found many pages that just weren’t built to the HTML standards that Chrome supports, so there is some loss of page functionality. While publishers are quick to fix their code to make their sites functional in Chrome, there are still bugs the crop up. More recently I’ve found that button images disappear from many sites I use making it difficult to know what you’re actually clicking when they button has no alt text. This is especially true for WordPress which I use to author this blog. Since editing this blog is near impossible on Chrome (even the stable versions), I’ve been using Firefox to do my writing. Oh my goodness how I miss my Firefox addins.
I’ve been back in Firefox for 2 days now and I love being able to customize my browser, I’m in addin heaven. I would imagine everyone would want to read CNN while TwitterFoxing, listing to Foxytunes, blocking ads with Adblock Plus, VideoDownloading, tweaking pages with Greasemonkey all on a designer inspired browser persona. Now I face the ultimate dilemma, stick with Chrome or move back to Firefox. Hmmmm.
CEO = Vision? Unlikely.
Jun 17th
Those of you who might have read my previous post, will be familiar with my frustrations with the matrix organization and how the problem boils down to a lack of leadership . At the end of my post I came to this conclusion: “What comes to me from this discussion is the need to better define the difference between leadership, management, talent, and vision.” I think the challenge many organizations face is an assumption that leadership, talent, management and vision can all exist in the CEO. I’ve come to believe that is not true and apparently someone else agrees with my point of view. Umair Haque recently posted an article on the Harvard business blog on the subject of Redefining the CEO Agenda for the 21st Century . Umair’s post focuses in on Google and how they’ve successfully outmaneuvered Microsoft by securing an ad outsourcing deal with Yahoo!. Umair boils the post down with a quote from Google CEO Eric Schmidt :
“Or consider what Eric Schmidt said today: that Google has a “moral imperative” to help publishers benefit from advertising. That’s a living example of one of the principles we’ve discussed – good beats evil – being used to make real-world strategic decisions.”
The concept of a CEO using the word moral imperative is something relatively unheard of and yet it’s what sets them apart from the competition. Umair continues the thought in his post:
“And that’s how Google ends up in a league of it’s own. Schmidt’s quote is important because it’s a vivid demonstration of Google having the courage to question business as usual – in fact, this time, Schimdt is challenging perhaps the foundational orthodoxy of industrial-era business.”
I think Umair is right on point with what sets Google apart from the competition and it ties back to my previous post about the concept of differentiating the various traits we assume a leader has: vision, leadership, talent, and management. Rather than dredge these out over the course of a single blog post let me focus in on the key point I feel Eric Schmidt embodies – Vision .
Vision is something that great companies have. When you get employees from one of those company together in a room and ask about the company vision you should get the same answer from everyone. The challenge many organizations face is that most people expect the vision to come from the CEO. Perhaps the CEO is the person that articulates it best but often times a CEO is disconnected from the market, customers and day-to -day operations; essentially no where near to the right place to formulate the correct vision.
Occasionally you hear the term visionary CEO associated with innovative or entrepreneurial companies (such as Google). But what about the rest where you don’t see that moniker used? Does that mean they have no vision? Many will claim that they have a vision however you’ll find they have either a) difficulty getting consensus on what it is or b) a slick marketing driven statement. What these companies really need is to acknowledge that their CEO is not visionary or nor sufficiently engaged in the business to drive that vision.
Let’s be real, there are a lot of demands on the CEO’s time and managing the company vision might not always take priority. In these scenarios the CEO needs to outsource the responsibility for the company vision to someone who is publicly acknowledged as the visionary. By not doing so the CEO does a disservice to themselves and one of two things happens, they either encourage rouge operations based on the random visions of employees, or worse end up with many interpretations of what they should be doing. Sometimes companies pass on the vision to the fluffily titled ‘Evangelist’ sometimes it’s the CTO , or the head of product; I’d argue that this is really a half measure and potentially detrimental. How many VP’s do you know that have slashes in their titles? VP Marketing/HR/Investor Relations, VP Finance/Legal, VP Product/Engineering… doesn’t make sense does it? When it comes to Vision, that all important corporate compass, it needs to be an all-consuming passion for the individual knighted with the responsibility for guiding the organization.
Perhaps if more companies had leaders declaring their “moral imperatives”, we’d find ourselves in a refreshingly competitive enviroment where employees have no question as to what defines corporate success. One can only dream.