Far from the Shore

The three behemoths of the consumer tech world — Google, Microsoft, and Apple — announced new products in the last two weeks. Those announcements, all of solid products in and of themselves, paint a picture of exactly why Google and Apple are huge and growing, and why Microsoft is huge and in trouble.

While Google and Apple are focused on making independently great products, Microsoft is focused on one-upping their competitor, and there’s a big difference between the two.

WWDC

At this week’s WWDC keynote, Apple released a slew of updates to existing products. People flock to Apple’s keynotes like rabid dogs because there’s an enormous element of surprise to each of them. Even the most well-informed Stevenote watcher will find something delightfully unexpected, and this week’s program didn’t disappoint.

The main factor is that Apple is willing to make decisions that many others would find too risky for a company of Apple’s size. They’re willing to offer a product that goes against some canon law of the tech wold established by some papal legate by a competitor or journalist in years past. Their market differentiation comes not by making a better product, but by making a different product.

Their laptops don’t have a removable battery: they have a more eco-friendly built-in battery that lasts longer and works better for more than 99% of their target audience. They don’t build a phone like everyone else: they revolutionize the industry by creating a communications device with a fantastic user experience. While the industry clamors for Apple to release a netbook or tablet, Apple is clearly working on releasing a product that isn’t simply small, but one which they believe will reshape the market for ultra-portable computing.

Google Wave

Google is a search company, right? Or, maybe they’re an advertising company; or a company that competes with MS office; or with Yahoo; or they just do cool stuff in their spare time. Whatever Google is, they’ve had several of their more creative employees — Lars and Jens Rasmussen, creators of what became Google Maps, along with my friend Cameron Adams — working for several months on their next big thing.

Wave is a communications platform and protocol that can handle live, time-shifted, or published content through a single UI. There are a lot of great ideas here that have a chance to change the way we communicate online, and Google is open-sourcing the platform to encourage third-party adoption and extension.

Will it work? Who knows. It’s certainly far from a sure bet: IM and email have been around and largely-unchanged for twenty and thirty years respectively. The point is that Google is willing to put some of their smartest people on what amounts to big public experiments, and they’re not afraid about many of them failing.

Note that I’m not talking about their attitude toward visual design here, which is certainly far more luddite.

Microsoft Bing

Microsoft keeps trying at search. They’ve always gotten some traction for their search engine du jour thanks to their default msn.com home page in Internet Explorer browsers, but even that default has only helped them be a third- or fourth-place search player. Bing is their latest effort, and they’re excited about it. It’s like Google, but has a few other features and niceties.

Actually, it’s a lot like Google. They clearly decided they needed to be more like Google to compete, so they’ve emulated 95% of Google’s search and then tacked on a few extras in various places. Their actual search results are decent, but many claim that Google’s are still somewhat superior.

What this is likely to do is help them hold onto some of those default IE/MSN users for a while longer, but it’s not likely to win them back any Google users. If one site (Google) already provides a high-quality product, users who have made Google part of their routine (almost everyone) don’t really consider switching to a competing product that is marginally better in small, potentially-insignificant ways.

The Shoreline

Incremental improvement is the shoreline of safety: if you can see it, you’re sure to be okay, but you won’t be discovering any new oceans. Google and Apple, through very different methodologies, are willing to move away from that shore and explore the risks and reward potential of innovation.

Microsoft, for all the smart people who work there and all the potential they have to obliterate the significantly-smaller Google and Apple, seem to only attempt to incrementally improve their own work or that of a competitor. It’s as if they’re afraid to come up with their own solutions to problems, and when they do, they get watered down by endless fear of risk.