I'm really impressed with the speed and scope of these recent changes Google has made. Most giant tech companies wouldn't be able to pull this off. Could anyone imagine Microsoft doing anything this big and fast? I can't.
See: Xbox.
Within only two console generations, they went from having zero presence in the market outside of publishing some games for Windows, to one of now only three major players in the landscape. For millions of gamers, the Xbox is their first choice for games. They pushed Xbox Live to market, after years of Nintendo and Sony saying consoles were going to go online. They weren't the first console to go online, as the Dreamcast shipped with a modem, but Xbox Live was the first wild success. Nintendo and Sony scrambled to launch their not ready for market Ethernet adapters for the Gamecube and PS2.
Microsoft pulls over a billion in revenue annually with the Xbox Live Marketplace, a digital distribution avenue that didn't exist on consoles until they created it, that Sony and Nintendo again moved to emulate on their platforms. Source: http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/2009/02/22/just-over-hal...
Then, four years after the Xbox 360 had already been in homes across the globe, they reinvented the platform with the NXE (New Xbox Experience) update, that moved to make the console more family friendly, pushed entertainment options like Zune and Netflix to the forefront, and arguably set the ground work for what was to come with Kinect.
Yes. I could see Microsoft do something big, fast. Because they did.
You're both correct that Microsoft has done product launches which were big and done quickly, but that's different than what Google is in the process of doing.
Yes, Google launched their big product: Google+ which would be comparable to Internet Explorer or Xbox.
But Google has also redesigned all their main products, integrated many of them, and is going to rebrand other products. That's much more difficult than just launching one product. It involves more cooperation and effort from the entire company rather than just a division.
One of the reasons Internet Explorer 4 was integrated as deeply in to Windows as it was, is that Microsoft was betting on the Internet being a big deal, but executing it in the wrong fashion. Beyond integrating the browser in to the OS, there wasn't a real plan there, and it came to be a security issue by the time we got to IE6 and XP.
Microsoft tried to relaunch/rebrand Windows as a gaming platform with their Games for Windows initiative around Vista, which integrated Windows games to some degree with Xbox Live. But the idea was never fully integrated in a way that added any value for consumers, and many publishers skip the Games for Windows branding as it requires additional certification to attain the branding.
Then there's the Zune, a perfectly capable device that was never able to find its niche. The Zune name lives on in the music and video marketplace on the Xbox dashboard, but a synergy between Microsoft's products, brands, and services with the Zune was never struck, and now the device is dead.
So in this, Google's ability to draw everything together with a laser like focus, and actually seem to commit to this thing is a switch, for them or any company. I agree.
You could argue that this is Google's Internet Explorer moment. Disruptive technology comes along that threatens entrenched tech giant's core business. Tech giant is still lead by its brilliant, passionate founder, and still filled with many smart people. Big long memo is sent out by one of the company's VPs. Senior engineers are pulled off other projects and brought together on one team, first to catch-up to the new challenger and then to surpass it. The rest of the company is realigned to support their efforts.
Remember that Microsoft did do something this big and fast once - they won the browser wars. They probably couldn't do it now that Ballmer's in charge. But in Microsoft's heyday...yes, they could.
Internet Explorer was 'successful', but mainly as a block to prevent anyone else from being dominant in the browser space. What comes to mind is Microsoft's attempt to replace Google by imitating them thoroughly with Live search and then Bing, that coming after other projects such as MSN, an equally lame clone of AOL.
Of course, a lot will depends on what comes down from the top - the reason IE is lame is because it was destaffed after Microsoft won the browser wars. From what I know about Larry Page's personality, though, this doesn't seem like something he's likely to do.
When I heard about G+ my thoughts were along the same lines as the recent posts from MySpace's founder. Google has offered these services for years, but they have not been well integrated with each other or presented as a unified product. Overall Picasa, Buzz, Profiles and so on have not been branded or marketed well. Putting these together makes sense. I'm glad Google has done it and I'm pleased to see it's being well received.
What seems new for Google is how this is a 'real identity' network. There's a key difference between communities where one can choose between a real name, anonymity or a pseudonym, exemplified by sites likes on YouTube, Reddit or your average random web forum, vs. the Facebook style where policy requires that you use your given name and have a single identity. Each style engenders a different dynamic, and has benefits or drawbacks. Maintaining the right to and acceptance anonymity on the internet is a quite important cultural issue in my opinion, however.
I definitely agree that Google and MS are very different companies, personality wise. MS's style is to copy competitors products, cargo-cult style, but miss the overall point. They seekt want to eliminate competition without really caring about the original point of the product - IE was just one in a long line of examples of this. They definitely don't care about improving the product after they eliminate the original, I suppose because the product or what it did was never the point. I don't think Google is like that at all... A company's behavior so often reflects the behavior of the people who run it at a high level, and the two founders of Google are not at all like Gates or Ballmer.
Google on the other hand, is offering services without any lock-in or bundling. You can export your setting easily.
They're doing something much harder, and that we rarely see. They're competing on value. If they want users to stick around they'll have to treat them as the customers.
It could, eventually, usher in a new age in software - one where you didn't just tolerate failure because it came bundled with your hardware.
There isn't lock-in, but they do seem to be trying for the bundling, where they're jump-starting a new product (that people may or may not want) by trying to tie it to existing popular products, not entirely in an opt-in manner. It'll be interesting to see how exactly the process plays out; they do appear to be aware of the potential for backlash if they're too strong-armed about forcing Blogger and Picasa users into Google+, but they also seem pretty interested in strongly nudging them towards it.
Looming further on the horizon, it'll be interesting to see whether they try to integrate Google+ and the similarly-named "Google +1" more closely, as a way of getting Google+ into search (their big dominant-market-share product that's an obvious candidate for bundling, at least if antitrust regulators don't get upset). The +1 product much more overtly tries to leverage search; e.g. it's on search results by default now, and information about how it affects search results is on the Webmaster Tools console.
Microsoft also did all this shady stuff with bundling it into the OS because that's apparently how they operate, but I'm not actually sure this made all that much difference in winning. It certainly wasn't what won me over.
This looks more like the pieces just falling into place, though I agree, the scale is a bit staggaring.