Larry’s Turn

John Lennon would have loved Twitter, Yoko is said to have revealed. Certainly she would have the inside track on this, especially if she had insisted on it. But what I want to know is whether Hendrix would have loved GarageBand, or would Miles have preferred Android over iPhone. It’s open, man…

We’ll never know what the Gettysburg Address would have looked like after surviving auto-correct. Or what Hitler might have done with GPS. By the looks of Techmeme this weekend, we don’t even have a shot at what is happening right now. Instead, we have Larry Page’s first day at his second take as Google CEO. Stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues again.

I know it’s just business. Fear of Facebook has sent Eric Schmidt packing or at least down the hall in some newly refurbished executive building. Larry is being handed something similar to the creaking load of stupid situations that Russell Brand wrestled to the ground in the newly refurbished Arthur. Brand did a good job, and so will Page, but to what end? It is increasingly difficult to remember how amazing Google was just a few story lines ago.

Back then, the throw it against the wall and see what sticks approach seemed engaging and faintly revolutionary. Gmail was the real disruption, heralding the Cloud and daring Microsoft to ignore it at what continues to be its peril. Wave seemed like Animal House, live from Australia it’s Saturday Night, now with added realtime. Buzz was like the Apple leaks that came surprisingly true, a capitulation to copying the remaining good ideas out there. Sadly, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, and magic isn’t what it used to be.

But there is light at the end of the tunnel. Gmail succeeded because it was given time to breathe. Today’s Gmail is streaming, the magic fountain of youth for Netflix and iPad 2 and AirPlay. YouTube made some noises about turning on streaming this week, and if the Gmail strategy of letting beta dynamics build just barely in time scalability is repeated it will be a really big deal.

Google has shown no skill at doing what Jobs does best, wrangling the studios. But wrangled they are, leaving a gaping hole for streaming live news and events to break through. Ustream and the other streaming startups are not moving quickly enough to take advantage of the opportunity, which is summarized in one word: iPad. If Google can do to streaming what iTunes did to podcasting, namely produce ubiquitous iPad consumable live streams of any and all comers, the market will do the rest just like it is doing with Netflix.

This will require some heavy duty gumption on Larry’s part. He’ll have to abandon the Schmidt antipathy for all things Apple and support (or continue to support) H264 and the direct channel to the iPad and AirPlay. You can see noises already about doing Google TV right, but that’s a sucker play that people like Sony’s Howard Stringer are already signaling they won’t go for again. It’s hard to remember apparently that Google’s early alliance with Apple on the iPhone was equally good for both parties.
If rumors of an Apple/Twitter deal are right, it’s all the more reason for Larry to align with iPad on streaming. He doesn’t need anyone’s approval, except perhaps for Adobe’s (and who needs that.) Seriously, Larry has the opportunity to realign with Apple and head off a streaming war that is too early and irrelevant to either company’s assets. It also would limit Amazon’s upside and further damage Microsoft’s chances of doing the much harder job of swallowing the Apple platform.

Today’s movie analogy is The Fighter, where Marky Mark is forced to jettison his mother and crack addict brother to get another shot at a title fight, and then realizes he must bring his new and old teams together to win. Google still thinks it can invent its way forward, but it’s a bit of a bluff given its Facebook paranoia. The swing vote these days is with the users, who know what they want and will flock to the first group that delivers. We know a tell when we see it, and Larry’s 25% social tax is a loser. He’s saying social is the enemy, and we’re saying no it’s not.

Social is not something gained, it’s something we give. Facebook may overreach but we flock to Twitter to reduce the chance of being overpowered. We root for Netflix as much because it is not Comcast as we did for Google for not being Microsoft. We intuitively know that if the majors hold Netflix up for ransom we’ll pay 20 bucks a month instead of 8. And intuitively we know that once we get there it will be a lot easier to cut the cable cord knowing the economics are more in line.

In other words, it’s a counter-intuitive world where the cartel’s smartest move would be to keep prices low to keep Netflix from crossing over. A world where the way forward is to hold your friends close and your enemies closer. We pay Netflix $8 a month not for what they deliver but for what they could. We may not be sure who our friends are, but we know who aren’t. Now it’s Larry’s turn.

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I’m Having A Party. Here’s $50. Bring Cool People — Or You Owe Me $100.

Think about the best parties you’ve ever been to. They’re probably not thrown by some random promoter that you found via a flyer on the street. They’re probably thrown by your friends, or a friend of a friend. And they probably came together organically. Or at least more organically than a party you pay for.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot this week following the news that Google is tying all employee bonuses this year to their social strategy. At first I thought this was a joke. It is not. They dance around the word “social” in the wording in the memo, but make no mistake: that’s exactly what this is all about.

“[Your bonus] can range from 0.75 to 1.25 depending on how well we perform against our strategy to integrate relationships, sharing and identity across our products.” Social.

And yes, you read that correctly, the bonus can go up or down based upon Google’s performance in the social realm. The critics are already jumping all over this one, noting that it looks like all Google employees will be losing bonus money this year. And given the decided lack of success from products like Wave, Buzz, and to a broader extent, Orkut, who can blame them?

But on a higher level, it’s the strategy itself that may be the most interesting thing here. Mathew Ingram notes that you can’t threaten people into being social. While Mike Elgan calls this Larry Page’s first blunder (as CEO). I actually have a slightly different take on this. I think that on paper, this is actually a good idea and strategy. But in practice, I think it will ultimately be looked upon as a bad thing and may even directly backfire.

At this point, at least we know that Google understands the value of social. Hell, they just appointed a SVP of Social (Vic Gundotra, which we more or less noted months ago). They’re clearly not asleep at the wheel as Facebook zips by them. And they know that unlike Wave, Buzz, and Orkut, they need to get meaningful traction worldwide.

With Wave and Buzz, both products saw an initial wave of buzz (see what I did there?). But the hype quickly died down and the products atrophied. Given what we know about Google’s social strategy going forward, and interpreting this new bonus strategy, it would seem that Google wants to do the exact opposite with any new products they push. Instead of launching under some massive buildup and then watching a product not be able to live up to it, they want to do slow, gradual roll-outs that are propelled by Googlers themselves.

Again, on paper this is not a bad strategy. Many of the services you know today started out this way. They didn’t launch with pomp and circumstance, instead they started out small and were pushed by a small group of diehard early-adopters. Twitter, Foursquare, Instagram, even Facebook could fall into that category. It’s the same story over and over again. It doesn’t always work — but it has a much better chance than the massive launch route. And much less downside.

The problem that I have is that all of those launches were organic (or mostly organic). Naturally, employees of the companies were pushing their products, but at launch, all of them were small startups with just a few employees. The “Google Strategy” of making sure all employees push the products simply wouldn’t have meant much. Instead, they had to rely on the early adopters (some of whom were friends, but that too isn’t enough alone). And the natural progression from there.

But Google has nearly 25,000 employees. It seems that will lead to an artificially and prematurely inflated re-creation of the launch environment described above. And that may only serve to create the type of paid-for party that I talked about at the beginning. It’s a party that will attract a lot of people. But it’s not one that anyone will likely remember — or want to go to again.

And given that we all now know about this strategy, the initial Googler push will be an even harder sell. We’ll all be very skeptical. So the strategy could actually backfire.

Unless…

Google can actually get away with this strategy if the products they release are good. Really good.

If they’re good, the Googlers’ push should actually accelerate the launches. It won’t matter at that point if the initial push is real or fake, enough people will try the product(s) out and see for themselves. But given Google’s past history in social, this is a very big “if”.

Over the past few months, we’ve had more information than anyone about Google’s social strategy and products. We’ve gotten leaks and have talked to people who have actually used the things Google is working on. All of this is still very fluid (see: the +1 toolbar), but the constant has been that we have not yet heard of anyone absolutely blown away by what Google is working on. This worries me with regard to this new Google strategy.

Having said that, Google still has several things yet to launch, many of which I’m sure we still know nothing about. For all the multiplexing video conferencing services and Loop (or is it Circles?) mobile networks, there are likely many more things being worked on. And we also know that Google has been calling in other experts in the space from around the Bay Area to get opinions and advice.

But this many-pronged approach has issues of its own. As Elgan points out in his Computerworld post today:

People prefer Facebook to Google’s many socially enabled services because Facebook is a place they can go to be social. With Google’s far-flung social services, there is no “place.” There is no party. Google’s approach to social isn’t fun.
Google’s strategy of baking social into everything will never, ever beat Facebook. Google needs a social networking site. (But not Orkut.)

Mike has stated this idea in the past before as well. One major problem that Google has in social is that there is no one place to go to be social. And it’s pretty clear at this point that there won’t be. That was in the cards a long time ago, but now it’s all about these new products wrapping Google’s other products in social. That’s going to be a really hard sell.

I’m left wondering if it wouldn’t be smarter for Google simply to focus on a frontier that hasn’t been won yet: mobile. While Facebook and Twitter are both growing very, very fast in mobile, there’s still an opportunity for something new to come along in that space from a social angle and disrupt them. And Google would have a massive potential advantage with Android. Why not start something totally new from scratch — not tied into any of Google’s very forced social graphs like email contacts — and go from there?

I’ve argued before that Buzz should have gone this route. And Google may be indirectly pushing this way with things like the Slide-built Disco.

Speaking of discos, let’s hop back to the idea of a party. Unless their products are truly excellent right off the bat, Google needs their social products to be parties that friends get invited to organically. As we’ve already seen with Buzz, being force fed can lead to vomiting. That’s why this new strategy worries me — it’s pretty likely that it will not work. We’ll all be at a party that no one wants to be at because a bunch of Googlers are being paid to invite us.

But if that’s the case, at least that extra bonus money saved can go towards the “Buy Twitter Now” fund.

• [photo: flickr/vectorportal]

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