The (Google) Web is the Platform

I visited the HQ of the “Best Company to Work For” (Fortune), aka Googleplex, last week for a Silicon Valley WebGuild event about “the future of online platforms.” It proved to be a timely topic given the Facebook cover story in Newsweek that came out on the same day. Expertly moderated by Ismael Ghalimi, CEO of Intalio, the panelists Mark Trang, Director of ISV Marketing at Salesforce.com, Chris Schalk from Google Developer Programs (codename: Google Code), and the witty Chuck Mortimore, Director of Platform Services at Rearden Commerce discussed how and when the next evolution of the web would take place – and who will be in the driver’s seat.

From the beginning of the evening, the most daunting challenge for the panelists appeared to be the definition of what an online platform actually is, and not surprisingly they fell back on sales pitches rather than providing some general attributes to nail the category. At least one gained some valuable insights into the business models represented on the panel. Rearden, probably the least known of the three, is an aggregated services procurement solution, a “mash-up platform,” as Mortimore put it, which connects supply and demand for consumer services. Salesforce.com – oh, boy, do they wish they hadn’t locked themselves in by choosing that name – is striving to become the go-to-platform for all business applications, far beyond just CRM. Trang said that in five years he’d expect his mom to do all of her event planning on Salesforce.com. Schalk, who evangelized Google’s efforts to collaborate with the developer community, could afford to lean back and play the humble card: “The web is the platform.” That, of course, is easy to say if, as many suspect, Google and the Web are essentially the same.

In any event, the panelists agreed that the “network effect is critical” for any platform, and that “putting the long-tail business models into demand” (Mortimer) was the number one challenge. For Mortimer, the platform value applies particularly to fixed-cost services as it enables businesses to achieve economies of scale much faster than they would on more traditional marketplaces. Trang emphasized that Salesforce.com did not consider itself to be a data warehouse: “We have no interest in storing all data in the world.” Rather, similar to Rearden, they would facilitate transactions and provide the tools and the infrastructure to run data operations. Well, there is your definition of a platform.

Of course, the question remains (and Ghalimi posed it to the panelists): With all these platforms in place and all the applications that are being built on top of them, how will users remain able to manage them effectively, that is, without having to administer multiple log-ins? Ghalimi proposed the “one single sign-on” solution. His rallying cry for a meta-platform, however, was essentially an “identity problem,” argued Mortimer, and one that was extremely complex and, because of its political undercurrents, almost impossible to solve by just one player alone. “It can’t be done on the browser level,” so Mortimer, “as that would create a control monopoly.” Instead, models such as OpenID, which proposes a decentralized identity framework that streamlines access to multiple platforms through one major hub, would be the best bet.

Overall, no surprise, all three panelists said in unison that the future of online platforms was golden. The “entry barriers for software entrepreneurs are as low as never before” (Trang), and according to him and Google’s Schalk, the micro-businesses that develop and distribute targeted niche services based on the SFDC and Google applications, make serious money.

So what are the next big milestones to look out for?

- Better data portability: Automated data-sharing across applications and platforms
- Offline functionality (still under-developed)
- Opening-up more applications for third party developers (Schalk hinted at the possibility of Google opening up Gmail or Google Analytics)
- Solving the “identity problem” by finding a “politically correct” way to consolidate multiple identities into one

For an overview of new mash-Up platforms, read Dion Hinchcliffe's great post on ZDNet.

Comments

[Tim]

Hi Francesc,

Thanks for the shout out! I'll make sure to check out the site.

Tim

[Francesc]

Hi

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