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The rise of the Super Platform

Several recent news stories are good indications that the battle of the Super Platforms is starting to heat up in a very big way.

This includes news that IBM is going to be offering a hosted service for applications a la Salesforce AppXchange; news of Amazon’s Dynamo (an “incrementally scalable, highly-available key-value storage system”); and Yahoo’s recent purchase by Yahoo of Zimbra.

The Super Platform will be as revolutionary as the the electric grid a hundred years ago. As Nick Carr points out:

“At the start of the last century, the great engineering project was the creation of an electric grid that could deliver power to millions of users with a reliability and an efficiency that were previously unthinkable. Today’s great engineering project, of which Amazon’s Dynamo is but one manifestation, is to build a computing grid that can achieve similar breakthroughs in the processing and delivery of information.”

Just how quickly we are getting to the era of the Super Platform and what its impact will be like is illustrated by this Small Business Trends article titled “Google Apps: The Sleeping Giant?”:

“It seems incredible, but just over a year ago most businesses had to pay for their email…. I’m not sure I can express how significant this is for a small business trying to manage an email server. In a simple gesture, Google is alleviating a huge strain that small businesses can feel on a mission critical system… “

But the Super Platform doesn’t only apply to small businesses. It applies equally well to Fortune 100 enterprises.

So what does a complete Super Platform look like? Seems to me, a Super Platform needs to provide the following key services:

• A complete infrastructure for running applications, like Salesforce AppXchange. Two interesting decisions for the platforms to make: (1) do you provide a platform programming language with built-in service access like Salesforce APEX, or do you allow any programming language with a slew of API’s, like Google?; and (2) do you allow application programs to run on your infrastructure like Salesforce, or do programs run on their own servers, like Google and Facebook?
• A database engine, like Google’s Big Table.
• Commodity services like collaboration, calendars, documents, wikis, social networking, video, search, etc. that can be easily folded in to any application.

So which companies will succeed in building a Super Platform? Google and Amazon have the right infrastructure, obviously the primary prerequisite for success. Others who have a shot include IBM and Yahoo. Possibly SAP. Probably not Oracle (there is little in it for them, so they will try milk the old model forever). Microsoft has the same problem as Oracle - they completely lose their installed base and competitive advantage on a Super Platform, but they will no doubt try (but their success is certainly not guaranteed - think search). Distant possibilities include Facebook and Salesforce.

The age of the Super Platform is upon us. It’s just a matter of time before everyone gets to choose which platform they are going to be on. Kinda like the days when you had to choose an operating system: Windows vs. OS/2, anyone?

(Also see Amy Wohl’s post on this subject).

Zoho is NOT a platform!

This is indeed freaky. I started writing this post in the morning, then saw this new Dilbert gem this afternoon - while watching the Bears get badly beaten by the Chargers :-(. So I learned 2 things today - Web 2.0 has indeed become mainstream, and the Bears aren’t going back to the Super Bowl.

So I bumped into long-time industry analyst Amy Wohl at the Office 2.0 conference last week. I hadn’t met Amy since I attended a seminar she ran for IBM South Africa back in 1984! Anyway, we got talking about “platforms”, since it was a word that was being bandied about with great abandon at Office 2.0. Seems everyones product was a “platform” of some sort.

We agreed that this is plain silliness. In the end, there will only be 4-5 true platforms in the brave new world we are now entering. Google, Microsoft, Amazon, SAP, probably Oracle, maybe Ebay, maybe Facebook. Salesforce is trying to establish itself as a platform, but I doubt it will succeed on its own (it will probably be gobbled up by one of the other players).

In this new world, software companies will need to build their products on top of a platform to succeed, just like ISV’s are now building their applications on top of the Salesforce or Facebook platforms. This is necessary to provide the seamless experience users need. Not that users won’t be able to use applications on other platforms - it will just be more difficult and rarely worthwhile.

“Platform suites” are the new product suites. So you have Google Apps as a platform suite, much like the MS Office suite, but so much more. Stay tuned for more on this…