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…
