"Or you could just install Linux. ;-)"

Believe it or not, that was a piece of "advice" that I discovered while trying to fix a problem with Google Chrome. The question was about a browser, but the answer was about an operating system. It was clearly not helpful, at least in dealing with my immediate problem.

On the other hand, pseudo-advice like that is very useful if you want to understand the state of the technology industry in 2010. It's the subject of this autobiographical psychodrama that I might entitle, Personal Computers Are Not Appliances. If you decide to read on, let me warn you: it's a terrifying tale of reasonable people at the mercy of unreasonable levels of complexity and unreliability. During this exposition, you'll encounter interesting characters like the Apple iPad, Google's business plan (of sorts), Marc Benioff, and our evil cat Kelly.

When Chrome Lost Its Shine
Yesterday morning was crunch time at stately Grant Manor. The quarter was coming to a swift end, which meant all kinds of deadlines for research documents, expense reports, client projects, and a variety of other tasks. Regular activities, such as phone calls with technology companies about their latest product and service offerings, still happen during these hyper-busy periods, when time becomes so compressed that it fails to serve its basic purpose of, in the words of Richard Feynman, preventing everything from happening all at once.  

I'm always surprised when there's a great deal of news buzz over something everyone knew was going to happen.  When I lived in Milwaukee, we'd joke about the first snowfall of the year and the sorry assignment given the lowliest reporter to stand on a giant pile of municipal salt to report on the efforts to clean the streets. We all know it snowed, we can see the snowplows--what's newsworthy about this, exactly?

That's the way I felt reading all the headlines about comScore's report that time spent with Facebook exceeded Google in August.  Any informed person knew the trends and expected this to happen, so whether Google or Facebook is No. 1 is less interesting to me than what the trend really means.  This week's news is not as immediately dire for Google nor as immediately beneficial for Facebook as the headlines would imply. That said, the trends do highlight the fact that Facebook has succeeded where Google has not in creating a single, cohesive experience that gives today's consumers what they want.

When people hear the Google name, the first thing that comes to mind is the search engine which, of course, is not a place where people spend a lot of time--users search and leave quickly.  But Google has many popular "sticky" sites, such as YouTube and Gmail, and despite the news, these sites are not losing attention.  In fact, Google isn't shrinking while Facebook is growing, it's just that Google isn't growing as fast as Facebook. 

Google's decision to pull the plug on Wave was hardly surprising. Not only did Wave stumble out of the gate and then never quite get its footing, it violated a core principle of software as a service (SaaS): It's the application, stupid.

If you're going to be in the SaaS business, you need to deliver an application that's attractive, comprehensible, and usable immediately. Not after a horde of developers built a library of interesting widgets. Not after a quasi-beta program in which the product is really in production, but you just choose to call it beta. Not after potential users scratch their heads for days, wondering what the heck this Wave thing is supposed to do, and then sell their equally perplexed colleagues on its purported value. Deliver value now is the cardinal rule of SaaS.

On-Premise Strategy For An On-Demand Application
Wave's product strategy resembled a traditional on-premise strategy, in which you built the platform first, and then added an application to it. In the cloud, the product strategy moves in exactly the opposite direction: application first, then platform. A classic example is the Salesforce portfolio, which started with a highly capable CRM application that was easy to implement. Later came the platform, Force.com, on which customers and partners could build customizations and adjacent applications.

[Co-authored by Zachary Reiss-Davis]

Google announced yesterday that it is buying ITA Software for $700 million. ITA does two main things: airline eCommerce and reservations management solutions and a cross-airline flight comparison tool called QPX, used by most of the major travel comparison Web sites including Kayak, Orbitz, and Microsoft Bing. 

Google purchased it for the QPX product in a classic example of buying technology instead of either building it in-house or licensing it.

Today, Bing, Microsoft’s search offering, offers a solution that is based on QPX to help customers search for flight information on the Bing Web site. Google has nothing comparable; instead, they direct customers to other travel specific sites (see the screenshots below). 

Google is focused on the goal of staying at least half a step ahead of Microsoft in all aspects of search technology; in order to stay ahead of Microsoft in this area, Google had three major options: 1) License the technology; 2) Build it themselves; 3) Buy ITA. 

Licensing the technology would mean that Google would end up with a solution equivalent to Microsoft’s and not as robust as specialized Web sites like Kayak. Building the technology would take several years, allowing Microsoft and other competitors to continue to differentiate themselves and pull ahead. 

This left the acquisition as the only viable path to regaining leadership in this area, while at the same time placing Microsoft in the awkward position of relying on Google-owned technology as the backend for one of their major search features.