Ten years is a long time in the technology world, and it was more than ten years ago that Microsoft-then the dominant desktop technology monopoly-entered into a letter of consent with the US Justice Department and 19 Attorneys General from around the country.
The letter of consent said that Microsoft had engaged in an anti-competitive strategy of tying its Windows operating system to Microsoft Office and other desktop applications in ways that competitors didn't have access to. In other words, there were all kinds of resources and code hacks in the Windows OS that only Microsoft knew about and could take advantage of, and that was using one monopoly-Windows-to strengthen another monopoly-Microsoft Office.
This past week Google-now the dominant desktop technology monopoly-began to slide out on to the thin ice of anti-trust with the introduction of its "Search Plus Your World" feature. SPYW takes your own social media results from Google+ and Picassa (both owned by Google) and incorporates them into organic search results when you enter a search term.
And it does this without asking if you want these results. To be fair, Google is working on scraping other social content from you and your friends from networks like Quroa and WordPress. Note the significant absence of Facebook and Twitter.
Amed Singhal of Google told Danny Sullivan in an interview last week that "Facebook and Twitter and other services, basically, their terms of service don't allow us to crawl them deeply and store things. Google+ is the only [network] that provides such a persistent service," Singhal told Sullivan.
The point is that Google is introducing search features that leverage Google's social networks Google+ and Picassa-but not other social networks like Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn. Just like Microsoft in the 1990s, Google is seeking to use its dominance in the Internet's OS-Google search-to compel people to use its other products-Google+ and Picassa.
As Google critic Benjamin Edelman points out in his well considered piece this week, both Google Maps and Google Finance were languishing until Google used similar tactics to drive traffic from their search to these applications. Using an OS to compel use of integrated applications is precisely what Apple does but there's an important difference. Despite growing faster than the PC market in general, Apple still only controls 5.2% of all worldwide desktop and laptop computer sales. Google, by contrast, owns 66% of the worldwide search market. Apple is a small, niche player in a very competitive space. Google is the 8,000 pound gorilla who now holds the secret keys to the central engine of the Internet-search.
Geeks as smart as Chris Brogan have jumped on the Google+ bandwagon, but Google is ignoring the central component of a successful consumer technology product-a great user experience that is so compelling we will pay the switching costs to move from whatever other products compete. Will you take all of our Facebook friends and migrate them to Google+? Will you stop using Twitter for a daily feed of news and links about your life and business?
I'm not. Google+ now joins Pinterest, Storify, Path and a couple of other new social networks that I have to check in with each day, just to see how they work and where they are going. I like the ability to write longer posts on Google+ than on Twitter, but Facebook remains the private network of family, friends and close collagues. And I ain't moving them any time soon.
It's disturbing that Google comes to market and competes with a new social network with an unfair advantage that no other network-not even mighty Facebook-can match. Brands ignore Google+ at their own peril because Google will now more aggressively promote content from its other applications like Google+ into the organic search results of Google search. That's not a fair fight.
Why should we care if the competition among new social networks is fair? Because the core value proposition of social media is that growth of a social network is driven by passion from the user, driven through a compelling user experience. Look at the great user experiences of Foursquare or Instagram. These are social networks that have earned their audiences and earned their growth honestly.
Right now Google is doing what Microsoft did back in the 1990s. It's compelling users and brands to participate in a desktop / mobile application called Google+ if they want good search results from the Google search engine-and that ain't fair.
Legal action may or may not be forthcoming against Google. My point is that the consent decree Microsoft signed in 2001-which remained in effect until last summer-had little effect on Microsoft's business. The company remained ludicrously profitable because it had established a de facto monopoly of the related Windows OS and Microsoft Office desktop products. These products, despite millions invested in improvements, remain lazy and bloated, especially in comparison to Apple's products.
Bottom line: there's no incentive to innovate when you can get sales from compelling people to use your product rather than attracting them with a compelling user experience.
And that's Google's problem with Google+.
