This is supposed to *herald* curated computing. Nonsense.

Curated Computing: Fancy cynical analyst term. Here is Forrester Research declaring a new era (‘Post-iPad’, no less).

A consumer can do anything with a Windows PC or Mac… the iPad operates very differently. [It] works more like a jukebox than a desktop — consumers choose (and pay for) applications from a predetermined set list. Each of those applications is, in itself, also curated; the publisher selects content and functionality that’s appropriate to the form factor, just as a museum curator selects artworks from a larger collection…

Rubbish. ‘Curated computing’  has been Apple’s design philosophy for all this decade – that’s only now making its way into industry consciousness.

But it’s a good thing.

If anything, it indicates mobile manufacturers hitting reality. In the short years after the realization that people wanted to ‘do more’ with their phones, manufacturers packed in as many features as they could. A few really took off (cameras, music players, even email), and most others just didn’t (bluetooth, mobile office packages, bar-code readers).

In another way, it’s a sign of the industry beginning to mature. Even as hardware has gotten more capable (faster processors, storage, memory, larger displays, touch-screens) and networks have invested massively to build capacity, there’s a discernible trend to do less better. Manufacturers are (belatedly?) realizing that a mobile device isn’t a smaller personal computer, but something ‘very personal’. And that very personal is very different from personal.

Which is also why everyone in the industry wants ‘vertical integration’ – control over the hardware, operating system, software platform, applications/content, and network. It’s so that having bet on what (limited) tasks a device will perform, a manufacturer has greater control over the quality of what the customer experiences.

Expect, in the next couple of years, for all major smartphone players (in addition to Apple, RIM, Google) to create (curate?)  really great out-of-the-box experiences for the 20% of tasks that matter most – email, web browsing, facebook/twitter updating, maps, and playing music/movies (yes, better than what we’ve seen). Expect  new devices to ship with fewer radios and sensors, and very few basic applications out-of-the-box. All other features and applications will be available via an App Store, to which there will be a prominent link on the home screen.

If this sounds very much like what Apple’s been doing with iPhone all along, of course you’re right. Forrester’s just woken up, declared it a trend and slapped on an alliteration.

Footnote: also, this isn’t as global, industry-churning a movement as Forrester would have you believe: the Japanese, for the most part, like cellphones crammed with bells and whistles (TV, bar-code readers,credit cards, suchlike). And this doesn’t look to be changing anytime soon.

The first was the “early web” – through most of the 90s and until the dot-com bust. People accessed content through directories and portals, and the content itself was static web pages.

The second was what was dubbed (retrospectively) “Web 1.0” [1] Search went mainstream, and we also began to see a lot of dynamic content (think classifieds on craigslist and books on Amazon).

The third stage is what we’ve called “Web 2.0” in its early forms and “social media” as focus has shifted from a loose set of open standards and technologies (RSS, OPML, AJAX, Ruby on Rails, CSS, HTML5, Webkit, Flash, SyncML, OAuth) to the services that have been built with them.

Within this latest stage of evolution, developments in the last three years or so have been about putting together the guts of what Tim O’Reilly called the “Internet Operating System” to truly integrate the Internet into our daily lives. We’re reaching a stage of maturity with these internals (that is, growth/focus/interest is slowing), and are seeing an acceleration in the activity around applications and services built on top of them.

Tomorrow and beyond
But I think there’s still tremendous competition for some platforms that will form the guts of the Internet Operating System. Fred Wilson talks about aspiring to be a platform:

I think, that if you don’t want to be [an Internet] platform, then I don’t know what you should be aspiring to be. I mean, I don’t know that there is anything else that you would want to be.

The search system is pretty much Google and the location system is Google Maps. The iTunes Music Store and YouTube are the digital entertainment system, and Twitter makes an extremely strong case for the messaging system. But there’s still no dominant payment system for the web. There’s still no dominant scheduling/calendaring system yet, no dominant remote storage system and most critically, no identity system. And this is nowhere close to being a complete list.

As a parent, can you subscribe to your child’s school’s football coaching team calendar with the playground location embedded, sign up for it by paying the fees through your mobile phone and have your car’s GPS give you turn-by-turn directions to the ground on practice days following the least-congested route based on real-time crowdsourced information? Not yet.

Until these systems are in place, there is an upper limit on what we can make applications do, how deeply we can integrate these applications into our physical world. The “next Google/Twitter/Facebook” is going to be a company that creates a credible missing platform.

The top-level applications that build upon existing platforms will be either be single-purpose applications (Evernote is one example) or “glue” companies, those that tie platforms together. Don’t expect to see a billion-dollar company out of them in their current form. [2]

[1] The analogy with the World Wars is hard to miss. Until WW2, the First World War was known just as the Great War. Until sometime in 2005, “Web 1.0″ was just the Web.

[2] That’s not to say that they’re not worth investing in. I’m saying that next-generation services can only become mainstream once the plumbing is in place – and to take advantage of new platforms, these top-level applications will need to evolve significantly.

Related stuff around the web you ought to read:

Techcrunch announced PubSubHubbub, a protocol to speed up delivery of RSS and Atom feeds (5 August 2009)

Dare Obasanjo on Google’s possible stab at an identity solution, the WebFinger protocol (15 August 2009)

The aggregate results of every search ever entered, every result list ever tendered, and every path taken as a result. … a massive database of desires, needs, wants, and likes that can be discovered, supoenaed, archived, tracked, and exploited to all sorts of ends… this artifact can tell us extraordinary things about who we are and what we want as a culture.

That phrase made it into his book “The Search” and quickly became a popular way to demonstrate how enormously important and powerful Google might eventually become.

This last Saturday, the New York Times ran a piece on a possible new monetization idea that Twitter was considering: to “offer shopping advice and easy purchasing”. People already solicit their Twitter followers’ opinions, and it is also already possible to identify real-time trends related to a particular product, company or event. Put those together, and you get an extremely powerful (and, the founder hope, lucrative) tool.

Viewing this piece of news in the context of “database of intentions” you can see how the web has evolved since Battelle propounded that idea:

One, Twittter is now a database of actions, of people announcing by-the-second what they have tried, used, bought, rejected, liked and disliked. I see an attractive opportunity for an analytics firm to help companies make sense of what people are saying about them, what events caused this conversation, and the results of a company’s actions/response on the conversation and subsequent sales/signups.

Two, it is still a database of intentions, but at dizzying, real-time speeds. From the New York Times article:

“Commerce-based search businesses monetize extremely well, and if someone says, ‘What treadmill should I buy?’ you as the treadmill company want to be there,”

While it’s certain that companies can use these intentions to snap up customers before competitors, it’s unclear as yet how companies will be able to scale and respond if and when Twitter achieves Google’s adoptions levels. There is definitely an opportunity for another business here.

Except that things have changed somewhat: in 2006, your fellow shutterbugs probably used point-and-shoot digital cameras. Chances are they were using their mobile phones at that last ceremony. Chances are that you were too.

No surprise; consider this. The current installed base of mobile phone cameras is 1.9 billion, up from nearly zero 5 years ago. In contrast, the camera industry only ships 100 million (one-tenth of a billion) devices a year.

Whatever happened to the standalone camera industry? And how long, you might also ask, before they fade into oblivion?

I think the answer to the first, discussed in this post, is that the camera industry stopped innovating.

For years, the Megapixel ruled. Consumers bought a new digital camera based solely on “how many MP it had”, fed by copious advertising  by manufacturers promoting this very lust. So, roughly, 3 Megapixels in 2002 went to 5 in 2004 to 7 in 2006 to 8 now (perhaps even 10) – and stopped.

At some point – perhaps a couple of years ago – folks began to realize that the pictures they were clicking with their existing digital camera were good enough. When they wanted an upgrade and looked around, all they saw were more Megapixels. Clearly, no one was listening to them. Camera manufacturers – Sony, Nikon, Kodak, Olympus and others – probably thought they didn’t have to. Even if existing owners didn’t upgrade, there were so many first-time camera buyers out there. You didn’t have to own a larger slide of the pie if the pie itself was expanding.

This is where the camera manufacturers made their big mistake. At that very time, mobile phone manufacturers were busy embedding tiny 1 and 2 megapixels cameras into their devices. Millions of would-be-first-time-digital-camera buyers bought Rs. 9000 phones and suddenly found themselves with a ready digital camera. The photos were grainy and often out-of-focus, but hey – the camera now fit into their pocket, and was always with them to capture moments with friends, on the bus, in the train, on the street, at home, at outings, gatherings, ceremonies, parties, everywhere. Suddenly, the lure of the Megapixel didn’t hold sway at all. What mattered was that this little camera was always there. It also helped that the same block of plastic was, often, a music player, video player and recorder, radio and, occasionally, Internet browser.

Guts.

By this time, the camera manufacturers had had their first “uh-oh” moment, as sales of phone-enabled cameras shot through the roof. They scrambled back to appeal to their base of existing owners, attempting to sell them on something other than MP. So you began to hear noises about everything ranging from image stabilization to multiple face-recognition.

But the mobile phone industry wasn’t idle either. While the first generation of mobile phone cameras were dreadful, the second wasn’t. Mobile phones that cost around Rs. 15000 to Rs. 20000 – the price range of a good point-and-shoot digital camera – were now sporting 5 megapixel cameras (more than what consumers wanted), advanced lens technology (for instance, the Carl-Zeiss lenses in the top-end Nokia Nseries cameras), great flash (the Xenon flash in the Nokia N82) and customizable settings on par with their standalone counterparts. In other words, phone cameras were as good as standalone digital point-and-shoot cameras. The choice for buyers was now between i.) their existing camera plus a few incremental features, and ii.) their existing camera +  music + web + maps + video + kitchen sink. Making that choice was easy.

The female of the species is deadlier than the male. Unquestionably.

Next – what the camera industry can do to stay relevant in the coming years.

That last point makes social networks a lot of like the communities of old – BBNs, chat rooms, IRC, forums. But since they’re the *new* craze, well, they’ve got to be different somehow. How?

One, profiles. Even as a new member of a group, find out a lot about the people you’re interacting with by looking at their profile pages – where they’re from, who they know, what they do, how they look like, what they like, what they’re up to lately, and a dozen other things. Because of this, interactions on social networks become richer sooner.

Two, you can, with a single profile page, be a member of multiple communities/groups/hangout spots. You don’t have to replicate your profile. With Facebook’s “mini-feed” (a summary of what your friends have been up to recently on FB), you can discover people who share several interests/lifestyle attributes with you. Also, because you *can’t* make different profiles for different communities, you’re the ‘real you’ throughout. Interactions are therefore more genuine, more real, and perhaps more trustworthy.

Three, marketers can build up impressively detailed profiles of users individually (via their communities and behavior), and communities themselves (via profiles of their users in aggregate). That enables far better, more granular targeting of ads than would be possible on forums, benefiting both users and advertisers.

Four, applications! Interactions between members are no longer limited to text-based discussions about action that happens elsewhere. Forum-like conversation and the actual application exist side-by-side.

Five (and this is mostly because of FB), communities are no longer silos but are deeply influenced by (and in turn influence) the rest of the Internet. For instance, the Digg.com application shows your friends your five most recently Dugg stories. Think of the added (and focused) traffic to Facebook from Digg and then from Facebook to Digg.

Social networks need to open their walled gardens to the rest of the Internet, instead of attempting to monetize only interactions within. As we’ve seen above, those very interactions will become richer as data flows into the network from outside (of course, at the cost of profile data flowing outwards in the short term). I think a network’s success will now depend on how much it is willing to open itself up.

So where does that leave Microsoft? Simple. Microsoft should get out of search. And out of online advertising altogether.

Surprised? Read on.

Microsoft is a company that, after having led consumer computing for a generation, is now finding itself playing follow-the-leader. Over the last few years, its strategy has been plainly, reactive. Its Live initiative (Windows Live Search, Windows Live Mail, Windows Live Messenger, Office Live) was a poor attempt to match Google’s online portfolio, pitting application service against application service. But it didn’t work out. Today, the Live initiative is an acknowledged damp squib.

Why? Because the New Web is not central to Microsoft’s business model. It never has been. In the mid-to-late nineties, when it “woke up to the Internet”, it reacted. And made Internet Explorer integral to Windows 98, added TCP/IP support and made it easy to connect to the Internet (it also bought Hotmail, launched the MSN portal and tried to play ISP). These didn’t seem to me, either then or now, to be part of a concerted strategy to leverage the opportunity the Internet presented. Cut to today. With Ray Ozzie’s “leaked” memo in 2005, the company once again found itself waking up to the New Web. Once again we find a set of ad hoc tactics that don’t collectively define a web strategy. It seemed crazy that a person with the sagacity and vision of Ozzie would talk drivel like “online advertising is the next big revenue opportunity, and therefore we must move everything – Windows, Office, Mail – online, and make money out of ads”. It is almost as if with each generation, the Web is being retrofitted into Microsoft’s business strategy.

In contrast, Google is a company that has been built from the ground up to leverage the “Internet opportunity”. The firm realised that first public, then private data would find its way to the web. It first created tools so that it would have access to all of this data (either by crawling or by hosting this content). Simultaneously, it created applications that people could use to access the information they needed from this data. And it monetized this access.

Microsoft is a desktop applications company. From 1975 to 2007, repeat, it has been a desktop applications company. Further, though it may have had a profound effect on consumer computing, its revenue has come from enterprise customers. Finally, its largest selling products are not its search service, or its MSN portal, or Hotmail, or Messenger. Its largest selling products are its Windows Operating System and Office Application Suite. The mandarins at Microsoft have to consider these facts before running around like confused chicken.

The Enterprise does not “get” the Internet. It gets the network, or, more precisely, the intranet, but it does not get the Internet. There’s just too much data that needs to be kept within the walls of the organization. Two paragraphs ago, I said that Google’s essence is to have access to data, either by crawling or hosting. No large firm is willing, either now or in the forseeable future, to let that happen. This Enterprise market has been growing for two decades now, will continue growing. This is where Microsoft faces virtually no competition from the likes of Google.

How can Microsoft enter a new phase as an enterprise software company? How can it create better applications using the Network? That’s another Tomorrow Today in itself, coming up soon after this series is done.

And Yahoo! ? The Google of the late nineties is foundering. Brad Garlinghouse’s “Peanut Butter” memo seems to have done little more than cause a rearrangement on the company’s board, but I don’t see a strategy shift in the least.

Yahoo should also get out of the search and Pay-per-click advertising space.

What is Yahoo! as a company? As Terry Semel himself stated several months ago, Yahoo! is primarily a media company that is technology-heavy. An online media company, to be precise. Now think of the online advertising world in terms of the Long Tail. Yahoo’s customers were in the “head” of the Long Tail graph – a few thousand advertisers, but each one worth big bucks. Google instead targets the “long tail” with its AdWords model. In fact, AdWords is not effective for large advertisers, but then it was never intended to be.

Yahoo! needs to realise that there is much more to the online marketing world than simply advertising, especially when compared to the sophisticated offline marketing campaigns that professional marketing and PR firms run. Yahoo! would do well to induct that kind of talent onto its rolls. I’m thinking an acquisition of a respected marketing/advertising agency. Being able to use more media like video, audio, images and maps willl increase the richness of future campaigns, With regard to video, having traffic driven to Google’s properties (YouTube) won’t seem so bad once the videos on that website have been created by Yahoo! (PR videos, video ads, videos with embedded ads, the works!)

Online PR, viral and buzz marketing, social network marketing and affiliate marketing are areas that are currently a fishmarket of small fragmented firms, none of whom have the scale or the expertise to cater to truly large clients. They’d be cannon fodder should Yahoo! choose to muscle into these spaces.

Finally, mobile is one area where I believe Yahoo! already has a lead over Google. Its widget-oriented OneSearch service proves that the mandarins at Yahoo! have the right idea. The company recognises that the mobile web is different. Although more intent-based than the PC Web, mobile web is subscription-driven instead of search-driven. OneSearch is a large step down that road. Mobile online communities could be a massive revenue-earner. Google has Orkut and Dodgeball in its armory but isn’t doing a thing with them. Will Yahoo! grab this opportunity instead?

In summary, both Yahoo! and Microsoft have forgotten their company DNA in their zeal to show Wall Street that they’re wise to every Google trick. They don’t have to be. In fact, as we’ve seen in this rather detailed Tomorrow Today, they’re three very different companies operating in three different spaces, playing to their different strengths. The sooner Redmond and Sunnyvale realise this, the sooner they’ll be able to drag these companies out of the morass they’re sliding into.

Tomorrow we’ll wind up by examining what GUS means for Google itself, and where the company could go from here.

Until today, everything – everything – in the SEO industry was to do with optimising web pages. Firms in this space have fine-tuned the art of Optimization into a science over a decade. Pagerank was all that mattered, and SEO firms knew what worked and what didn’t.

But it was all page optimization. Meaning, web pages with textual content. Because the default, vanilla Web Search dwarfed other vertical searches – image, news, map, book, video search, they didn’t even register on an SEO firm’s radar. After all, if no one’s searching for my client on Google Book Search, why do I even bother optimizing his/her website for it? What’s changed is that results from those same niche searches have found their way onto the hottest property on the web today – Google’s web search results page.

To optimize for GUS means optimizing for a whole host of data types. It also means several paradigm shifts in thinking. Fundamentally, “news” is not a different data type – it’s also text on a web page. But one, the way in which its relevance is measured is definitely different. For instance, recency is probably much more important here. Two, it’s tough to simply “generate” news, when compared to how quickly a business can “generate” content on static or dynamic web pages that are *owned* by the client. Maps is another example. Providing location-based data is something that has never been done before with text, at least not in the spatial sense. Video presents similar challenges. How does Google rank videos based on relevance? And what kind of video content can you create for your client? Maps deserves an entire post to itself, but I’ll leave it to your imagination for the present. The indsutry will enter a phase where SEO firms will have to work much more closely with their clients to optimize for them than they do today.

Paid Search Engine Optimization (which is currently almost entirely Adwords/Overture campaign) is set to change dramatically. Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products and User Experience at Google, commented during the launch of GUS, “For us, ads are answers as well…. And so I was hoping that we could bring some of these same advances in terms of the richness of media to ads.” Consider location-based ads. Today, searchers in different countries see different sponsored ads based on their location. Maps can take that to an entirely different level. Consider a search for “sports shoes”. Apart from other results, you could, on the right pane, have a map of your region showing you stores with sell sports shoes. Which stores are shown will depend upon a bid-based mechanism similar to Adwords. Video ads are more or less a given. Travel advertisers, for instance, could optimize videos displaying cruise line offerings or hotel amenities, while financial firms might focus on promoting educational videos rather than straight text articles. How GUS will embed these ads in the company’s traditional unobtrusive manner remains to be seen.

In summary, SEO firms will spend the next few months taking stock of how much their business has changed with GUS. Those that do find a compelling strategy for GUS will be able to put miles between them and their competitors. Think about it – with GUS, the battle for Search is all but over. Having defined Search 2.0, Google has left other engines in the Search 1.0 era. Those SEO firms that declare that they can now optimize for Search 2.0 will not only be able to scale up, acquire larger customers, but also win over significant accounts from their competitors. In other words, they will have won the SEO wars.

Tomorrow, we’ll see what the mandarins at Microsoft and Yahoo are thinking about GUS, and what they ought to be thinking instead.

For ordinary web searchers, the change is hardly noticeable. In fact, a lot of ordinary surfers I’ve spoken to since Google Universal Search (GUS) went live have given me the “Duh” reaction. And therein lies the genius of this innovation. This subtle, almost invisible new search is a disruptive innovation; affecting the entire SEO industry, Microsoft, Yahoo! and Google itself.

This week’s Tomorrow Today is a four-part series where we’ll examine just how GUS has changed the rules of the game for all stakeholders.

Part 1: What people are saying about GUS
Part 2: What it means for SEO
Part 3: What it means for Microsoft and Yahoo
Part 4: What it means for Google and the future.

Part 1: What people are saying about GUS

Google’s had plenty of “vertical”searches in the past – its bread-and-butter web search, image search, blog search, local search, video search, even book, map, news and email search. Google Universal search unifies these previously siloed searches. Now, a search for a term will return a list of results that span all of the above. The most dramatic change as of now seems to be the video search integration. As an example, the results to the search request ”I have a dream” will include an actual video showing Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous 1963 speech along with the usual assortment of Web links (Associated Press). Now you begin to get understand how significant this little change is, and begin to think up of other scenarios. Imagine a search for “apple store”. This could lead to (apart from normal web results), a map of Apple stores throughout the state where you’re located, new results about apple stores, images of the glass Apple Store in Soho, and so on.

The real technical smarts with converting siloed searches into GUS have to do with “finding the best answer across multiple content types“. How do you rank an image search result in comparison to a web search, or a video search result? Previously, comparing a news result for a search term with a maps result for the same term, and ranking them relative to each other was like comparing apples and oranges. No longer.

Danny Sullivan demonstrates how news, maps and book results now form part of the standard search results set. Admittedly, these results did show up on the first page of the Web search results, but they were placed separately, out of the top 10 search results. That, ironically, reduced their relevance. Consequently they were hardly clicked on.

Tomorrow we’ll see what this means for Seach Engine Optimization firms who, for good reason, are quite shaken up by this new development.

In any case, this month we’ve seen an example of what the next generation of web applications is going to look like. Google Talk is no longer an “application”, but a Flash “gadget” that can live anywhere on the web – be it on your personalized Google homepage, or your blog, or your Firefox sidebar. Well, a web-based chat application is rather stale – computer science undergrads routinely write applications like these as part of their network programming course. But the Talk Gadget’s different – in two significant ways:

One, it’s got about all the functionality of a desktop application. Because it’s Flash-based (as opposed to HTML/AJAX), it’s able to incorporate features like tabbed chats, Flickr/Picasa slideshows, or embedded YouTube videos.

Two, it can be “deployed” anywhere on the web, as I mentioned earlier. This has far-reaching consequences for web application developers; the Talk Gadget represents the beginning of the era of full-featured application components, an era where you no longer have to download/launch/upgrade applications, or even live with browser-based implementations. We’ve set foot into the realm of “instant launch”. Take a look at the Google Talk page if you don’t get what I just said. The big blue button no longer says “Download Google Talk” – just “Launch Google Talk”.

I guess we can see where we’re going – “launch Word/Excel/PowerPoint” anytime, anywhere, for starters. Componentization of full-featured applications like this could lead to completely new ways of looking at existing web applications. Take Blogger. Today, the publisher and the reader have very different interfaces to the blog – the publisher uses the Blogger interface to compose, manage and publish posts, and the user views the *.blogspot.com pages. With Word processor integration, we could have a collapsible compose window right at the top, viewable only by the publisher. He/she could compose/manage posts right from the existing *.blogspot.com page. And what is a comments system but a multi-way chat? Enter the embedded Google Talk Gadget. Adding images is no longer cumbersome – simply drag and drop from your desktop (or browser window) into the compose area, and it’s automatically uploaded or linked. Let your imagination loose for email and scheduling applications too. Now embed AdSense into these components, and you can see where the money’s coming from.

Finally, the most promising platform to deliver these applications seems to be Flash. Suddenly, Adobe has been given a new lease of life. Will Google risk building its future application services on a platform owned by another company? And where does Adobe go from here? (Think Apollo.) That’s fodder for another post!