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July 09, 2004
Gmail part of Google moving to plaform play?
We've talked a lot about search and email dragraces. Now, Rajesh Jain and Rick Klau both look at how email can really move more and more toward developing a platform. In their view gmail is very well positioned to do the right things - to be open to more and more functionality (like adding an RSS/ATOM reader) and utility.
In our view, though to be a true platform you have to embrace others and be embraced by them. Gmail is clearly embracing others by doing things like making it easy to import contacts. But will they go further and encourage/make it easy for outsiders to develop applications and utilities for them (as Anil Dash and Omar Shahine note that Outlook - you got it, from none other than Microsoft - has been doing for a good long time)? Until they really embrace their own ecosystem of third parties who really love helping them win the email race (like they have done well in search), they will still be just a dragracer vs. yahoo and msn and not yet a real platform.
Posted by johnza at July 9, 2004 05:05 AM
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Having had worked with the internals of Outlook at one of my previous programming jobs, I would caution anyone against thinking Microsoft has "gone further" to make it easy for developers to augment Outlook's functionality.
Example: the company I was working for was trying to make it simple to use the built in email encryption functionality of Outlook - part of our installation process required us to configure the user's encryption certificate in Outlook. After trying to find out how to do this, we eventually had to contact Microsoft - turned out, they hardly knew how to do it! In the end, the solution involved writing our own code to parse internal Outlook data, make the modifications we needed to make, and format the data before re-writing the data into Outlook.
The lesson I can glean from this is that Microsoft believes making a platform involves not only enabling others to add value to your product, but also disabling others' value-add from eclipsing the value of your product. It's especially clear from my experience with Outlook that Microsoft is very smart about limiting what you can augment - it doesn't want you eating their lunch with an augmentation that they think would be better to include as a core feature of Outlook.
Posted by: Brendon J. Wilson at July 9, 2004 07:43 AM
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