The Platform Arms Race Just Exploded
The History
We knew the arms race for the platform of business was coming, we just didn’t know who’d enter. Let’s rewind 30 years to see how we got here:
1986: Productivity platform = telephone + memos
1996: Productivity platform = email + shared drive
2006: Productivity platform purchased by IT = Sharepoint
(Productivity platform actually used by business teams = email + shared drive)2016: Productivity platform= horribly fragmented across 10 SaaS tools
Everyone is on the move. But there’s no winner yet.
The Challenge
So who’s going to win? From 12 years of helping teams navigate these choppy waters (mostly multinationals, with a few SMBs along the way), I’ve seen a very strong trend:
It has always been about communication + content (telephone + memo, email + shared drive etc ), but those terms have evolved.
Communication: One to one is moving to Connected network
Content: Static documents are being replaced by Dynamic content
So who’s in this race, and are they primed for this new world?
The Contenders
The conservative bet until now has been Google. Sure, there’s a huge number of helpless souls on some god-awful on-premise installation of Sharepoint, but that number is diminishing. Google for Work has grown to an astonishing 22.8% of the enterprise application market.
So what has Google been offering us?
Google for Work (the suite formerly known as Google Apps)
- Owns Gmail. Great for communication in 2005, but sucks for many-to-many. Attempted to resolve with Hangouts / Google+. (Disastrous.)
- Pioneered dynamic content with Docs / Sheets / Slides
But here’s the thing. Not many people realize, but Google for Work is being quietly slaughtered, by….
Office 365 (Microsoft, and now LinkedIn)
In the last year, O365 tripled its market share to outpace Google for Work with 25.2% of the market. An astounding turnaround.
Microsoft has been a productivity powerhouse for 30 years, but has historically insisted on an ‘island’ mentality for its products, meaning that there is no centralized network. Think about how two teams can both be on cloud Sharepoint, but cannot share a file with each other.
Did all this change with the acquisition of LinkedIn? Suddenly they can add the cross-company connection to the internal network. Islands join to form an archipelago where individuals are all connected together.
On the dynamic content front, Microsoft is king. Office 365 is powerful and has excellent fidelity. It makes Google Apps look like Windows 95.
Also taking advantage of those powerful Office 365 content tools is…
Facebook for Work
With 1.7 billion monthly active users, there’s little question that Facebook has a solid network. But in my experience, the vast majority of IT staff at larger companies simply will not accept a B2C-first tool in the corporate stack. (Dropbox has suffered greatly from this).
For communication, FB is in a great position with its conversion of Messenger to Work Chat, which is well suited to a connected network.
For content creation, FB have been cozied up to Microsoft for some time, but no tech giant wishes to rely on another. That raises the obvious question… assuming they’re serious about Facebook for Work, we must assume that they looked at Quip. Bret Taylor could have had his old job back.
My vote: Facebook for Work will be seamless, easy and useful, but will make little $ or market impact above SMB level.
The New Kids
These big three have been battling it out, with Microsoft + LinkedIn the newcomers on the productivity + network scene.
Until now.
Salesforce (and Quip)
Salesforce has until now been a pig in the productivity space. Half-hearted efforts with Chatter and Tasks as the proverbial lipstick.
To win this war remember, you need a connected network, and the ability to work with new content formats. Salesforce had a strong network of separate islands, but no P2P network, and no content tool.
As it turns out, looks like they agreed with me. For network, they tried to buy Linkedin, for content, they succeeded in their $750 million acquisition of Quip.
Salesforce have a fairly painful history in this space post-acquisition (do.com debacle etc). Can they shoehorn the well-engineered Quip neatly into the 20 year old Salesforce tech? Seems like quite the ask.
…and then there’s the elephant in the room.
Slack
If you’ve read any tech articles in the last six months, you know that messaging is kind of a big thing at the moment.
Undisputed champ of workplace messaging is Slack, and with a shiny new fund to accelerate its platform play, its fully fledged P2P network is looking good.
On the creation of dynamic content, arguably the message (and Slack’s ‘post’) are the new content format. If so, Slack’s in a strong position.
It’s also not impossible to picture them pushing further into this space. Perhaps Quip would have accelerated the content side for them too.
A little less conversation, more action please
There’s just one small hitch in all this — where does actually getting stuff done fit into this world? The humble old memo often contained tasks. It would wait patiently in your inbox. That paradigm was brought into the modern world with the email inbox. Not popular, but at least functional.
I ask this question: Where in a Facebook-for-Office365-Salesforce-Quip-Slack-channel do we help people to work on the most important things? How do we assign responsibilities against a backdrop of constant messages. Might unloved cousin Asana finally be invited to the party? Will companies develop this part of their offering?
Until they do, we’ll have some incredible options for a communications and content platform, but none will have won the more important productivity platform war.
I’m sure you have an opinion. Who do you think will win?
John
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