In the navy, the 1st rule of engagement with an enemy ship is to try to hit it with multiple missiles coming from multiple directions. Most naval ships can handle one missile shot at them fairly easily using chaff, electronic warfare or even shooting it down with good old shotguns. But throw at that same ship multiple missiles at about the same time, and it’ll have its crew running around like chickens without heads trying to figure out which threat to handle first.
With each new product Google announces (latest being Google Spreadsheets), I can’t help but think that Google is brilliantly applying naval missile tactics at USS Microsoft.
Microsoft has a long history of easily swatting off single-missile threats as if they were mosquitoes. Ask Netscape, Real Media, Lotus, Novell, etc, etc, etc. Each time such threat surfaced, Microsoft moved massive resources and all of its brightest folks to strike the missile and beat it.
But Microsoft has no experience in handling multi-missile attacks, which are a completely different ballgame. It’s a fairly easy decision to shift your entire crew to attack Netscape, when the cash-generating cows like Windows and Office are safe and cushy and don’t need much attention. It’s a *completely* different decision to move those same resources onto a new, high-risk and currently-revenue-less adventure (=MSN adCenter) while putting in jeopardy the company’s existing assets.
Google Spreadsheets is obviously not core to Google in any way. I can’t see how in the world it complements their search, and obviously it won’t contribute anything worth mentioning in ad dollars (if they ever integrate ads into it, which I doubt). And being that it’s free, I don’t think anyone in Google’s finance team is assigning anything but losses to this product in the future.
So the only remaining conclusion is that this is just one of a set of missiles[1] aimed at Microsoft, forcing them to spend significant resources on defending their castles rather than attacking Google’s (AdWords + AdSense) full force.
I don’t envy Microsoft in this scenario….
But then again, as I said in this post in more detail, this may just be the 20% pet project of a few Googlers… 😉
[1] The next such missile on its way from Mountain View to Redmond is probably a word processor following Google’s acquisition of Writely. More to come, I’m sure.