Ghost town

The Wall Street Journal reports that Google+ is essentially dying, with users spending on average three minutes a month there, while they're spending seven hours per month on Facebook. If those numbers are even close to accurate, they're brutal.

The WSJ spins this as Google's failure to differentiate Google+ from Facebook, but it's a mistake to think this is about features. Google+ has failed to date because of network effects. I've signed up for Google+, but I never go there, because no one I know goes there, either. My friends and family are on Facebook, and so that's where I go, too. It's quite simple. If you want to beat Facebook, steal its members. Features are largely irrelevant; what you need is people.

Sooner or later someone will disrupt Facebook -- it's inevitable -- and that company will do it by being cooler than Facebook. The initial community will be high school and college students, who will like it in part because their mothers and grandmothers aren't already there; only later will the numbers grow so great as to attract the less cool elements. It's like real estate: at first the artists move into a neighborhood that no one else likes, and it works for them because it's cheap and filled with other artists. Then the yuppies and the wanna-be's follow the artists into the neighborhood, and the whole thing gets so gentrified that the artists move out and look for the next cool spot.

My guess is that Google made a fundamental mistake when rolling out Google+, in that its initial community (and, by consequence, its initial appeal) was among the tech-savvy crowd. Techies only appear cool to other techies.

The enemy of my enemy, take two

This week there's been a back-and-forth over screenshots that may or may not show Microsoft Office running on an iPad. Microsoft has denied it, but in carefully-couched words that to some eyes read more like a non-denial denial.

M.J. Siegler thinks that Microsoft is putting Office on the iPad as the ultimate screw-you to Google: the iPad is already far more popular than any Android tablet out there (even the quasi-Android tablet known as the Kindle Fire), and with Office it would also be far more useful for business users. Android in the tablet space would be left with very few selling points -- and remember, this is a platform that's already struggling to find a strong connection to customers. Android on a smartphone benefits by the sales muscle of carriers and device manufacturers; Android on a tablet has to sell on its own merits, and so far it's mostly failing that test. If Office is exclusive to the iPad (and Win 8 tablets, when they come out) that might just about do it for Android in the tablet market.

FastCompany has a piece on why this move, as satisfying as it might be, would put Microsoft in a very difficult situation. Briefly stated, Microsoft has three primary options, none of which is appealing:

• They could bring Office to the iPad and price it at competitive levels to comparable apps on the platform. Apple's own productivity suite costs about $10/app, so the Big Three of Office (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint) could logically be priced at a collective $30. This poses a serious problem, though: Microsoft Office for the desktop will run you $149.99 retail (or $123.49 if you buy it through Amazon). 
• Alternatively, they could protect the price structure of Office in one of two ways: either by offering a full-featured tablet version at $50/app (absurd on its face) or by presenting the tablet version as a stripped-down, "Lite" version of Office optimized for touch input but missing some core features. That, though, causes them problems down the line when Windows 8 comes out on tablets. If the tablet version of Office that comes pre-installed is not a true version of Office, why would you buy that tablet? 
• The third option is no option at all: argue that Office requires a keyboard and mouse, and limit any tablet app to the sort of "view and annotate" versions we've seen on handheld devices before. This would almost certainly have the effect of convincing more and more consumers that they don't really need Office, as they try out tablet-based Office alternatives and find that they can actually get their work done that way, too.

This is a real problem for the company. Microsoft cannot hope to sit out the tablet revolution and still prosper going forward, but by the same token they can't sharply cut prices on the tablet version of the software with which they've printed money for decades now and hope that customers won't expect price cuts on the desktop side as well. A lower-priced desktop version of Office might sell like hotcakes, but it's very possible that even so Microsoft's bottom line would suffer.

In the end, this dilemma could prove to be Ballmer's true legacy. He's managed the company through a long profitable period, but he also mocked the iPhone and iPad when they came out. Clear vision would have recognized strong competition when he saw it; strong leadership would have had the company already building for new markets, rather than focusing on wringing every last cent out of the markets they already occupied. If Ballmer can find a way out of the mess he's at least partly created, I'll owe him an apology; in the meantime this will be a very interesting drama as it unfolds.

Who is your customer?

Amid reports of Google's latest ethical lapse, I found myself reflecting on an adjacent point: Google would never have thought to engineer ways to bypass users' browser security settings if those users were still their customers.

Way back when, in the days when Google was young, you and I were their customers: we were the people using their cool, new search engine and (I'm sure) they delighted in delighting us with the power of their tools. Subsequently, though, Google stumbled upon the fact that you can make a huge amount of money connecting advertising results with search, and that occasioned a shift of outlook and intent. No longer were Google search users the customers; now they were the product, and advertisers were the new customers.

Any business that wants to be around for a while seeks to delight its customers. But the product? That's just the product, to be packaged and marketed in the most effective manner. Google has had more than its share of ethical stumbles this year, but in the end what some people are angry about is that Google has stopped treating ordinary people like you and me as their customers. That has been the case for years, but it's only now that we're seeing the full implications of that switch.

It's a critical question: who are your customers? I've found that this can vary widely even within an organization. Since I was hired to manage an intranet, I've always taken it for granted that my customers are the company's employees. Five feet away from me, however, sits a woman whose primary client is the company CEO. Next to her sits a woman whose clients are certain divisions within the organization, and beside her sits a woman whose customer is the department head. We have many different customers whose interests do not always perfectly align, and yet this is a fact that we never seem to speak about.

Do you know who your customers are? Do the people you work with know that, too? If not, ask yourself what might happen if they stumble on that information themselves.