Over the weekend, Boston Globe and The Times ran articles on Google. The Globe piece emphasised the notion of third parties developing applications that work on the Google platform and how Google supports that using environments like Gears. The other piece focused on how Google tweaks the search algorithm to produce better results. What is amazing is that there are over 200 signals that Google uses to tune the search results.

While it may seem like these two strategies are contradictory, they are highly interrelated. Relevance is very important in providing high quality search results. In order to tweak its search algorithms, Google needs more and more user/usage data. This data comes from both the search queries and from using Google products like Gmail, Orkut, GoogleMaps and others. To keep developing useful products, Google is contantly testing multiple products in parallel. It is impossible for Google to develop all of them internally. As a result, they make it easy (by providing APIs and development environments like Geas) for third parties to create new applications but capture the data on usage.  

In a recent post on his blog, my colleague Venkat wrote about network-centric strategy and the role of a platform architect. Connectivity via the Internet has created opportunities to engage other customers, complementors and even competitors. This has led to the creation of ecosystems and new roles that companies can play within them. Platform architect is one such role. What other roles can one play in this landscape?

While the role of a platform architect is a great outcome, it is hard to accomplish and clearly not the only one. One could choose to be a module or component provider that preferentially attaches to a platform to compete. The platform could provide access (via a standard) to other services that satisfy a customer need. The third role is that of a systems integrator (SI). While the platform and module provider create optional and core services, an SI could help customers choose and integrate these services. The final role we see is that of a process orchestrator. Entities playing this role ensure that, by weaving together services, the transaction of the business is completed and when failure occurs they can recover from it.

In addition to these roles, how can one measure and exercise control within the ecosystem. In our research we have outlined a methodology to capture data on ecosystems and described some network measures to track progress. We have also described a concept called architectural control that helps companies create strategies to being relevant in industries characterized by platform-based competition.

I was recently reading an article on WSJ that provided a link to this conference. On that website there is a video of a joint interview of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. When asked about what they learned by watching the other, the answers were telling. Bill G. wanted Steve's taste. In particular, he liked how Steve made engineering decisions based on people and product issues. Steve on the other hand would have liked Apple to have MSFT's partnering or ecosystem strategy in his company's DNA. I guess there is no better way to put their differention strategy into words.