Whit Andrews

My colleague Brian Prentice, a sharp and distinguished practitioner of our occult trade, is utterly whelmed by the possibility of an exciting new operating system, at least insofar as evidence for its delivery is currently available mostly via a spare blog post.

Many of my colleagues sort of threw up their hands at the Google announcement. (You can find a somewhat running summary of our thoughts, including many other blog posts, on an earlier posting from this blog. A First Take slouches toward publication as I write.)  They felt, all but in unison, that a simple blog entry is a ridiculous indicator of a strategic direction with — frankly — global implications for the future of many companies, Microsoft included. More, even, than the blog entry, they felt that media reaction implied a slow news day. Sarah Palin was no doubt delighted she had picked the comparatively sleepy holiday weekend to drop her own farewell-for-now message into public discourse, as it meant over-the-shoulder graphics of the Google and Microsoft’s logos crossing swords were no threat.

But — BUT! — I need to respectfully disagree.

One of the things that Google has failed at dismally from time to time is communication of its plans and efforts. Not so much the Wave-style announcements, where they turn up in your breakfast cereal with an announcement that sets the technological world aflame with hype, so much as the failure to provide them. Ask Microsoft or Oracle or IBM what they’re going to do in the next generation of a product and they are likely to tell you. As an open source community and they’ll give you the email address for the key developers and a list of their goals. Ask Google, and sometimes all you get is the sound of waves sloshing up and down inside an ocean borne electrical generator.

Yes, the blog entry is talking about something that probably won’t be real for quite a while — shipping on devices in 2010, impact in enterprises later, circa 2012. But it is better for Google to tell us — and you — what it is doing than that it continue to labor in the server pits, splurting out occasional gouts of slag and plumes of gold all a-sparkle. (For example, I respectively think here of the first generation of Google enterprise search, an ASP model that cratered in the early 2000s, and Picasa, which is a thing of beauty where I squirrel all my images.)

One blog entry will not be enough to satisfy the community of peerers and observers we analysts and our constituents represent. But its existence — the idea that Google owes its vast prospect base transparency of strategy and detail of tactics before they become fact, is an extremely good sign. The key is to adopt an intelligent perspective on Google’s communications. (We can help with that. Sorry, that’s my rent-paying gene talking.)