October 2010 has witnessed the re-assignment and retirement of two major software figures, Twitter’s CEO Evan Williams and Microsoft’s chief software architect Ray Ozzie, respectively. The transition for the men is a marker for a larger transition for tech companies in general. In Twitter’s case, it is purposefully shedding its start up veneer and attempting to make a go of it as an official business, with actual profits. In Microsoft’s case, the company is growing beyond its roots as a provider of utilitarian software into a kind of virtual utility in of itself.
A recent New York times article revealed that Microsoft negotiated with the city of New York to allow agencies to purchase only the individual programs of its software suite that it needed, rather than the entire package. In addition to placing a renewed emphasis on cloud computing, Microsoft is entering a kind of grand retirement phase of innovation, having mapped out the course for all the younger tech companies that wish to follow in its footsteps.
First, there’s the scrappy start-up period in the garage, followed by several years of dogged survival and mounting insider prestige, eclipsed at last by critical mass acceptance that rockets the company into the searingly bright international eye. And then, a team of highly intelligent business analysts marches in and puts a lid on the raw innovative spark, with plans to use it as a display item in the corporate corridor of the new HQ. Years of Profit and Loss statements blanket the conference table, eventually pushing the innovative types back out into the corridor, where they are crowded out by much faster, younger, and lower paid versions of themselves. Finding themselves redundant, innovators like Ray Ozzie graduate into the cloud, to be dispersed as needed across an unbounded network.
What does this somewhat romanticized vision foretell for Twitter and its contemporaries? With a major movie having already been made about Facebook, the lifecycle may be much speedier, and may not end in a golden immortal halo of SaaS. Microsoft started off by making money by selling products, and gradually parlayed that into even greater commercial success, dominating the market with its ubiquitous spread sheets and word processing programs. Facebook and Twitter, on the other hand, make money primarily by selling information. In of itself, information is not a quantity that can be owned forever. These sites are valuable because of ‘who they know.’ Should a rival website or service manage in another fifteen years time to scoop the new generation by offering a service that isn’t ‘Your Father’s Facebook,’ the relevance of those sites will be limited to a group of older users.
Of course, this presupposes that Facebook and Twitter don’t suddenly start inventing new services to strengthen their product base. Technology users in general seem to be graduating from relying primarily on text to relying on complex graphics, or data visualization, for their information. The trend is subtle but persuasive, and as we have documented on this blog, is encouraged by the de facto reality of parsing information in an age of instant search results and compressed virtual real estate. Essentially, our attention spans have not gotten shorter, but our resources are becoming constrained. Time, always in short supply, has become so hyper-defined and regulated that the idea of lazily exploring anything is now the single most identifiable relic of a bygone era.
Indeed, having a service that can generate complex visual displays of data to instantly communicate concepts that would have taken days of tedious text-only reading may be the next step in human intellectual development. This type of communication would encourage verbal discourse among collaborative participants and the creation of even more highly complex charts and graphs. It would allow people to keep setting a faster pace for themselves without ditching in-depth thought.
Perhaps by 2075 fond data graphs of Microsoft (represented by a line-drawn Bill Gates clicking through a hilariously antiquated PowerPoint presentation) will be used to commemorate the anniversary of the first great technological behemoth. Will we still be updating our statuses and tweeting our thoughts, or we will have by then collectively retired into an ephemeral cloud of stored data, allowing us to remain young forever?