A Week in the Valley: GData
I spent the week before Where 2.0 visiting companies between San Francisco and San Jose. I've already written about my trips to Ning and Meebo. Next is an account of a meeting with Mark Lucovsky, who was architect of the HailStorm web services product from Microsoft.
Context & Ripple Effects
Radar's pre-Where 2.0 tour has been working down the Peninsula through Ning and Meebo, and the GData stop matters mostly because of who is doing the explaining: Mark Lucovsky, the architect of HailStorm, Microsoft's early attempt to wrap a user's identity and data into a paid web-services platform that became shorthand for platform ambition outrunning market appetite.
Timing sharpens the contrast. Earlier in July, Robert Scoble asked where Google had gone during a stretch of very visible Microsoft activity — and the same week's confirmed news includes COO Kevin Turner telling Google to stay out of enterprise search, WinFLP screenshots circulating, and silence around the rumored music device. Sitting down with the man who built HailStorm to walk through GData reads as Google's half of an argument Microsoft keeps starting in public.
First-order effects
- Developers choosing where to build get Google's data-access story from a credentialed source — notable because the exact same independent-developer audience is being courted by Microsoft's soft-launched Project Glidepath for Vista work.
- The interview lands inside a week of confirmed Microsoft aggression toward Google (Turner's enterprise-search warning chief among them), so GData gets read less as an API note and more as Google's counter-position in an open rivalry.
Second-order effects
- Platform owners are forced to compete on how much of their datastore they expose: if GData lowers the cost of building against Google's data, rivals must publish comparable read/write interfaces or watch third-party innovation cluster around whichever store opens first.
- MicroISV-scale developers become the contested resource — Glidepath on the Windows side and GData on the Google side function as competing recruiting pitches for the same builders, with API generosity as the currency.
Third-order effects
- HailStorm's core lesson — that users and partners reject data access gated behind a vendor's business model — points toward opt-in, feed-style access becoming the baseline expectation for any consumer web platform, regardless of who ships it.
- If that holds, the durable competitive question shifts from feature counts to whose datastore others are allowed to build on — the moat-recomposition fight relocating from applications to the data layer itself.
The trend: Consumer web platforms are recomposing their moats around exposed data APIs, turning user-data access into the next front of the Google–Microsoft rivalry.