Google Waters its Innovation Garden with a Gmail Upgrade as Digital Dances

So this week Google has been revealing the redesign of Gmail just as it is about to launch it. The new features are designed to make the user experience more productive and Gmail more attractive, as its current minimalistic interface can be a little infuriating when it is difficult to perform some of the tasks that, say, Outlook lets you do. Gradually though, it appears that Google Apps are moving to the point where Google is more of a heavy weight contender able to compete with Microsoft in established enterprises where Microsoft has a strangle hold.

This is important, because the move to cloud is an inflection point at which there is a genuine opportunity to present Google as a real alternative to Microsoft and also because Amazon does not yet offer much in the way of personal productivity alternatives. Google already has an advantage with small and start up businesses which wish to avoid the overhead of Microsofts fees. Additionally, most consumers (outside of China) use Gmail and are familiar with Google's other personal productivity offerings. This is Google's new unfair advantage, the hearts and minds of all school and university leavers, including the new techies. Coupled with the way that Chrome book has outmanouvered Apple and Wintel based offerings in schools, this means that Microsft risks being made irrelevant, since it has repeatedly lost in the War for domination of smartphone and pad devices.

So what does this mean to the big 3 in cloud:

• Microsoft continues to surround big accounts with Azure and Office, whilst it builds its AI and Big Data capabilities, but appears to have lost consumers (its original strength) and the hand held market, whilst PCs become increasingly niche;
• Amazon still dominates in platform services and has a well established service for helping innovators launch in digital market places and still has the best IoT platform and well established AI/Big Data capabilities, whilst its consumer credentials come from shopping and Alexa and Amazon;
• Google has taken new consumers and techies hearts and minds with its personal productivity apps, maps and its own reasonably successful persoan assistant. Google has also managed to take a dominant position in the consumer device market with ChromOS and Android. Whilst for enterprises it tries to be more price efficient abd flexible than the other 2, is playing fast catch up on platform capabilities and aslo has good Big Data and AI capabilities. Google also makes a great play of its custom chip technology as well as broadcasting its credentials as an innovation garden.

All 3 can talk a good game around security, global and local presence, and distributed databases. Whilst Apple is looking very niche, its cloud storage and music business is still strong and it is revamping its personal assistant to ensure that it competes with Amazon in the home automation market.

 

Oracle and IBM continue to try and surround their existing corporate customer bases with specialised offerings, whilst Oracle is also trying to provide agnostic join all your environments together services, essential for hybrid infrastructure.

 

Meanwhile GDPR has taken its first blood as WhatsApp has decided to raise the minimum age for subscribers from 13 to 16, to ensure compliance. This has established a precedent, going beyond parental permission or controls, so it will be interesting to see how other platform services will respond.  It certainly means that regulation is starting to become a governor to libertine innovation, as Uber has found out in several jurisdictions.

On another tack, Bill Haris posted a swinging blog on Bitcoin calling it a "pump and dump scheme". Whilst I don't agree with every aspect of his commentary and analysis, as Bitcoin is now really being used for something it was not designed to do and his comment on value applies equally to money as to any cryptocurrency (money does not have any intrinsic value, we just chose to give it some) he does cite some interesting facts:

• E&Y estimates 10% of ICO money has been stollen, 
• Insecurity of crypto coin exchanges,
• Cost and Energy demands of "mining" coins,
• High Failure rates of new cryptocurrencies (almost half of cryptocurrencies launches in 2017 failed),
• the high level of criminality and non tax compliance associated with cryptocurrency trading,
• Scalability issues.

So the Digital Worl continues to follow the two steps forward, one sideways and one backwards dance of progress.