NYT Maps the Forest of Services Across Top Tech Companies, But Fails To See The Trees
Today’s NY Times has an article in the Bits section that attempts to define the services available from Apple, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo across a wide swatch of important
technologies. It’s a curious matrix, and points out the risk of ambiguity charts like this present, limiting their effectiveness. Let’s look at several of the categories and try to make sense of what (if anything) this chart actually is telling us.
Video/Voice/IM Chat. Unified communications are only as good as their ability to integrate with what you are actually doing. Screen sharing and collaboration are critical elementshere, with Microsoft leading the way in both consumer and enterprise offerings.
Mobile Hardware, OS, App Store and Applications. One could make the case for Microsoft being a grey circle here.
Music Store. Overlooked Google’s partnerships with MySpace and LaLa
Office Suite. The Office Suite area is solidly owned by Microsoft; while there market share will see some decline as the Google offerings mature, to say they are competing at this point is like calling a race between a bicycle and a stock car.
Video Content. A throwaway metric, but ok. Not sure what the Microsoft offering is that they’re referring to, as MSN Soapbox is dead.
News. I would put a grey circle here for Google, as they aggregate news from various sources. Microsoft and Yahoo produce content.
Social Network. The author loses major credibility here by overlooking Microsoft’s Live platform (Spaces, Messenger, etc.) which has millions of active subscribers and is arguably of greater significance than, say, Google’s Orkut.
Online Retail. Google Checkout maybe? Selling a phone online does not an online retail presence make. On the other hand, Microsoft has been selling software (games, Office suites), hardware and services to consumers online for years.
My point in walking through the chart is this: anyone can show you a chart with a bunch of dots on it. What matters is how you interpret the relevance of the categories and the impact of the solutions provided by the vendors in those categories.
