On brand consistency and BHAGs

Adobe Wave?Ryan Stewart — a platform evangelist for Adobe — wrote a post resentful of Google Wave’s hype — and lamented the lack of similar interest and enthuasism for rich internet applications (RIAs), writing that Adobe, just [doesn’t] seem to encourage the visionary demos, the ones that make people rethink how they’ll communicate and interact.

The resulting discussion was worth a read, especially comments by Brian Lesser. While one of the arguments was over whether Wave could be built with Adobe technologies, that’s the least interesting part of the conversation. As Ryan points out, people don’t get excited about standards — they get exited about vision.

And that’s where I think there’s something to be realized.

Google is a company that values big thinking and puts resources into big ideas — what I’ve heard referred to as “BHAGs“, or “big hairy audacious goals”. I mean, their mission statement is to index and make available all the world’s information. That kind of brand promise has benefits beyond just Google, and I think that sets them apart.

The promise of Google Wave is to transform how people communicate and collaborate — and Google can credibly take on a challenge like that, because they’ve done a pretty good job of doing transforming search, and then — almost accidently — maps (even though, again, you could argue that draggable maps could have been done in Flash at the same time, but you’d be missing the point).

What Google seems to do well is focus on some obvious and widespread problem that regular people have and apply a determined, quantitive approach to solving the problem. Wave is probably their most risky bet yet because of the complexity of their solution, but I think anyone who deals with a large amount of information — in real-time or asynchronously — has to admit that our current tools just aren’t cutting it. And it’s only going to get worse unless something better is created.

But the benefits of such a technological solution will be missed unless it rapidly achieves scale through widespread and ubiquitous adoption — which requires an open, royalty-free standards-based approach. Just read Hal Varian’s book on the subject, and you’ll realize that the reason that Google Wave is exciting is that it represents a multifaceted solution with a little something for everyone: the interface and user experience is controversial and novel providing designers a hook; the technology stack pleases and challenges open source hackers and the tech press equally; the collaboration and communication aspects excite businesses, managers, and any frustrated by email; and sceptics are held at bay by the cleverness of the economics of Google Wave — from the outset, Wave servers are designed to be run by other actors besides Google. That is, if you don’t want Google to own the space, you’ve now got to decide if you’re going to create a competing platform (and more importantly, “open standard”), or join the fray. Given Google Wave’s first-mover advantage, I think any competitor wishing to offer a competing open standard will be hard pressed to argue why they didn’t just “adopt the Wave Protocol”.

To put this argument another way, this is a product firing on all cylindars, and that’s what we’ve come to expect from Google.

If Adobe had launched Wave — the identical product that Google launched — I don’t think that anyone would take them seriously. As Scott Koon pointed out, Adobe is a toolmaker — they’re not known for big ideas that confront a basic human problem — least of all one related to information on the open web. Instead, Adobe tends to make graphics tools, and products that help organizations lock down information — not share it freely and openly. Wave is just a product that Adobe couldn’t make, because it’s not in Adobe’s DNA to tackle such problems.

It isn’t that Adobe doesn’t have its own BHAGs — it does — but I believe that history and behavior show that most Adobe products end up supporting existing control structures rather than breaking them down — same with Microsoft’s. Google’s products are inspirational because they enable us to imagine — and achieve — a different and perhaps freer tomorrow.

This entry was written by Chris Messina and posted on Oct 2nd at 8am and filed under Technology. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

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15 Comments

  1. Chris said
    at 1pm on Oct 2nd # |

    Great article. You nailed it in terms of this not being Adobe’s DNA. And to me, Adobe *still* doesn’t fully get the web and what to do there (one of the main reasons I left). I think that is intertwined with that DNA, and with the tools and things they focus on. It is also to some degree not fair, given that they tend to build “tools”, not say “services”. Sure, they have a few services, but most people would be hard pressed to name even one I think. So it’s not really comparable to compare building something with AIR or Flash to an actual end user solution.

    Ryan’s beef that all this could have been done 5 years ago with Flash and such is true, but at the same note, it didn’t get done. I would say that is partly Adobe’s fault in that they weren’t able to show what Flex, AIR, etc. could do in a convincing enough way to get the visionary folks to use it, but it’s also that there is a complicated overhead, not just with technology but with licensing, politics/corporate-ness, and all that that goes along with it.

    Anyway, interesting stuff all around.

  2. Michael Kozakewich said
    at 8pm on Oct 2nd # |

    There’s just something about Google. The way they can just lay out something new like that, over and over, in completely different parts of the internet ecosystem.

    It’s amazing, really.

  3. Pelle said
    at 6am on Oct 3rd # |

    Just a little funny sidenote – Adobe actually did launch “Wave” around a month after Google did – it’s just that it’s a different Wave – but still, “Adobe Wave” exists: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/wave/

  4. Ankush Narula said
    at 5am on Oct 7th # |

    a little devil’s advocate here… I wouldn’t entirely agree that Adobe hasn’t tackled any Inspiring BHAGs. Flash and AIR both pre-date their HTML/CSS/SVG counterparts. Flash certainly changed what was possible on a web page… And has driven creativity and innovation quite far. If nothing else, Adobe has driven the vision of rich asynchronous web applications and subsequently or indirectly spurred innovations in web browser standards. Let’s also not dismiss PDF and it’s impact on the move away from printing, faxing, and snail mail. I think it’s easy from a web infrastructure perspective todismiss presentation layer technologies an their impacts. I mean for deeper tier technologist that architect communications and security protocols, the presentation layer is just another client. Google Wave is communications infrastructure – outside the scope of Adobe’s core competency – the presentation layer. But to dismss Adobe’s successes in transforming the web’s presentation layer or how people work would be harsh. That said, I will concede that adobe’s successes were probably not based initially on BHAGs.

  5. John Coonen said
    at 12pm on Oct 21st # |

    What Would Lloyd Benson Say:

    “Adobe? I knew Google. Google was a friend of mine. Adobe, you’re no Google.”

    Agree, Adobe’s a great, empowering tool. Adobe’s here to help folks like Google and others create fundamental change.

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