You could argue that this is Google's Internet Explorer moment. Disruptive technology comes along that threatens entrenched tech giant's core business. Tech giant is still lead by its brilliant, passionate founder, and still filled with many smart people. Big long memo is sent out by one of the company's VPs. Senior engineers are pulled off other projects and brought together on one team, first to catch-up to the new challenger and then to surpass it. The rest of the company is realigned to support their efforts.
Remember that Microsoft did do something this big and fast once - they won the browser wars. They probably couldn't do it now that Ballmer's in charge. But in Microsoft's heyday...yes, they could.
I'm hoping this isn't what I'd call Google's Microsoft stage - being focused on an area that a relative upstart dominates, with little results.
Internet Explorer was 'successful', but mainly as a block to prevent anyone else from being dominant in the browser space. What comes to mind is Microsoft's attempt to replace Google by imitating them thoroughly with Live search and then Bing, that coming after other projects such as MSN, an equally lame clone of AOL.
There does seem to be a big cultural difference between Google and Microsoft in that Microsoft was always focused on winning while Google's is focused on innovating. It seems baked into their corporate DNA. I know many Google+ engineers that will bristle if you suggest that it's just a Facebook clone. It's a necessary evil that it looks a lot like Facebook now, because there's a certain baseline set of functionality that users need in a social network and you can't just ignore it to be different. I'd be very disappointed, and I think many other Googlers would too, if Google+ was only just as good as the incumbent.
Of course, a lot will depends on what comes down from the top - the reason IE is lame is because it was destaffed after Microsoft won the browser wars. From what I know about Larry Page's personality, though, this doesn't seem like something he's likely to do.
Personally, I don't see Google+ as an FB clone either. Awarding FB the 'rights' to social networking features is reminiscent of a non-deserved software patent - the functionality of FB is not unprecedented, non-obvious or original. Their success is in bringing it all together in one place successfully. Talking to friends and sharing materials with them is a natural way that people are going to use the internet.
When I heard about G+ my thoughts were along the same lines as the recent posts from MySpace's founder. Google has offered these services for years, but they have not been well integrated with each other or presented as a unified product. Overall Picasa, Buzz, Profiles and so on have not been branded or marketed well. Putting these together makes sense. I'm glad Google has done it and I'm pleased to see it's being well received.
What seems new for Google is how this is a 'real identity' network. There's a key difference between communities where one can choose between a real name, anonymity or a pseudonym, exemplified by sites likes on YouTube, Reddit or your average random web forum, vs. the Facebook style where policy requires that you use your given name and have a single identity. Each style engenders a different dynamic, and has benefits or drawbacks. Maintaining the right to and acceptance anonymity on the internet is a quite important cultural issue in my opinion, however.
I definitely agree that Google and MS are very different companies, personality wise. MS's style is to copy competitors products, cargo-cult style, but miss the overall point. They seekt want to eliminate competition without really caring about the original point of the product - IE was just one in a long line of examples of this. They definitely don't care about improving the product after they eliminate the original, I suppose because the product or what it did was never the point. I don't think Google is like that at all... A company's behavior so often reflects the behavior of the people who run it at a high level, and the two founders of Google are not at all like Gates or Ballmer.
It's important to note though, that Microsoft only accomplished that by bundling it with their OS (which they'd gotten to near monopoly status through a long series of dirty tricks). Then they tightly integrated its code to prevent removal. They attacked alternative projects at every level from PR/FUD to lawsuits. They used things like Active-X to create technology traps which they wantonly inflicted on naive customer, totally against the customer's interests. They increased lock-in at every step, making it easy to use other program's settings but hard to migrate away. Just as we hear Facebook is doing, blocking tools for reading your own data.
Google on the other hand, is offering services without any lock-in or bundling. You can export your setting easily.
They're doing something much harder, and that we rarely see. They're competing on value. If they want users to stick around they'll have to treat them as the customers.
It could, eventually, usher in a new age in software - one where you didn't just tolerate failure because it came bundled with your hardware.
I'm not entirely sure that IE only became successful because it was bundled with the OS. In many ways, it really was the better browser. It rendered faster than Netscape, its UI was for the most part cleaner, it introduced innovations like the XHR, and it was even more standards-compliant. (Shocker I know, but does anyone remember trying to do DHTML with Layers in Netscape 4?) The reason I switched from Netscape 4 to IE5 wasn't that IE5 came with my computer (the first thing I did with a new computer was to download Netscape anyway), it was that Netscape 4 flat out hung when I tried to visit many websites.
Microsoft also did all this shady stuff with bundling it into the OS because that's apparently how they operate, but I'm not actually sure this made all that much difference in winning. It certainly wasn't what won me over.
I hate Microsoft, but there is a lot of truth to what you say. IE 4 was clearly better than Netscape 4. And IE 5 better still. Then they rested on their laurels.
IE 4 was better than Netscape 4, but the average user - the vast majority of not-terribly-technical sorts - goes with whatever's on the computer to begin with. Microsoft probably could have won the browser war (albeit much later, and less completely) simply with bundling a not-quite-as-good-as-Netscape browser.
> Google on the other hand, is offering services without any lock-in or bundling.
There isn't lock-in, but they do seem to be trying for the bundling, where they're jump-starting a new product (that people may or may not want) by trying to tie it to existing popular products, not entirely in an opt-in manner. It'll be interesting to see how exactly the process plays out; they do appear to be aware of the potential for backlash if they're too strong-armed about forcing Blogger and Picasa users into Google+, but they also seem pretty interested in strongly nudging them towards it.
Looming further on the horizon, it'll be interesting to see whether they try to integrate Google+ and the similarly-named "Google +1" more closely, as a way of getting Google+ into search (their big dominant-market-share product that's an obvious candidate for bundling, at least if antitrust regulators don't get upset). The +1 product much more overtly tries to leverage search; e.g. it's on search results by default now, and information about how it affects search results is on the Webmaster Tools console.
You could argue that this is Google's Internet Explorer moment. Disruptive technology comes along that threatens entrenched tech giant's core business. Tech giant is still lead by its brilliant, passionate founder, and still filled with many smart people. Big long memo is sent out by one of the company's VPs. Senior engineers are pulled off other projects and brought together on one team, first to catch-up to the new challenger and then to surpass it. The rest of the company is realigned to support their efforts.
Remember that Microsoft did do something this big and fast once - they won the browser wars. They probably couldn't do it now that Ballmer's in charge. But in Microsoft's heyday...yes, they could.