Many think that Slack is a better product than Microsoft Teams, but that is not what the graph reflects. In fact, if you extend it to 2024, Slack’s 39mn users are swamped by Teams 320mn!
Why and how?
The simple answer is distribution, the most powerful and sometimes the most under-rated aspect of marketing and business. Microsoft 365 has 345 mn paid users, and Teams is free for them, thus the 320mn.
Simple!
In the good old days, when Microsoft was the enemy, it had a EEE strategy of Embrace, Extend and Extinguish: first they created a tool using open and popular standards, then created a proprietary extension which quickly gained popularity through its brute distribution and dominance of the PC market, and finally used this extension to control all the market and extinguish their competitor.
I thought of the above as I sprinted my way through the 2 hour Google I/O video today. (Aside: The event should be renamed Google AI; the event ran for 110 mins, the word AI was mentioned 121 times!).
They had a slew of announcements some impressive, but a lot in prototype stage.
Searching through Google Photos called Ask Photos was impressive. They announced a more powerful and advanced version of their LLM Gemini 1.5, and an intriguing AI agent that can return products that you have shopped. Project Astra was like GPT4o, the only difference being that GPT4o is in my phone today, and Astra is still a prototype. More powerful text to image, text to music, and Veo the new text to Video – all still demoware. A new TPU. Big announcement on Search with AI Overviews. And many more things.
The subtext: basically, there is no product at Google which is not going to have the magic dust of AI and GenAI sprinkled on it.
Google search with 2bn+ users and 6mn searches a minute, gets redone entirely with GenAI. Gmail with 1.8bn users gets Vitamin AI. YouTube’s 1.8bn users can have AI generated text summaries of the nearly 4bn videos that the site hosts. Android with its nearly 4bn users gets AI on tap. The list goes on.
See, where I am going with this?
OpenAI with its scrappy innovation can turn out eye-popping products like ChatGPT, Sora, and now GPT4o galore (as they did in their developer event just yesterday), but what they lack is their native distribution. One and a half years after ChatGPT, the needle is stuck at 100mn users or so. Impressive, but chicken feed compared to Google’s captive billions.
Yes, OpenAI has Microsoft backing them, with its 345mn Microsoft 365 users, all fed with OpenAI through Microsoft’s rapid integration of its models in its products.
But still chickenfeed, compared to what Google can do if it executes. Google does not need to innovate, as much as it needs to distribute. The I/O basically was doing that – no product left untouched.
Remember, Google owns the Internet. Which, in turn, owns us.
#GenerativeAI #Search
This post was originally shared by Jaspreet Bindra on Linkedin.