Google is a publishing platform that needs a developer platform

There’s been a lot of talk about Google becoming an operating system on the internet.

I also commented earlier tonight about the dynamic face of the internet that the corporates are battling over.

A good addendum to both points is John Gruber’s comments at Daring Fireball:

the central tenet of Microsoft’s success is that they have developed platforms, not just products — but where is Google creating a platform for third-party developers?

What makes something a platform is that you can’t take it away without the stuff that’s built on it falling down…Platforms are solid, because they are entrenched.

Google is an advertising company. They don’t profit from search, they don’t profit from software. They profit by selling ads.

If Google has a platform, it’s an advertising platform, not a developer platform.

Google’s software is just an excuse to show ads. Google may or may not become a direct threat to Microsoft in the future, but in the here and now, the entrenched monopolies that ought to feel threatened by Google are newspapers.

Whenever anyone raises the issue of Google’s reliance on other platforms, I am haunted by my comments on the inevitability of the Google Browser - because Google *does* need a platform of sorts from which to protect access to it’s own products.

As I highlighted in that article, the longer Google relies entirely on third-arty companies to bring traffic to generate revenues, the more dangerously unbalanced the company revenues can continue to be.

After all, Microsoft could implement “security” features in a future version of Internet Explorer, which could “inadvertently” block Google AdSense by default. Additionally, it could even block advertising on a page, and replace it with its own publisher network ads, which are on their way.

Anti-trust or not, any simple IE update that blocks Javascripted ads by default would mostly destroy Google as a company. No board of directors can consider that a suitable business model to live from.

Which means that Google needs to at least have its own browser. And just maybe, they even need to develop an actual operating system of their own, to protect that business model.

As Scott Rosenberg plainly observes:

Each time Google releases any software that is not browser-based — whether it’s Google Desktop, or Picasa, or the new Google Talk — it has offered only a Windows version of the product. No Mac versions, no Linux versions.

Which underlines all the more reason why being a publishing platform alone cannot remove Google’s long-term need to develop a developer platform to protect its interests.