Open Handset Alliance, Open Social and the Platform Marketing Playbook

Google’s recent platform announcements are both classic Platform Marketing coups, but show a profound difference in style which has deep roots in two competing business cultures.

As OM, Rob Hof and others have pointed out, there is a lot of PR going on here. These are well packaged announcements of future releases of (hold you breath)…..SDK’s. But often that’s what Platform Marketing is all about. At this point, I’m sure most of can spot the playbook:

- The Goat Rodeo: Assemble ranks of supporters, preferably featuring a kingmaker or two

- Have a more-open-than-thou participatory architecture creating new business opportunities for all

- Demo. Show some demos if you can, particularly important if you don’t have any code to distribute to would be developers

And, perhaps most importantly…

- Disrupt the hegemony of some oppressive, proprietary villain, transforming them quite suddenly into “that which has been holding us all back”.

When performed well, this kind of move creates widespread permission to believe, mobilizing capital, developers and media observers, and can turns into a giant commercial success.

What struck me was the difference in style between the two announcements. One sounds like Redmond, while the other shows Steve Jobs’ imprint. The fact they are so different in style but came out of the same company says good things about Google’s culture, and suggests a healthy neutering of central marketing bureaucrats.

Open Social, led by Vic Gundotra (a friend and a truly fine human), comes out of the Microsoft genome, cerebral cortex marketing at its best: here is partner evidence and compelling demos of commercially relevant apps, proof positive of future success. The impression left is that these guys are so well organized, so on-message, that you would be a complete idiot to bet against them. I’m looking forward to training videos, Open Social developer certifications, and “Open Social For Managers” whitepapers.

Android and the Open Handset Alliance, run by Andy Rubin, who spent his formative work years at Apple, sounds a lot more like humanities-trained, enlightened SF Bay Area, more like a movie trailer than what it actually is: the announcement of a release date for an SDK.

Here you have the goat rodeo conference call of supporters, and the architecture of participation, but instead of focusing on evidence, with demos and code and forums and such, the Alien team aims for the heartstrings. Google has produced two videos, one in which Andy and the engineering team open up to the camera about their dreams for what Alien will enable, and one, “If I had Magic Phone” features pre-school children talking about their phones “going to the moon” and “getting them anything they want”. Goodness.

Back in the day at the borg, we didn’t spend a lot of energy trying to pluck developer’s heartstrings.

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