Google: No Game Changer … Just Yet
June 5, 2008
Imagine my surprise when Computerworld picked up on information in my April 2008 Gilbane Group study, Beyond Search. You can read the Computerworld story here. (Hurry. Computerworld content can be hard to find if you dally. I won’t try to summarize the article nor will I comment on it beyond one modest observation.)
The GOOG bought Transformic. Transformic has some very prescient innovations. These are not new. In fact, the core insights date from the early 1990s. With the Google plumbing in place, XML and semi structured content processing in the bag, Google has to look beyond today. Never mind that Google’s competitors don’t have a clue what Google does on a day-to-day operational basis. The GOOG is the future.
The killer comment in the nice article by Chris Kanaracus is:
Inside an enterprise, and maybe unlike the Internet, you can know a lot about a user,” such as who they report to, said Matthew Glotzbach, director of product management for Google’s enterprise division. “There’s a lot of empirical information you can derive. All of that can be used to create a very, very rich profile about the user, which can then be used to create a really rich search experience.” Do not expect Google to suddenly bring a game-changing product to market, according to Glotzbach. “The model is not these kind of big-bang approaches where we work for multiple years and then roll something out. In terms of what we do in enterprise search, you’ll see a constant flow, as opposed to one sort of big bang — here’s a whole new thing,” he said.
Mr. Glotzbach was on a panel billed as a debate late last year. Ah, he’s a canny wordsmith that wizard be.
Mr. Glotzbach’s comment comes from the belly of a company planning to start building housing in the year 2013 on prime NASA real estate in Mountain View, Calif.
Time, to Google, means right now and really fast. Time also means the drip drip of incremental functions slipstreamed in apparently meaningless droplets. The pace will be Googley slow. You will need a time lapse camera to note the changes.
Should IBM, Oracle, and other giants in data management worry? Nope, executives at the companies told me that their knowledge of Google is rich, deep, and wide. I do have a nifty briefing about the Transformic technology. Interested? Write me at sa at arnoldit dot com.
A chipper quack to Computerworld for the reference to my new study.
Stephen Arnold, June 5, 2008
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