Learn Shortcuts, Not Content Excellence
July 8, 2008
Google controls the majority of Web search traffic in North America. The GOOG is good, but so far slippery fish like Yandex and Baidu remind venture capitalists and entrepreneur, the GOOG is not flawless. But in the fat-bellied U S of A, Google reigns supreme. A Web site that is not in the Google index does not exist. A Web site that does not appear in the top five or six hits on the first page of a search results’ page takes a kick to the liver.
SEO or search engine optimization is a real live discipline. There are hundreds of companies offering a wide range of services. Some are focused on getting a Web site to comply with Google’s Web master guidelines. Other offer exotic techniques to take a plain Bill Web site and dress him up to look like George Clooney. The idea is that George Clooney Web sites get more eyeballs than just plain Bill Web sites.
Disclaimer: I avoid SEO like I avoid dark alleys, my grade school playground at 3 am, and a yard full of mistreated pit bulls.
If you want your just plain Bill Web site to appear higher in a Google results list, there is now a full day course “Optimizing for Universal Search” for you. You can read the full description of the training class here. The instructors are search engine optimization experts, Greg Jarboe of SEO-PR and Amanda Watlington of Searching for Profit.
My experience in SEO is non existent, but I did grind through some of the information on this arcane practice for a section in my 2005 The Google Legacy. I tracked down about a 100 factors that appear to have had bearing on how a Web site gets to the top of a Google results list. I received more inquiries about this table from crazed people who had to get site traffic than any other topic in the monograph. Like the angry goose which is my logo, I deleted any discussion of SEO in my subsequent Google writings and presentations. I am not interested in helping 20-somethings make a Web site “popular”. I learned enough in my review of SEO to make formulate these views:
- Most Web sites have little substantive content. I am delighted that these Web sites do not appear high in my queries’ search results.
- Google spends quite a bit of energy trying to stay one step ahead of SEO wizards who fool PageRank. If I were smart enough to be a Google engineer and unlucky enough to be assigned to the team trying to deal with SEO spoofers’ tricks, I would probably honk loudly in annoyance. What a waste of mental work. Honk, honk.
- SEO firms charge big bucks to help Bill become George Clooney, a former Mayfair, Kentucky resident I must add. Some of the customers are having a hard time differentiating the services, figuring out of the fixes actually work, and trying to retrofit Web sites to deal with crazy urls pumped out by equally crazy content management systems.
What my research revealed is that content really helps a Web site get a high Google ranking. The theory is proven by my own tests. Put up content that people find interesting, and those people–fueled by their own motives–link to the good, interesting, or useful information. Over time, content wins. Metatag strategies, weird indexing, and child pages stuff with recycled text lose out tosubstantive content.
Well, HP Tries Another Way to Sell Ink
July 8, 2008
Pity the magazine industry. Paper costs are rising. Writers resist working for peanuts. Customers are shifting to online. Students don’t read magazines the way their parents did. I used to work for a newspaper and a magazine publisher, and I am now almost free of traditional media.
Hewlett Packard wants to sell ink. After buying Exstream Software for $1.2 billion, the company is now pushing in a new direction. Navigate to http://www.magcloud.com. The name evokes the sizzle of cloud computing and binds in the now dying world of magazine publishing. I think HP is trying to imbue traditional media with a sense that it’s not too late.
The idea behind Mag Cloud is that HP has big ink guzzling machines and software that allow a publisher to print a magazine for one person. In theory, the system can generate 10,000 different magazines if a publisher has 10,000 subscribers who provide enough data to make personalization possible.
Ink makes HP’s money mills work. IBM has wrested the server crown away from HP. Vendors like Asus and a slow moving Dell Computer challenge the HP PC revenue. What’s the big high tech company to do? implement the King Gillette model. Sell a bigger razor to hold that $8,000 a gallon razor blade.
Stephen Arnold, July 8, 2008
Google’s Economist Clarifies Transparency
July 7, 2008
My hard copy of the venerable New York Times and my news reader made it difficult for me to overlook the essay by Steve Lohr, another in the growing cadre of Gray Lady journalists covering the Google. “Google, Zen Master of the Market” is a benchmark in mass media’s discussion of Google. This addled goose cannot summarize the article; however, I can identify one key point and offer several observations. (You can get other views such as Clickety Clack’s here or Ross Mayfield’s here.)
Before identifying the crux of the analysis for me, I want to congratulate Mr. Lohr for skipping right over the lava lamps and the free Odwalla beverages, the great free lunch, and the wacky antics of the world’s smartest people. That is a refreshing change in my opinion. Please, let this editorial policy stick.
The Key Point for Me
Now, the crucial point for me in my hollow in rural Kentucky. Mr. Lohr writes:
Google, it seems, is the emerging dominant company in the Internet era, much as Microsoft was in the PC era. The study of networked businesses, market competition and antitrust law is being reconsidered in a new context, shaped by Google. Google’s explanation for its large share of the Internet search market — more than 60 percent — is simply that it is a finely honed learning machine. Its scientists constantly improve the relevance of search results for users and the efficiency of its advertising system for advertisers and publishers.
I agree. Please, read the entire piece in the increasingly hard to find paper version or the pop up ad covered online version here.
What’s striking about this passage are its assumptions, compressed like bits in a tarball. For example, here’s how I interpreted some of the words in this passage:
- “Seems”. Mr. Lohr is reluctant to come out and say that the Google is search, a monopoly, and still growing as a reasonable clip even in the lousy economic environment that has [a] destabilized poor, old Yahoo, [b] squeezed competitors in enterprise search, [c] chilled the blood of Verizon-type companies, and [d] triggered in Microsoft some pretty wild and crazy business actions such as paying for traffic, buying search technologies that are probably impossible to integrate, and putting its share price right in the middle of the “value stock” category;
- “Emerging dominant”. Mr. Lohr and other pundits cannot grasp the fact that Google is not emerging. The company is now 10 years old and getting close to puberty.
- “competition and antitrust law is being reconsidered in a new context” hip hops over Google’s operating as a supra national entity that is tough to regulate. Think about set theory. Google just isn’t in the set in which most regulations were designed to work. Anyway, by the time regulations are Google-ized, Google will be different.
- “Learning machine” is a nice way to say super computer with systems and methods that are automatically able to stay one step ahead of most users, most competitors, and most regulators. The more people use the Google, the more expertly the Google morphs into Google subscript n+1. Stated another way, you can’t pull the plug to allow the competition to catch up. Only a pile of lawyers can trip the Google at this time. To catch Google, a competitor has to stop Google’s “motion”. Failing that, closing the gap requires solving the “bridge” problem with which I close this essay.
Okay, I am tired of this little exercise in deconstruction.
My Telco Experience and How It Relates to Mr. Lohr’s Analysis
One final point before I offer some observations. Remember your university economics class. I sure do, and I don’t have a clue what my professor talked about. I graduated at or near the top of my class with a Summa cum laude designation from an unknown university in a corn field, but I remember the “cloud of unknowing” that settled over me.
An economist explaining transparency strikes me as amusing. Wait. Not amusing. The combination is like a a pause in Waiting for Godot. Google appears to be talking more. Whether it is the Excite and JotSpot founder Joe Kraus to Jeffrey Dean explaining for the umpteenth time how MapReduce works to Eric Schmidt explaining how to fix American innovation–these are efforts to humanize an entity that is not accurately perceived.
Let me give you an example. Ask your broker what business occupies Google. She will tell you that Google is a Web search company that sells advertising. Yes, the revenue comes from millions of people competing to buy key words displayed to user’s of Google search. Business school wizards at Harvard and Wharton will tell you that Google’s other revenue generating attempts have not as yet generated substantial revenue. Ergo, as Steve Ballmer accurately asserted, Google is a one-trick pony, or as I prefer, a one-trick Googzilla.
Now, I have written two studies–The Google Legacy (2005) and Google Version 2.0 (2007) which you can buy here–that argue Google is a company with a business model that is manifesting itself in this “advertisers pay” character that Wall Street loves so much. My research asserts that this business model is extensible to other business sectors. When pundits narrow their vision to the neighbor who sells quilts with AdWords, the bigger picture is blurred. Google’s disruptive force is the seeping of its business model into other business sectors; for example, mobile telephony.
I did a few briefings for telco senior managers. After my review of Google’s hook-them-when-they-are-young strategy, the telco executives snorted. College students were perfectly happy with the existing mobile services. Then I explained Google’s “pull strategy” where traditional direct sales is not emphasized. The telco executives explained that store fronts, promotions, and TV advertising were the keys to success. I explained that Google had dabbled with some unusual telco-related technology as early as 1998. The telco executives laughed and said, “We have decades of technology and no one can leap frog us.” In short, Google’s nine years of patent applications, technical papers, and presentations were dismissed as trivial, amateurish, and irrelevant. “Wow,” I said to my colleague who witnessed these reactions. “How can Google hire people from Bell Labs, let them innovate, and then dismiss former telco wizards as dorks?” Telco executives just did not make sense to me.
So what happened after my briefings?
Sprint swizzled into financial muck. Verizon got tangled in an auction and had to concede to open a tiny bit of its business to outsiders. The outsider (the Google, of course) became the camel getting its nose in the telco tent.
Now I have been around camels quite a bit for a Kentucky lad, and you want to keep these beasts out of the tent for sure.
Then Google rounded up two dozen partners in telephony. Next Google rolled out a beta mobile operating system. A developer conference followed. In short, by not doing much of anything that works by an objective yard stick like counting ad revenue, the Google has destabilized mobile telephony triggering wierd stuff like Nokia’s buying Symbian and indicting that it would become a software and services company.
You can read more about Google’s impact in my studies, and I think you can see that the business model is more abstract and therefore significant than selling online advertising. What is this business model? Again, some analysis appears in my studies, but it is larger, more potent, and more impactful than twisting Mr. Ballmer’s plans for online search.
My Observations
Let me conclude with three observations:
- When the calculus swept Europe, mathematicians had to use it because it worked. Doing stuff with zeros was illogical, but it worked. I think Google is this type of contribution to business. Economists–even those working at Google–don’t have the tools to understand the Google calculus, but, hey, it works.
- Analysis of Google–after 10 years–is beginning to become more rigorous. My hope is that the trend continues. No, Google is not making anyone stupid. Lots of people are already stupid, and Google is an entity that can derive benefit from stupid and brilliant people. Right now, Google’s ability to do this is orders of magnitude more efficient than its competitors’ instrumentality.
- Perception of Google will remain difficult because the company is polymorphic. The rate of change in the systems and methods is modest, but when an adjustment occurs via its “finely honed learning machine”, it is difficult to perceive its effects. This is not a “network effect”; it is a different type of behavior, closer to nuclear physics than analogies about the value of facsimile machines.
The good news is that more thought is now being given to the Google. The bad news is that the pundits are starting a decade behind. I could explain how this works with more references to calculus, but I will not. Here’s an analogy. To catch up with the Google, a competitor needs technology, people, and money. No problem. The absolute is time.
Google has changed the time value for its competition by using fast local changes within larger chunks of time; for example, Google Talk versus the Android developer play–each with a different time to payoff clock.
Stick that ploymorphic stuff into a traditional economic model and what emerges is one of those problems in getting from here to there without a bridge or the materials to make a bridge.
In short, the Google is one place. Everyone else at this point in time is somewhere else. Pretty clever, no?
Agree? Disagree? This backwoods fellow can still learn. Just include pertinent data, not that stuff from college econ classes.
Stephen Arnold, July 7, 2008
Vista Humor
July 7, 2008
For a chuckle, navigate to PCWorld Australia here. A clever person created pseudo code to provide some insight into Vista. This is a joke, and you don’t have to know how to program to enjoy the author’s considerable wit. The commented out reference to Windows 2000 is a nice touch.
Stephen Arnold, July 7, 2008
Google Acquisitions
July 7, 2008
A Digg post reminded me that Wikipedia does a very good job of keeping its Google information up to date. The link to the Wikipedia Web page listing Google’s acquisitions is here. A happy quack to jimmaculate.
I want to point out that Google has a number of vendors, partners, and relationships that don’t make it to these publicly maintained lists. One of the most interesting is Google’s involvement with various university research projects in hardware and software engineering. If you know of a list of these, post the link in the comments section to this Web log.
Finally, I want to call your attention to one interesting acquisition Google made in 2005 or early 2006–Transformic. I have a for-fee report about this deal coming out, but because of the contract terms, I can’t provide much substance. I can say that this acquisition may prove to be one of the most significant ones Google executed in the last 24 months. Like my work for some of the investment banks, I get a tiny footnote or a check. Hey, it’s a living.
Stephen Arnold, July 7, 2008
Why Microsoft Fears Google Sort of Revealed
July 7, 2008
My trusty news reader delivered this knowledge dumpling to me on July 5, 2008. I scanned it between pitches at the Louisville Bats baseball game. Like most commercial business writing, the essay is good, well-reasoned, and shaped to put major events into an understandable context. You can read “Why Microsoft Will Win Yahoo” here. by David Kirkpatrick, senior editor of Fortune, writing on CNN.com. This business essay has an A at Wharton written all over it: primary research in the form of quotes from a personal discussion with Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer, humor in the form of a left-handed description of Google as owner of the “world’s most powerful and profitable marketplace” with Google technology described as not “the best”, and an analysis pegged to Microsoft’s need to get its transmission in gear in terms of online advertising.
With Mr. Kirkpatrick, I agree on most points, but one passage nibbled at me during the thrill-lacking Louisville Bats’s game:
Google (GOOG, Fortune 500) drives Microsoft crazy for two fundamental reasons. One, Google has developed the fastest-growing new pool of profit in technology with its ad-supported search business. And secondly, it has taken the mantle of “greatest and most powerful tech company” away from Microsoft, with all the associated benefits that go along with that, most notably a very high stock-market valuation.
Here’s why.
Recall that Google is a decade old. It is no start up, but some journalists fall for the crazy college guys charade with astounding consistency.
Today, the company is without a doubt the leader in search. With some inspired me-too borrowing, Google jumped into online advertising and now, after facing minimal competition is these areas controls somewhere between 65 percent and 75 percent of the market for search in North America and Europe. Russia is lagging because of Yandex.
And Google’s search and ad platform was accidentally discovered by Google as able to support a range of applications, services, and functions. Some of these are definitely not-searchy. For about nine years, Google’s engineers have built more than 80 services, created a Google Search Appliance, moved into mapping, probed online database technology, and offered products and services to the education market, commercial enterprises, and government agencies. The telecommunications industry discovered how annoying Google could be with its New Age approach to mobile communications. The video industry is relying on Viacom to put Google in a straight jacket. All told, Google is exploring six or seven industry sectors with products and services. Some of these are only variations of search technology; other thrusts such as online payments just run on the Google super computer.
Microsoft is now trying to “close the gap”, “catch up”, or more colloquially “kill Google” by taking these actions:
- Creating Live.com, expanding cloud or network solutions, and making Google a focal point much as Inquisition worker bees focused on folks who did not follow the desired line of thought
- Announcing investments in data centers and research labs. Both of these initiatives look quite a bit like Google’s approach to data centers and research labs, but Google got its ideas from AltaVista.com engineers and Bell Labs. The problem is that it takes time to get data centers up and running, particularly when you are using systems that require name brand hardware and technical baby sitting.
- Buying search technology.
The leader in collecting search technology is Yahoo. So, Microsoft will buy that company and get licenses and technicians familiar with these search systems: {a} AllTheWeb.com which was originally based on Fast Search & Transfer technology now owned by Microsoft; [b] AltaVista.com, the company whose engineers provided Google with a turbo boost in the the 1999 to 2002 period with some residual kick continuing even now; [c] Inktomi, one of the original Web indexing systems; [d] the Flickr search system; [e] Stata Labs, the email search system in use in Yahoo mail; [f] InQuira, the natural language search system used for Yahoo Help; [g] the various research search engines that range from the moth balled Mindset to the newer and somewhat flaky semantic Microsearch; [h] the moth balled Delicious.com search system; and a handful of others lost in the jumble room of my 64 year old memory.
Add to this collection, the SQL Server search technology, two types of SharePoint search, the search functions in Dynamics CRM, Fast Search & Transfer’s Web search and ESP (enterprise search platform), a couple of flavors of desktop search, the mind boggling awful search in Outlook and Outlook Express, and the search function in the Xbox which at one time was provided by Mondosoft (now part of SurfRay in Denmark). The Powerset search system built on Xerox PARC technology and partially running on Amazon’s Web services platform. Of course, I’m probably forgetting a few.
What I am driving at is that if and when Microsoft buys Yahoo’s search business, the Yahoo.com site really should be part of the bargain. Despite its many flaws and weird America Online approach to information, Yahoo.com gets traffic. And traffic is what Microsoft needs, not more wacky search technology.
Consider this statement by Mr. Kirkpatrick:
So even though Microsoft has with painstaking and expensive effort come near to par with Google on search technology, it still shows little likelihood of competing successfully with it as a search business.
“Par with Google on search technology” is not going to deal with the fact that Microsoft finds itself on the defensive not just in search but in these key areas:
- Brand (generally positive)
- Demographic hooks (moving into education where Apple and Microsoft have long ruled the hen house)
- Business models (Advertisers pay, “pull” sales, not “push” sales the way Microsoft earns money, piece of the action, etc.)
- Velocity of innovation (slowing but still pretty zippy)
- Cheaper operating and infrastructure costs (not understood and overlooked as a competitive advantage by Wall Street analysts)
- Time (Google has a head start and is still moving forward).
When I read business articles, I recognize the care that goes into them. I know from my days at Ziff Communications how much it costs to craft prose that flows.
My concern is that after a decade of Google being Google, no one recognizes that Google represents a fundamental change in the software, services, and systems business. Microsoft is now reacting but I think it is too late to buy aging portals, collect odd ball technologies, and try to use money to buy parity with Google.
The Fortune article does not and can not tackle such issues in a short essay. I am looking forward to Fortune and other publications coverage of Google. I do hope to read something more substantive than Microsoft will keep trying to catch Google (pretty much an impossibility in my little Kentucky sphere of understanding), Google making people stupid (a concept I don’t understand because Google manifests a demographic. Google did not create the demographic’s behaviors), and Google is on the ropes in the telco business.
Google drifts above these particulars. The company does face a grave threat but from attorneys, not software companies or venture capitalists’ bets on “Google killers”.
Information on this perspective on Google is available, just hard to find.
Stephen Arnold, July 6, 2008
Not So Fast, Folks
July 6, 2008
My news reader alerted me to an essay “How Fast Is Attivio?” The author is Adrian Bloem, a contributing analyst to CMSWatch.com and its Enterprise Search Report. I try to keep track of ESR and its new shepherds.
Some readers may know I suffered a “heart event” and had to step away from Enterprise Search Report in February 2007. This was a tough decision because ESR was in a way my “baby.” I wrote the first three editions (2004 to 2006).
If there was a mistake in the math of the cost analysis, I made it. I was responsible.
But when I quit, I was no longer responsible. When someone asks me why the number of profiles has been reduced, what do I know? When I stepped away from ESR, I gave up any control over what CMSWatch.com includes or excludes from the ESR fourth edition.
Sure, I still get a pittance in royalties, but if there is a mistake, I sure as heck am not responsible because I quit, allowing others to take control. I tell people, “Take it up with CMSWatch.com, not me.” I think you follow my logic here.
How does this apply to Attivio, a start up?
Attivio: Moving Beyond Search
Some history: My interest in Attivio arose from the research I did for my April 2008 monograph Beyond Search: What to Do When Your Enterprise Search System Doesn’t Work. When I was recovering from my little health problem, I did some hard thinking about the sameness of the enterprise search vendors, the many problems I had documented, and survey data that said, “60 percent of the users of enterprise search were dissatisfied with their enterprise search system.” 60 percent! That is a big number, now backed up by other survey findings. But in 2007 few knew what I knew about the problems with traditional enterprise search systems.
The data said to me, “Key word and legacy systems are not what users looking for information needed.”
My study Beyond Search explains these needs and some options, consuming about 300 pages to summarize my data. As I worked on the study, I become more vocal about the user dissatisfaction with enterprise search than some of the other speakers the search conference circuit.
The root of the problem is that the users’ needs and expectations. Most search systems were not changing fast enough or simply could not change.
A colleague alerted me to Attivio. I recall her saying, “Attivio is trying to leapfrog the many problems of traditional enterprise search.”
So, I played telephone tag and finally chased down the Attivio senior management team. I do have a tenacious streak. I used the same technique on executives from Silobreaker (Stockholm, Sweden), MarkLogic (San Carlos, California), Exalead (Paris), and 24 other companies with systems that move “beyond search”. A phase change is taking place, and I wanted first-hand intelligence about what was happening. You can read some of this information in my free Search Wizards Speak series on ArnoldIT.com.
When I read Mr. Bloem’s well-crafted essay, published on July 5, 2008, I was struck by the skepticism with regard to Attivio and, by extension, toward other companies with pre-alpha or early-stage systems; for example, Powerset (now part of Microsoft), Radar Networks (Twine), and Tigerlogic (ChunkIt), among dozens of others.
These are works in progress, and each of these companies is working hard to sign up customers and make sales.
My information about Attivio comes from my knowing a couple of the founders, several of whom who worked at Fast Search’s offices near Boston, Massachusetts. Also, I know a bit about Fast Search technology because I had an engineering oversight role for the US Federal government on the Fast Search implementation for the FirstGov.gov, a US government wide index of citizen-facing content.
In my push forward way, I tracked down Attivio’s founder–Ali Riaz–and interviewed him about his new company and its technical approach.
Mr. Riaz made it clear to me that he and his former colleagues wanted to move “beyond search”; that is, these professionals knew that key word and legacy information retrieval systems were not what users wanted. Mr. Riaz wanted to follow another path, moving to next-generation information access methods. He said:
From all our accumulated experiences in the industry, we realized that search is simply not enough to solve the problems that search has been trying to solve. We realized that today’s search platforms–specifically enterprise search–have become legacy technologies. The market needed a fresh approach, and that’s why we created Attivio.
Please, read the complete interview with Mr. Riaz, which took place in May 2008, here.
In my primary research with Attivio’s management, I learned that Attivio is not a reseller of Fast Search & Transfer’s Enterprise Search Platform. I also learned that Attivio–like IBM, Siderean Software, Tesuji, and other information access companies–was using the open source search system Lucene as a base upon which to build.
The idea was, according to Mr. Riaz:
The Active Intelligence Engine, or AIE. Our AIE enables enterprises to blend their structured data and unstructured content without compromising the richness of either, offering the precision of SQL and the fuzziness of search by “mashing up” search and business intelligence data warehouse technologies.
Attivio, like six or seven of the companies profiled in my Beyond Search study for the Gilbane Group, was designed as a blend of components–some open source, others proprietary, and a lot of their own intellectual property.
Mr. Riaz told me that he was not reselling any vendors’ technology, preferring to “do his own thing”. No big surprise here. Mr. Riaz left Fast Search in mid-2006 and I was talking to him in May 2008.
What Gnaws at Me
The issue that gnaws at me is the implication as I understand Mr. Bloem’s essay that Attivio and its executives are tainted by the problems that have surfaced after they left Fast Search in 2006.
Mr. Riaz and the other Fast Search professionals were employees, reporting to the management team in Norway.
My research indicates that Fast Search’s problems came about because of a dearth of engineers who could install and customize the Fast Search system. I written extensively on this subject in this Web log. The posts are here.
The core of my analysis pivots on gap between the ability of the Fast Search sales team to close major deals, and the difficulty Fast Search encountered hiring enough qualified engineers to implement these enterprise systems.
Without qualified engineers, it is tough to install any enterprise search system. Expertise in search and content processing remains in short supply just as it has been since the ascendance of Google.
In my experience, this type of staffing problem, like a bobsled racing down a run, begins slowly and then gains momentum over time when hiring is slowed due to a shortage of talent.
In the period between 2006 to the present, the engineering staff issue accelerated like a bobsled racing down a mountain.
Microsoft Hosted Exchange Security and Archiving
July 6, 2008
I lost track of Microsoft’s 2005 acquisition, FrontBridge. The company, as you may recall, was a provider of comprehensive secure messaging services. FrontBridge’s “Total Message Management” services ensure the security, compliance and continuity of electronic messages. The system provided managed services for email and instant message archiving, spam filtering, virus scanning, encrypted email, policy enforcement and disaster recovery.
I had in my files a schematic that shows the FrontBridge architecture, which remains largely intact within the hosted Exchange service.
With search vendors morphing into eDiscovery, you may want to update your links to Microsoft’s Exchange Hosted Services, where FrontBridge plays a role. You can find the start page here. At the time of the acquisition, I understood that FrontBridge would be a Microsoft subsidiary. By 2006, FrontBridge became part of the Exchange product. The original 2006 pricing for email and message filtering was pegged at at $1.75 per user, per month; Archiving at $17.25 per user, per month with an unlimited retention period and 3.6 gigabytes of storage; Continuity at $2.50 per user, per month; and Encryption at $1.90 per user, per month. I am not sure how the pricing operates as Microsoft evolves its hosted services.
As you try to determine the value of licensing a third-party secure messaging service or use the hosted Exchange solution, you may find the diagram useful in getting your bearings.
Stephen Arnold, July 6, 2008
SurfRay AB Update
July 6, 2008
In the first two editions of Enterprise Search Report, I profiled Mondosoft, a Microsoft-centric search system. I gave it a favorable review. Like most Microsoft-centric products, unless properly resourced, performance can become an issue. By the time I started work on the third edition of ESR in 2006, I had heard rumors of some changes underway at the firm. By late 2007, Mondosoft became part of SurfRay, a Danish search conglomerate. I found the search system implemented for the Vatican quite interesting. Hit boosting and multi-lingual support added zest to what could have been a sinfully bad (no pun intended) search experience. You can try it here.
In 2004, Mondosoft caught my attention because it was one of the first search vendors to offer analytics for licensees. Mondosoft, when deployed in a SharePoint environment, brought much needed usage data into the SharePoint picture. Instead of flying blind, Mondosoft gave the system administrator useful information about user actions. With Mondosoft’s analytics, SharePoint sites could be tuned to improve the user’s experience. Microsoft talked about SharePoint user experience; Mondosoft delivered technology that addressed user experience.
Mondosoft then acquired Ontolica, a company that made better use of SharePoint metadata and generated other useful tags. With Ontolica 3.2 installed and properly resourced, a SharePoint administrator could provide a useful set of hot links related to the user’s query. Microsoft delivered a blunt instrument; Ontolica provided a precision tool.
SurfRay’s product line includes an advanced, multi-lingual search engine suite with three components [a] MondoSearch, [b] BehaviorTracking, and [c] InformationManager, SurfRay’s Speed Index search and retrieval system, and Ontolica Search for SharePoint, providing business intelligence on information creation, search, retrieval and use. SurfRay also owns technology that can speed up searches of traditional relational database tables. In addition, SurfRay provides consulting services to its licensees. Plus, the company offers SurfRay XP search for Xerox’s multifunction document systems.
SurfRay/Mondosoft customers include Bosch, Burger King Corporation, Coleman. Hilton Hotels, Honeywell Process Solutions, Microsoft, Overnight Transportation, People’s Bank, Shell Oil, Siemens, SimCorp, The Swiss Army, TDC, The Vatican Holy See and United Technologies. SurfRay’s CEO and founder is Martin Veise. The president of the company is Steffen Saxil.
SurfRay has offices in New York, Stockholm, Bangkok and Copenhagen. You can learn more about the company here.
Stephen Arnold, July 6, 2008
More Googzilla Warts: New York Times Throws a Punch
July 6, 2008
I mention this story–“On Day Care Google Makes a Rare Fumble”–by Joe Nocera to document Google’s headwinds. The piece appeared on July 5, 2008 on the Web site of the New York Times. You can read it here. The peg is day care at Google. Day care has been a hot potato in my experience. What I found interesting is this statement:
in June, the Google co-founder Sergey Brin said he had no sympathy for the parents, and that he was tired of “Googlers” who felt entitled to perks like “bottled water and M&Ms,” according to several people in the meeting. (A Google spokesman denies that Mr. Brin made that comment.)
Whether an accurate or inaccurate statement, in my opinion its inclusion puts a magnifying glass on Googzilla’s snout. Google, once the darling of the media, is now just another blundering company with insensitive management. Agree? Disagree? Set me straight, please.
Stephen Arnold, July 6, 2008
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