Baidu Is No Dodo: Growth Takes Wing
July 25, 2008
Pete Barlas wrote “China Search Leader Baidu Still Reporting Strong Growth”. You can read the full text here. Baidu, not Google, holds sway in the booming Chinese market. In the most recent quarter, Baidu’s revenue doubled to $117 million. The company projects revenue of more than $130 million in the next quarter. The company generates revenue from paid search ads. The company reports that it has more than 180,000 advertisers, up from 161,000 12 months ago. Can Google close the gap? I will be watching.
Stephen Arnold, July 25, 2008
Taxonomies: 24 Caret or Fool’s Gold
July 25, 2008
I have been bedeviled by taxonomies in the last two weeks. Vendors want to demo their systems. Clients want to find out how to make their taxonomies improve search. Even an entrepreneur showed up, gave me money, and outlined his taxonomy scheme for world domination.
Fancy tools are not needed to create a useful taxonomy.
Yikes!
The purpose of this feature is to provide some basic places to seek taxonomy lists, services, and functions. The list is not complete, and I will add to it over time.
- Dow Jones Factiva. You can get librarians to give you a hand and license software too. Click here for traditional media’s taxonomy resource.
- Interse. A Microsoft SharePoint-centric system. Click here.
- SV Technologies, now part of Sydney Plus. Legal taxonomy. Click here
- Taxonomy Warehouse. This is the place to start. Click here to start your quest.
- WAND. Software, services, and term lists based on business units. Click here.
- Wordmap. The grandpappy of many whippersnappers’ word lists. Click here
In my April 2008 Beyond Search study, I provide in depth analyses of Access Innovations‘ system and the SchemaLogic taxonomy management systems. You can get information about the for fee profiles here.
This is not a complete list. If you wish to add companies, please use the comment form for this Web log.
Stephen Arnold, July 25, 2008
Google’s Evangelist Evangelizes to Telcos: Tough Audience for the GOOG
July 25, 2008
Telecommunications companies like Verizon, AT&T, and SBC have got the Internet and the users all by the nose– without a T1 fiber, a DSL line, a cable connection, or heaven forbid, dial-up, a user has to resort to hitting a Starbucks or a McDonald’s to get online.
The major players not only offer the service on current infrastructure, they can offer bundles of products (Who has the cable/telephone/Internet combo at home? Go ahead, raise your hand.) to make consumers’ lives easier. Why go anywhere else? It keeps control firmly in their hands, and any other companies wanting to get into the game are on the outside looking in.
In the Internet’s infancy, we were willing to give the telcos if not carte blanche, certainly an easy road with little regulation to expand networks. It took the telcos lots of time and lots of money – and now this monopoly is their reward.
Vint Cerf, affectionately called “Father of the Internet” and Google’s Chief Internet Evangelist, is preaching that there needs to be more regulation of the telcos as well as more competition (Read: Google wants to sell Internet access, too). You can hear an audio interview here.
From Google’s point of view, incentives are needed to bring more competitors into the market to break the telco monopoly. And who would those competitors be? How about Google, Microsoft, IBM, etc…. Cerf summarized his (and Google’s, presumably) opinion by saying that the telco companies are acting like spoiled children – they want the incentives and they want to keep the network, too.
It’s bad for the country, Cerf says. It’s bad for Google, too.
So Google is planning its own Internet revolution. In the past ten years or so the concept of broadband power lines (BPL) has come up several times. This would let electric companies in on the Internet access game, but the technology was iffy and caused other problems with service. In March of this year Google sent the FCC a proposal to provide wireless high-speed access over power lines without the problems of the past. Info is here. Time will tell.
So the current Internet service monopoly, grounded in business models based on 19th century principles (outlive the opponent to win), is colliding with a monolith built on 21st century principles (if you can’t beat them, buy them).
The truism remains: Nuclear war is won by the outfit that strikes first. And Google has shown in the past that it has power – and it’s not afraid to use it.
Jessica Bratcher, July 25, 2008
Google Israel: Beavering Away
July 24, 2008
Google Israel remains my pick for the smartest Google operation outside of Mountain View. My opinion may rile the whiz kids working near Seattle and annoy the heck out of the wizards in Beijing, but I’m entitled to my view.
Noa Parag’s “Google as a Start Up?” is an important essay, and I suggest you click this link to Globes Online and read his English language article here. It’s one part interview with Googler Meir Brand who is pretty good at math and one part business analysis. Don’t delay. Globes Online doesn’t claim to be an online archive, but it does claim bragging rights to its coverage of Israel’s business affairs.
So, what did I learn?
- Google Israel is operated like a start up. The company has 100 employees in two R&D centers, one in Haifa and one in Tel Aviv.
- Google Israel developed Google Trends and the overlay technology that puts text content on video clips available on YouTube.com
- Mobile advertising is a significant opportunity.
Noa Parag’s write up underscores to points about Google. First, the company delegates and relies on email, Google’s internal online system to keep Google Israel “down the hall”. Google, despite its size, is allowing Google Israel to run with the start up ball.
Stephen Arnold, July 24, 2008
A David Outperforming Two Goliaths: Factiva, Lexis, Silobreaker
July 24, 2008
A thoughtful reader sent me a screen shot of a Compete.com report. This is the metrics company that says, “Track your rivals. Then eat their lunch.” As you may know, I don’t get too excited by third party analytics. The data have to show me a big jump, or most of the market shares information is a statistical fuzz ball. When I saw this chart, I took notice.
The time period is a 12 month span, ending on June 30, 2008. The companies on the chart are Dow Jones’s “other” online service, Dow Jones Factiva. You can read more about this outfit here. This online service is so adept that it’s Google ad today (July 24, 2008) returns a 404 error or “File Not Found”. I clicked on the ad eight or nine times to see if was traditional media latency or just carelessness. Answer: carelessness.
The second company’s data charted by Compare is Lexis Nexis, one of the two monopolies in legal information. I love the Lexis tag line: “Lead with Confidence. Work with Confidence. Grow with Confidence.” Unfortunately this Compare.com chart shows Lexis following, not something to inspire confidence or trigger growth. Lexis Nexis sells online information to lawyers, but not surprisingly, lawyers have been finding out that their clients expect the legal eagles to use publicly accessible services, not the high priced services. Accordingly, Lexis Nexis has been working overtime to make Lexis spin more money. Nexis, has been paddling upstream for years, and the brand has less visibility than the hair product (Nexxis) in my opinion. Lexis tried to get the hair product company to change its name. Didn’t work. Tough to confuse a sagging online service with shampoo and conditioners in my opinion.
Now, the third company is co-founded by the former McKinsey manager and intelligence officer, Mats Bjore, and the CEO Kristofer Mansson. His company, Silobreaker, is the one with the soaring line of the chart. When a third party generates an upward curve that rises steeply, I take notice. The absolute numbers are less important than the third party’s sampling process notes a significant change. You can read my interview with Mr. Bjore here.
What’s this chart tell me?
First, Silobreaker is gaining attention at the expense of Factiva and LexisNexis. You can see that in the up and down red and green lines.
Second, Silobreaker’s upward ascent tells me that the company is getting new customers, not just sucking oxygen from the bigger guys’ base.
Third, whatever goosed Silobreaker to rapid growth took place early in 2008, and the momentum appears to be holding up. There will be a tail off in the summer when information junkies head for the beach or a trout stream.
But the useful piece of data is that the combined “people” score for Silobreaker.com is only slightly less than the combined “people” score of Factiva.com and Nexis.com.
Silobreaker may be a David. The two Goliaths owned by traditional media companies and a track record of throwing money and people at a “problem” are not out of the game. But if I were the product manager for either of these two companies, I would be considering one of these actions:
[a] Killing Silobreaker.com with a price war or carpet bomb marketing campaign
[b] Polishing my résumé because I am getting humiliated by a company in Sweden, which has a GDP smaller than my employer’s annual revenue
[c] Buying Silobreaker.com and taking credit for the company’s rapid growth, nifty technology, and developers
[d] Deleting my Silobreaker.com bookmark and pretending that the company does not exist.
Since I worked for the world’s smartest publisher, William Ziff, I would go for [c]. Why pretend that a giant traditional publishing company can make a product people want, that’s sexy, and has lift. Buy it, issue a news release, and collect that bonus.
Will Factiva and Lexis wake up? I will keep you posted.
Stephen Arnold, July 24, 2008
Microsoft: What Now for Search?
July 24, 2008
Googzilla twitches its tail and Microsoft goes into convulsions. When I was in the management consulting game, my boss, Dr. William Sommers, talked about “hyper-actions”. The idea was that a single event or a minor event would trigger excessive reactions.
Brain scan of a person undergoing excessive “excitement” and “over reaction”.
When I read the flows-like-water prose of Kara Swisher’s “Microsoft’s Latest Web Stumble: Kevin Johnson Out” and then her brief introduction to Mr. Steve Ballmer’s “Full Memo to the Troops about New Reorg”, I thought about Dr. Sommers’s “hyper-action” neologism. In my opinion, we are watching the twitch in Mountain View triggering via management string theory the convulsions in Redmond.
First, let me identify for you the points that jumped from screen to neurons in Ms. Swisher’s write ups.
- Ms. Swisher reports that Mr. Kevin Johnson was the architect behind the Yahoo buy out. I thought that the idea was cooked in Mr. Chris Liddell’s lamb-roasting pit. Obviously my sources were off base. Mr. Johnson moves to Juniper and Mr. Liddell continues to get a Microsoft paycheck. Mr. Liddell’s remarks at the March 2008 Morgan Stanley Technology Conference left me with the impression that he was being “systematic” in his analysis. Here’s one take on his remarks.
- Ms. Swisher’s run down of Microsoft’s actions so far in 2008 is excellent, and she reminded me that Microsoft bought aQuantive, a fact which had slipped off my radar. What has happened to aQuantive for which Microsoft paid $6 billion, more than what Microsoft paid for Fast Search & Transfer and Powerset combined. He mentioning aQuantive reminded me of those wealthy car collectors on the Speed Channel’s exotic automobile auctions. What do you do with a $1.2 million Corvette? You put it in a garage. You don’t run down to the Speedway in Harrods Creek, Kentucky, to buy a pack of chewing tobacco.
- Ms. Swisher turns a great phrase; specifically, “Microsoft has succeeded in burnishing its image as a Web also-ran and still has an uncertain path to change that.” I quite like the notion that a large company takes one action and succeeds in producing an opposite reaction. I think the Google folks would peg that as one of the Laws of Google Dynamics applied to Microsoft. For every action, there is a greater, opposite reaction that persists through time. (Ms. Swisher’s statement that Yahoo looks stable brought a smile to my face as well.)
Next, let me comment on the Mr. Steve Ballmer reorg memo, which will be a classic in business schools for years to come. The opening line will probably read, “Mr. Steve Ballmer, firmly in control of Microsoft, sat at his desk and looked across the Microsoft campus. He knew a bold strategic action was needed to deal with the increasing threat of Google, etc. etc.”
After the razzle dazzle about goals, the memo gets down to business:
We will out-innovate Google in key areas—we’re already seeing this in our maps and news search. Third, we are going to reinvent the search category through user experience and business model innovation. We’ll introduce new approaches that move beyond a white page with 10 blue links to provide customers with a customized view of their world. This is a long-term battle for our company—and it’s one we’ll continue to fight with persistence and tenacity.
MicroStrategy: TSA Swims through Data with PIMS
July 24, 2008
Government information technology makes me perspire. When a government news item renders in my news reader, I don’t pause. I want to make an exception. MicroStrategy is a very intriguing company. The fact that the firm has ramped its services to a law enforcement agency is interesting. MicroStrategy has been working with TSA since 2004. The deal signed in 2006 has saved TSA more than $100 million. The sentence that caught my attention was:
The TSA is a metrics-based organization… We [the TSA] use metrics every day to drive our decision making and quantify security effectiveness, operational efficiency and workforce management.
An example of this metrics focus is that since 2004, the TSA uses PIMS to run one million reports per year. TSA has about 12,000 users of the system. Each user prints about two reports a week. TSA is right in line with the Office of Management & Budget’s guidelines for managers to make decisions based on hard data, not hunches.
MicroStrategy, as you may know, popped in and out of the news in the 2000-2002 period. One of the items I recalled reading is here. Some former MicroStrategy professionals founded Clarabridge, a company focused on the overlap between business intelligence and content processing. You can find information about that company here.
I want to pay closer attention to MicroStrategy. Companies that can help Federal agencies save $100 million are the taxpayers’ best friends. I am interested in the MicroStrategy – Clarabridge alignment as well. Off to the library in the morning to find what I can find.
Stephen Arnold, July 24, 2008
Googzilla Swallows Telegraph Media Group
July 24, 2008
Traditional media has been my favorite whipping boy for a long time. The Telegraph Media Group may force me to rethink my critical view of companies who write stuff, print of dead trees, and employ folks at near starvation wages to get the messy artifacts to a declining readership. Silicon.com reported here that the publisher of The Daily Telegraph, Sunday Telegraph and Weekly Telegraph, as well as the telegraph.co.uk Web site will standardize on Google Apps–word processing, mail, collaboration. The whole shooting match.
My reading of the announcement suggests that TMG did the math and calculated that it could save a bundle. More significantly, TMG lets Google worry about software, presumably so the newspapers can worry about selling adverts. The most interesting statement in the Silicon.com write up is this remark attributed to one of TMG’s managers:
We see the levels of innovation happening in the consumer space…you can actually take advantage of within the enterprise space.
Microsoft, among other traditional software companies, are going to learn first hand how fissionable material goes critical. A few things happen, then a few more things, and then the game changes. Is Google Apps ready to go critical?
My view: yes.
Stephen Arnold, July 24, 2008
Google’s Schmidt on Google as an Application Platform
July 24, 2008
TechCrunch’s Eric Schonfeld’s “Liveblogging Eric Schmidt Google Interview at Brainstorm” snagged my attention. You can read the full text of his write up here. The document is also available on the TechCrunch.com Web site.
The points of interest to me were:
- Mr. Schmidt: Because of the way technology works, all the technology companies are aggregating information about people. It is a political debate.
- Mr. Schmidt: The most interesting next-generation social apps will be mobile.
- Mr. Schmidt: The easiest [way] for us to enter the enterprise is to address high pain levels like e-mail, messaging, calendaring.We have something like a million companies using these services, mostly small. My view is that it will be a many-year process…
What did I learn?
First, Google is explicitly describing itself as an application platform.
Second, usage data is the common denominator among technology companies. Aggregation is underway and the stern wake is political process. The data collection continues, of course. Politics has to play catch up to reality.
Third, mobile is a big deal. That’s for sure. Google has been beavering away on mobile technology for at least nine years.
Finally, Google is dead serious about the enterprise. Over a span of years, Google’s winning the hearts and minds of today’s students is an important part of Google’s being pulled into organizations.
The summer of transparency is yielding some useful insights into Googzilla.
Stephen Arnold, July 24, 2008
Knol: Encyclopedia or Brain Food for the Googleplex
July 23, 2008
Jason Kincaid does a fine job summarizing the Knol launch. He characterizes Google’s new service as “the monetizable Wikipedia” for TechCrunch. There’s a lot of repetition floating around, and you will do well to read this take on the new Google service here.
I want to identify a key point in Mr. Kincaid’s write up and then offer a different view of the service. Be aware: I will be expressing an opinion based on the research I conducted for my studies about Google. My angle of attack, therefore, is different from those who are viewing the service as a Wikipedia clone or killer.
The key point in Mr. Kincaid’s essay for me was:
The big news here is that by assigning ownership and allowing authors to include AdSense ads on their articles, Google is effectively offering a monetary incentive to create good content. In theory, the best articles will get the most attention, and in turn the most revenue. Unfortunately, this plan may backfire on Google. We’re going to start seeing a flurry of articles on the most popular content…
Dead on target.
The obvious question is, “Does Google know that many people will write about hot topics?” This will create duplicate information which will be tough for a 7th grader to figure out.
My take on this concentration on hot topics is that Know is not an encyclopedia. Knol is a mechanism to add information to the Google knowledge bases. Why does Google give away free voice directory assistance? The reason is that Google is building its knowledge base of morphemes.
Knol is another nozzle on the Google vacuum cleaner of data. What better way to approach disambiguation than to have a flow of content from known contributors, data from user behavior, and pools of information on popular subjects. The system also shakes the bugs out of the JotSpot plumbing that lurks somewhere in the bowels of Knol.
Knol is important. Knol could become an encyclopedia. But Knol pays dividends to Googzilla in many ways. In my opinion, the data Knol produces are more important than some of the other features highlighted by the many people writing about this service.
Stephen Arnold, July 23, 2008
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
