Corporate Social Networks: Might Be Losers
July 19, 2008
On July 17, 2008, ReadWriteWeb.com let the cat out of the bag. Marshall Kirkpatrick’s essay “Corporate Social Networks Are a Waste of Money, Study Finds”. Please, read the full post plus the useful linked stories embedded in the essay.
The source of this insight is Edward Moran, a brain-for-hire at Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, one of the remaining Big Eight largely untarnished by service scandals in the last few years. As a veteran of Booz, Allen & Hamilton, I am reluctant to embrace these types of studies without reading and studying them first hand. I am, therefore, not agreeing or disagreeing with the news media’s summary of the story or Mr. Kirkpatrick’s analysis.
I wanted to capture the most important point for me; to wit:
They [corporate social networks] are stupid.
Brilliantly summarized, Mr. Kirkpatrick.
I continue to be skeptical of social networks as a user. As a person who has worked in law enforcement and intelligence for short periods of time over the years, I think social networks are extremely useful. I don’t want to participate. I want to peruse the information about the topics, who reads what, who comments, on what, and other tasty info nuggets.
My view of social networks is probably not what the cheerleaders for social networks and collaborative systems had in mind for their products. That’s okay with me. Keep ’em coming. Pump up that usage. Every little clickstream helps.
Stephen Arnold, July 19, 2008
Search All Information: The Categorical Affirmative Is Alive and Well
July 18, 2008
I think I took a logic class in 1964 from Dr. William Brown, a Ph.D. with an encyclopedic knowledge of Will Rogers, the American humorist. Dr. Brown could whip out one liners to make a point. I watched as my classmate when he said, “Will Rogers said, ‘A man only learns in two ways, one by reading, and the other by association with smarter people.'” My classmate avoided categorical affirmatives and negatives for the remainder of the semester. I’m not sure if my classmate understood the quotation or if the attention Dr. Brown directed at my classmate drove the lesson home.
This morning my news reader presented me with this headline: “We Offer a Single Place to Search All Information”. I clicked the link and read an interview conducted by Ruth Samson for DQ Channels, a publication with which I was not familiar. Her interview subject was Sanjay Manchanda, Director, Business Division, Microsoft India. You must read the interview here.
The subject of the interview is Microsoft, Fast Search & Transfer, and assorted closely-aligned issues. Here’s my list of what caught my attention:
- Demand for SharePoint Search comes from “companies that have huge amounts of data and need to search quickly and constantly.” My notes to myself: What’s huge? SharePoint native search dies at 50 million documents, sooner if the documents are multi-megabyte jobs with SmartTags and other goodies stuffed inside the wrapper.
- Unique selling proposition: “we have built our search capabilities so deeply that it is seamless. We offer a single place to search information of different types. Our recent acquisition of FAST, a provider of enterprise search solutions, also gives us an edge over other players in the segment.” My notes to myself: No way. Search is a crazy quilt. Fast Search is not one thing. Powerset is older technology given a new coat of paint. Baloney. Seamless! Not true. The stitches are evident, far apart, and made with a nail, not a needle.
- Microsoft has 3,600 partners. My notes to myself: Hmm. Are these SharePoint partners or total Microsoft partners? 50 to 60 partners in India. Why the spread?
- Cost of SharePoint is variable. Starts low, then increases as the number of users goes up. My notes to myself: Ah, exactly like the IBM and Oracle models. Business model may not work in the present economic environment. Search server in India costs R20,000 or $470. Now that’s a deal with Fast Search targeting $150,000 in early 2007.
- Search is “the next killer app”. My notes to myself: Nope, search is disappointing, a utility function, and not what users want. If this Microsoft expert Sanjay Manchanda is right, Microsoft is chasing the wrong ambulance.
The interview struck me as a marketing effort. Not only was the “all” spurious, the idea that Microsoft search is “seamless” is not congruent with my experience. What’s seamless is loading a third party search system such as Isys Search Software and getting something that doesn’t take a platoon of Microsoft engineers scrambling around for days.
The interview has some one-liners that would make Will Rogers smile. Dr. Brown would still be fussing over the “all”. I am hung up on “seamless”. Quite an interview.
Stephen Arnold, July 18, 2008
Search and Text Analytics in New Fall Wardrobe
July 18, 2008
Clarabridge, according to CRM Today, has announced a new program for its business partners. You can read about the deal here. The most interesting portion of the announcement is the positioning that Clarabridge is adopting. I think of these fresh, clever ways to package search and text analytics as the fall collections of fashion houses. Clarabridge is described as “a leading provided of customer experience management solutions”. The acronym is CEM. In order to deliver better CEM, Clarabridge employs search and other technologies. If you want to know more about Clarabridge, click here. The headline on the Web site describes the company as one which delivers “customer experience intelligence”. I assume that the CEM and CEI are closely related. Clarabridge’s founder did a stint at MicroStrategy, a company that has an interesting track record in business intelligence.
Stephen Arnold, July 18, 2008
Business Week Sees through the Clouds
July 18, 2008
Sarah Lacy, Valley Girl, wrote “On Demand Computing: A Brutal Slog”. You can read the full text of her essay here. The story carries a date of July 18, 2008, so the text should be available for a short period of time. I know that I have been frustrated trying to locate Business Week stories in the past, so hopefully the site’s retention policy is more in step with my research needs and yours.
Business Week occupies a middle ground between the Harvard Business Review type of story (case examples, charts, checklists, and chatty case studies) and the Economist’s pro-business, pro-catty writing that combines odd ball statistics with “isn’t that obvious” types of juxtapositions.
Sarah Lacy’s look at cloud computing–also known as on demand computing, software as a service, and a dozen other acronyms–was interesting to me. First she hits the point that it can be tough to get revenue and expenses in line. Her phrase, which I well may appropriate in some future writing, is, “It’s [the Web] just as good at displacing revenue as it is in generation sources of it.” Dead on.
Also, she hits two often ignored “costs” associated with the cloud computing razzmatazz: [a] the difficulty of selling cloud services to prospects who don’t get it or just don’t trust it and [b] the tendency of certain high tech markets to become monopolies.
You will want to check out Nick Carr’s analysis of this topic here. Mr. Carr does not disagree with Ms. Lacy’s analysis. However, as nifty as Ms. Lacy’s essay is, there are two related points upon which I wish to comment:
First, Google’s approach to cloud computing is what I call “pull marketing”. Salesforce.com, Microsoft.com, and most of the organizations Ms. Lacey mentions in her essay, engage in “push marketing”. A sales professional makes a call and tries to close a deal. Not only is this grossly inefficient and expensive, it quickly exhausts the sales team and the sales and marketing budget. Google, on the other hand, rides in Salesforce.com’s car and occasionally waves its pom poms. Google also works to reach those in university programs who will enter the work place in a couple of years. The idea is that these individuals will want to use Google at work. So, Google once again gets a free ride into an organization. The approach is indirect and inefficient unless you have another source of revenue and are not in a particular hurry. Oracle, Microsoft, and other vendors appear to be shifting from pure push marketing to “buy” marketing. The idea is to make it financially attractive for a prospect to shift to cloud computing. Once hooked, I suppose, the vendor has got the fish in the basket.
Second, the success of cloud computing depends on a vendor’s ability to build a big, fast, redundant supercomputer that is reliable. Anyone with a credit card and an email can set up a baby cloud service on a low cost services provider or more upscale to the Amazon Web services system. There’s not much of a barrier to entry, but as the number of users climbs, then real engineering has to be in place. There was a reason why prior to the break up AT&T was a monopoly. AT&T had to do a lot of engineering, research, and guaranteeing to become a monopoly. The second and third tier players in the pre break up telco world were doomed to be niche players. So, consolidation is only part of the story. The rest of the story will be brand identify and really serious engineering for scale. The winner in cloud computing will be the present day’s equivalent of AT&T in the 1950s. Ms. Lacy is writing about border skirmishes. The real battle will be fought on many fronts in a global theater. Furthermore, the shoot out will take place regardless of the economy, regulations, and business school pronouncements. Engineering, not marketing, may be the deciding factor. A touch of creative destruction may add zest as well.
Based on my research, the winner in cloud computing will replicate the type of computing an individual has with a powerful device, pounded flat like a tortilla, and filled with applications, services, and functions. Cloud computing is a big digital burrito stuffed with the goodies organizations crave but have to deal with as individual ingredients. So my take, cloud computing is a convenience food in digital form, perfect for the young at heart and those who want to do computing on the run. For a drawing of a digital burrito, check out The Google Legacy here.
Stephen Arnold, July 18, 2008
Google: More Low Blows
July 18, 2008
The economy is sinking. Most companies are trying to cut costs and boost profitability or just stay out of the red. Google has been taking some low blows in the wake of its 2nd quarter 2008 revenue report. Stephen Shankland “Live Blog: Google Roses Loses Bloom Again” provides a good summary of what’s right and what’s wrong for Google with its financial results. You can read his essay here.
The best way to summarize what Google did is to show you this chart, which was included with Mr. Shankland’s essay:
The gross revenues are rising. The profit was $1.25 but less than the Wall Street mavens wanted. The result is that Google gets sucker punched.
You can find dozens of stories on this theme on news aggregation services.
My view is that Google is no longer the under dog. No matter what the company does, Google will be punched, kicked, and jabbed. As Google grows larger, the zippy percentage gains in previous years are harder to replicate. The GOOG is closing in on $20 billion in annual revenue.
Largely ignored is Google’s ability to tweak payouts for AdSense. None of the folks covering Google has talked with large AdSense customers about their smaller Google checks in the run up to this quarter. But I think Googzilla can withstand the abuse and no one is likely to probe how Google can twiddle the knobs to hit whatever numbers it wants to hit.
Stephen Arnold, July 18, 2008
Google: Stepping on the Enterprise Search Gas Pedal
July 18, 2008
Richard Martin’s “Pressed by Rivals, Google Accelerates Enterprise Search Efforts” is a revelation. The story appeared on July 17, 2008, and you can read the full text here. (You may see an annoying fly over ad and then be redirected. The wacky url worked for me.)
In my opinion, The most interesting point in the scoop was:
Unifying a single search interface across those varied systems, which often use different protocols and programming languages, has become something of a holy grail.
The religious metaphor is lost on me, but I think Mr. Martin’s point is that search is supposed to make it possible to access data, regardless of its location or format, from one interface.
I agree.
My view is that this is not a search problem and, therefore, the GOOG, Microsoft, and the companies mentioned in the article will not solve this problem with search technology.
The challenge is transformation of data in such a way that new operations are possible. Who wants to search? I want to know where a particular item comes from and how certain I can be that the item is accurate or good enough to use in a decision.
In my opinion, talking about enterprise search is a waste of time. Google is definitely going to deliver, but the solution will not be a search technology. The problem is better resolved in terms of data management. Google has some interesting technology in this practice area, and I discuss it in my new study Beyond Search, published by the Gilbane Group.
Stephen Arnold
What Is SharePoint?
July 18, 2008
A few publishers print tabloids and magazines. A hard copy of System Management News, July 15, 2008, arrived today. My lunch appointment was running late so I flipped through the newsprint tabloid and saw this headline, “Microsoft’s SharePoint Hits Sweet Spot as the Next Killer App.” The author of this apologia is Patrick Hynds, president of Critical Sites and a Microsoft Regional Director. Mr. Hynds is a good writer, and he does let his enthusiasm for SharePoint sparkle at every opportunity. The hard copy has a Web corollary at www.sysmannews.com. A digital version of Mr. Hynds’s analysis is here. I urge you to read the original.
The key point in the write up is that SharePoint is a “killer app”. For me, the most interesting point in the article was:
Let’s hope Microsoft doesn’t get too visionary for its own good and and expand SharePoint beyond the sweet spot it now occupies so well. It is all about collaboration and acceleration of information sharing.
The notion of a server as a killer application befuddles me. Actually, quite a bit about SiteServer, oh, I mean SharePoint makes me think about the fees consultants can assess. Without a doubt, SharePoint packs more buzz word goodness per byte than almost any other Microsoft application.
First, you have to figure out which SharePoint to license or use. The two versions are:
- WSS or Windows SharePoint Services 3.0.WSS includes Windows 2003 Server and Windows 2003 Small Business Server.
- MOSS or Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.
There are numerous differences between the two platforms but both offer search, wikis, Web logs, and calendaring.
To get SharePoint to work, you will need other Microsoft server products. The two must haves are SQL Server and Exchange. Exchange is also described as a collaboration application, presumably because some executives still send email with attachments.
Rube Goldberg: Software Architect
Whenever I read cheerleaders’ scripts, I am impressed with how each each is to remember. The reality of being a cheerleader is different from the surface appearance and the facile nature of the chants. SharePoint is for me like a cheerleader and a catchy chant. “Push em back, push em back, way back.”
SharePoint slices, dices, chops, shreds, and cuts julienne potatoes, which I would not recognize if you showed me one now. To my simplistic mind, SharePoint is a layer of spackle that one uses to fill in the gaps among islands of Microsoft functions. A properly deployed and resourced SharePoint makes it possible to create a document, make it available to authorized users, and publish the document as a Web page. The search, the collaboration, the federating of email, local, and remote information, and the rest of the bells and whistles is a huge, sprawling favela (Brazilian slum).
Source: http://www.travelblog.org/Photos/171232.html
Underneath the layers of code is a content management system. But to make the CMS work, you have to buy other Microsoft servers, use Microsoft programming tools, and drink Microsoft KoolAid.
The problem is that SharePoint has great marketing and lousy plumbing.
Google: A Digital Ceramic Brake Pad
July 17, 2008
TechCrunchIT is one of my favorite Web information services. I read Nik Cubrilovic’s July 16, 2008, analysis “Why Google Slows own Acquired Companies”. You will want to read the full text of the essay here. In addition to offering a compelling array of data to support his assertion that Google hobbles its acquired companies, he includes a snapshot of the Google Technology Stack. I have a different view of the technology stack in use at Google, but it contains more layers and includes such exotica as Google janitor bot engine, Haskell, and other nerd-xotica. You will also pick up some useful insights to the perils of a once-limber start up struggling like a Marine recruit on a double time run through the desert whilst taking fire. That’s a hurry up, lay down, hide, rest, run like the devil, and duck down process. A 1,000 meter stretch can take quite a bit of time to traverse. No one is shooting live rounds at the GOOG, but lawyers, being transparent, and planning a space flight have much the same effect.
However, I think there are several other factors that one must consider when thinking about the fate of Google acquisitions. These ideas are developed more fully in my 2007 study, Google Version 2.0 here. Let me highlight three and, as always, invite your comments.
- Google buys companies for people, not technology, business models, or traffic. The need for talent, particularly in math, physics, and engineering is tough for Google to satisfy with traditional recruiting techniques. This is the “just buy ’em and put ’em to work” motivation for an acquisition.
- Google buys companies because the company is cool. I have identified several acquisitions that fit into this category. Nothing happens with the company and the founders often leave, annoyed that Google handled the acquisition as if it were a toy in Google’s flak-attracting day care center.
- Google buys companies and keeps it secret if possible. I have identified one such acquisition. The technology is quite important to Google, and the company goes to great lengths to minimize outsiders’ awareness of the purpose of the technology and the identity of the individuals working on some of these crucial areas.
- Google buys a company and converts or modifies the technology to fit into a larger Google service. The rework may be done in a matter of weeks or it can take longer. The rework time is not important. The key factor is when Google wants to slipstream the building block into a larger service.
You can find a reasonably complete list of Google acquisitions here. In Google Version 2.0 I plot most acquisitions by year and I discuss a handful of the more important buy outs prior to 2007 when my study was published. I have updated the material, but this is available as part of my for-fee work. One acquisition is the subject of a for-fee report by one of the world’s best known research firms. The announcement of this report will come from that company. My agreement with the firm prevents me from providing specifics.
Stephen Arnold, July 17, 2008
Explicit User Input: The Future of Web Search
July 17, 2008
TechCrunch has an intriguing Web log post called “Is This the Future of Search?” After scanning the text, watching the video, you will want to read the comments to this post. I find it difficult to summarize multi-media Web log posts. My take is that Google is showing some users a Digg-like interface; that is, a user can provide input with a click about the value of a result, add a link, and with little effort on Google’s part, provide a full complement of user input functions. With the acquisition of JotSpot, Google can out Digg Digg with a user creating in the midst of a query or other Google action a “new” Web page. I provided raw material for an Outsell analysis last year, and few took notice of Google’s ability to morph into a publisher. Digg-like features are a fraction of Google’s content acquisition and creation capabilities. Traditional publishers, are you tracking Google as a digital William Randolph Hearst?
Among the more than 100 comments is one that I think centers of what is going on. Ben writes:
Ouch. I’m betting Kevin Rose is wishing he cashed up when he had one of those many opportunities.
I’d be a little worried if I were Mr Calacanis also.
Based on my research, my view of these Digg-like features are a bit like a double-edged sword equipped with those nifty barbs and hooks like this:
Source: http://www.myarmoury.com/talk/viewtopic.php?t=9497
Here’s how I interpret Google’s Digg-iness:
- Google wants to brandish a threatening weapon without actually striking anyone. This is digital saber rattling. Google shows strength, maybe intimidates or causes a competitor to think about selling or partnering with Google
- The GOOG is pushing the tip of the sword into the flesh of a opponent, forcing the opponent to get out of the way. If the opponent does not move the way the Google Jedi wants, a quick thrust and twist ends the opponent’s life. Death comes but it is painful.
- Googzilla is taking practice swings in order to use the cutting edge of its technology to hack its way through the social search opponents. Limbs and other digital body parts will be summarily removed as Googzilla stomps forward swinging the deadly blade.
I think the Digg-iness of Google is designed to position Google to buy one or more entities, force one or more entities to become partners in the manner of Nokia-Symbian’s sudden love affair with the GOOG, or outright war.
Stephen Arnold. July 17, 2008
Symbian: Simpatico toward Google
July 17, 2008
Symbian [http://www.symbian.com/] makes open source operating systems for mobile phones and has been building reference designs for telecommunications companies for years. Nokia, its major stakeholder, recently announced that it’s going to buy the rest of Symbian’s shares and turn it over in its entirety to the Symbian Foundation, a new group backed by several mobile phone companies that have pooled their knowledge and resources to create one big, happy, open-source, royalty-free, customizable Symbian platform.
Enter the Googlemeister. It’s about to launch a new product: Android [http://code.google.com/android/]. Android is (drum roll) “the first complete, open, and free mobile platform” and was developed by a group of more than 30 technology and mobile companies.
Symbian’s CEO said in a July 16 article here [http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/20080716/tc_pcworld/148477] that the company has a good relationship with Google and cooperation between the two companies is possible. But he also defends Symbian and basically questions why Google is pitching Android as if Symbian didn’t exist.
Perhaps Symbian sees the hammer about to fall.
Google has grown far beyond just being an Internet portal and is a serious player in the telecommunications industry. You know the “walk softly and carry a big stick” credo? There isn’t a big enough stick for Symbian to carry to ward off Google. It might not be a bad idea to embrace the GOOG’s services and functions.
Jessica Bratcher, July 17, 2008
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