Microsoft IBM: Claim and Counter Claim
August 3, 2008
I get a kick out of companies dressed in inflatable sumo suits whacking each other. I chuckle when both combatants swing and end up sitting on the ground looking at one another. That’s what Microsoft and IBM seem to be doing in the group ware and collaboration market. John Fontana does a good job of explaining this inflatable sumo face off in his essay “IBM Counters Microsoft’s Seat Stealing Boast”. You can read the full text of the Network World story here.
The dust up concerns a Microsoft assertion to the effect that Redmond’s SharePoint would capture five million Lotus Notes’ seats, a euphemism for users. IBM asserts this will not happen. IBM just closed a 300,000 seat deal in Asia as evidence to support Lotus Notes’ hegemony.
What must irritate IBM is that Microsoft’s SharePoint is getting quite a bit of public relations traction. To make the SharePoint product more annoying, Ray Ozzie–the inventor of the software category–works for Microsoft.
More on this struggle of the titans in inflatable sumo suits to come. Film at 11.
Stephen Arnold, August 3, 2008
New SharePoint Deck
August 2, 2008
If you want to know what’s what with SharePoint, you will want to download this new PowerPoint deck. Prepared by Babar Batla, a Microsoft Principal Business Productivity Specialist), the deck provides useful diagrams and some insight into the spin and positioning for “Microsoft’s fastest selling server product”. Highly recommended. The deck is in the wildly popular PPTX format, so you will need to fire up your PowerPoint viewer or PowerPoint 2007 to view the information. Topics covered include:
- Business Challenges
- Industry Trends
- SharePoint Overview
- Architecture (my favorite section in this deck)
- Talking points
A happy quack to Babar Batla, whose name I think is really cool.
Stephen Arnold, August 2, 2008
IBM: Mammatus Clouds Are Us
August 2, 2008
G.K. Chesterson’s statement “There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds” came to mind when I read Richard Martin’s article “IBM Brings Cloud Computing To Earth With Massive New Data Centers.” The write up is full of interesting information, and you will want to read it here.
Two points leapt from my flat panel display to my addled goose mind; to wit:
- IBM’s data centers cost about $400 million each. That’s a bargain compared to Microsoft’s San Antonio data center which cost about $650 million.
- IBM has opened centers in Dublin, Ireland; Beijing and Wuxi, China; and Johannesburg, South Africa. Mr. Martin does not tell us how many data centers IBM has.
For a company with $100 billion in revenue, IBM can build lots of data centers.
Mr. Martin reveals this juicy factoid:
IBM first opened a high-performance on-demand computing facility in New York in 2005. One advantage it enjoys over other cloud rivals like Google and Amazon, which essentially offer a do-it-yourself approach, is its army of system engineers and consultants who can assist companies in harnessing and deploying resources in the cloud.
I think of these as computing cloud type mammatus; that is, ominous looking but harmless. You can read more about mammatus clouds here. Better yet, take a gander at a mammatus and remember these clouds are toothless:
My recollection is that IBM has dipped in and out of the mammatus business a number of times. In 1996, IBM had a cloud-based Internet business. IBM sold this business to AT&T. IBM retooled and built a “grid” with a node in West Virginia. I don’t recall the details because the “grid” push drifted to the background at IBM. Now, like Hewlett Packard, IBM’s in the mammatus business–Big Blue mammatuses.
Telco Think: Nah, Google Does Not Matter
August 2, 2008
Telephony Online ran an interesting article by Alex Liu “Does Google Matter?” You can read Mr. Liu’s analysis here. The point of the article is a variant of Microsoft’s “one-trick pony” description of Google. Google sells ads. Its other initiatives have gone nowhere. Therefore, Google does not matter. The statement in Mr. Liu’s analysis that I found most interesting was:
Basically, Google has a materiality problem. Consider this: if the global advertising market is $600B, the online piece of that is $60B and the mobile portion of that is expected to be $6B (tops), that’s a lot of industry crowding out that Google has to win, even assuming differential segment growth—much less venturing into wireless communications services, another inevitable march. This journey into wireless will surely unfold, but it will take longer than most expect.
The author–a partner at prestigious A.T. Kearney and Alexander to the army in Kearney’s Communications, Media and High Technology practice in North America–has lost me. I don’t have a clue what “materiality” means. I’m not sure what “industry crowding out” means. I think I agree with the point that Google’s “journey into wireless” will take some time.
Stepping back from the glittering brilliance of this article, my view of Google and telecommunications is that it is one of five or six sectors that Google is probing. Unlike a telco, Google is not a one-trick pony when it comes to technology. Google has a business model that works just as well as Ma Bell’s coin operated telephones did for decades. I recall sitting in a meeting before the break up listening to chuckles about the shortage of rail cars in upstate New York to move nickels, dimes, and quarters to Manhattan. Google’s business model is not much more sophisticated than Ma Bell’s monopoly over pay phones. In fact, today’s telcos face a digital monopoly that shares some DNA with the old, beloved Ma Bell.
Will Google succeed in the telco sector? What about banking, back office services, entertainment, publishing, or enterprise software? Google’s “goal” of becoming a $100 billion company does not require success in its various initiatives. Google only has to make a reasonable showing in a couple of these sectors and work to keep its business model working.
My research suggests that Google could walk away from telco entirely and experience no material change in its financial performance. Telco, like Google’s financial services or publishing probes, are nothing more than applications running on Google’s infrastructure. I wish to remind Mr. Liu that Google has an infrastructure in place, working, and purpose built for massively parallel applications. Telcos don’t. Furthermore, telcos lack the vision, the money, and the time to duplicate the Google “as is” infrastructure.
Google enjoys more degrees of freedom than telcos. Google is largely unregulated. Telcos are regulated. Google is applications centric. Telcos are earnings centric. Google is experiencing a nice lift across its operations. Telcos are struggling to keep the blimps airborne. Google has nothing to lose probing telco land. Telcos have a great deal to lose whether the companies ignore Google or challenge Google. Google is a master of what I call Goo-jitsu; that is, minimum effort and cost yields maximum reaction and cost for its opponents.
I am delighted that I am no longer in the consulting game. My blood pressure is rising just thinking about the argument Mr. Liu has advanced. I think its lacks “materiality”, but that’s just an addled goose’s opinion.
Stephen Arnold, August 2, 2008
Microsoft Outlook and the Enterprise
August 1, 2008
If you are curious about the impact of Gmail on Microsoft Outlook mail, you will want to read “Breaking Free of Outlook” by Bernard Lunn in the August 1, 2008, ReadWriteWeb here. The core of this essay is about the writer’s shift from a fat client like Outlook to the Google cloud-based email service Gmail.
Mr. Lunn points out two immediate advantages: almost no spam and he could locate messages. Now Gmail is not flawless. Certain file extensions are not supported. The non hierarchical approach to organizing email takes a bit of adaptation or it did for this addled goose. I know about indexing, but I had to change my behavior in order to make full use of the Google “tags” notion. Note: Diversity blog has some useful comments about Gmail’s disintermediating utility and small business here.
Mr. Nunn points to Microsoft’s concern about Exchange, Microsoft’s mail server. He writes:
This game is now clearly all about economies of scale on those giant server farms, so we are likely to see email server hosting consolidate down to a handful of companies in the next few years. This is the normal and expected lifecycle for a commodity market such as email serving.
Nail hit on its head. Mr. Nunn hits the *key* point in the contention between Google and Microsoft. Let me offer several observations:
- Microsoft is building data centers at a ferocious clip. More information here. The assumption is that these data centers will run as fast or faster than Google’s data centers. My research suggests that Google has a performance advantage ranging from 2X to 12X. If these data are accurate, Microsoft will have to build twice as many data centers as Google to match Google’s throughput. Any other order of magnitude means that Microsoft cannot catch up to Google just building data centers with available technology.
- Microsoft is spending money on brand name gear. Google, by contrast, buys commodity hardware. Google also automates many routine set up and maintenance functions. The result is a cost savings for Google. Google buys a commodity server at the going rate for a dual processor, dual core pizza box with four gigabytes of RAM and dual SATA drives. Our price work ups suggest that Google can buy one server for about about $700 to $800 based on ArnoldIT’s analysis of the commodity components. A comparable device from Hewlett Packard can costs anywhere from $1,100 up to $8,000 or more, depending on the configuration, maintenance plan, and other facets of the purchase agreement. The $600 difference is meaningless for large companies but when scaled across 10,000 or more servers per data center, the price difference begins to mount up. Other savings kick in so Google spends less to deliver its performance.
These cost and performance data appear in Google’s technical papers here. Specific papers and their metrics are cited in my Google studies here.
What this means is that Google can scale while spending less on hardware and achieve a significant performance advantage. If these data are accurate, it seems clear to me that Microsoft is going to have to spend more money than Google to match Google’s performance levels. This means that Microsoft may need 1.5 to 2.0 or more servers than Google to deliver comparable throughput. If true, Microsoft will have to spend even more money to reach parity with Google.
Now, the killer in this scaling arms race. Google continues to push forward in its infrastructure performance. By working around known bottlenecks such as data writes and reads, Google does not have to buy exotic and expensive hardware to resolve these choke points. That’s another cost and performance advantage which ripples through set up, support, and maintenance tasks for these devices.
When I read Mr. Nunn’s comment about “economies of scale”, I thought of Google’s price performance advantage. If my data are correct, the cost gaps between Google and Microsoft are so significant, that I can chop these estimates in half. Microsoft still has to spend more than Google to match Google’s performance. Because Google continues to make incremental improvements, Microsoft will need plenty of money to deal with email and other type of cloud computing scale issues.
Microsoft can achieve parity with Google–at a price. A dip in Windows or server license revenues can impair Microsoft’s ability to continue to spend for data centers to deal with the types of scale Mr. Nunn references.
The metaphor that comes to my mind is that of a well funded Formula 1 racing team trying to catch up with a special purpose jet powered car designed for the Bonneville salt flats. The cost of reworking the Formula 1 infrastructure makes the exercise an extremely time consuming, difficult, and expensive one. The jet powered vehicle uses a commodity engine, racing tires, and a 20-something bold enough to fire up the engine and head down the track. But those Formula 1 team members look classy in their matching jump suits if that’s any consolation.
Stephen Arnold, August 1, 2008
Microsoft: Confusion and Carelessness Trying to Clarify Conflicts
August 1, 2008
MSDN is often a life saver for my team and me. Let me tell you. Every day brings new challenges when working with Microsoft’s enterprise servers.
We identified an MSDN Web log “Norm’s Performance Point Server Blog”. You can read the posts here. I don’t know Norm, but he seems to know Performance Point quite well. If you are not familiar with this Microsoft server, let me give you a quick overview. This is not my write up. The description comes from a Microsoft Web page I downloaded late last year, but it’s close enough for horse shoes:
Microsoft Office Performance Point Server 2007 is an integrated performance management application designed to help improve operational and financial performance across all departments and all levels of your organization. With Office Performance Point Server 2007, you can monitor progress, analyze what is driving variances, and plan your business from budgeting to creating management reports. You can have metrics, key performance indicators (KPIs), and reports delivered to every desktop through intuitive scorecards, dashboards, and the easy-to-use 2007 Microsoft Office system environment. A key component of the Microsoft Business Intelligence (BI) offering, Office Performance point Server 2007 can help you understand how performance can align with personal and departmental goals and objectives.
The SharePoint server also does business intelligence, which confuses this addled goose. In 2007, we had to work with Microsoft Dynamics and discovered that it too had some business intelligence functions. In fact, after the project was completed, we discussed the duplication, inconsistencies, and unnecessary confusion Microsoft’s product groups seemed to delight in generating. I don’t understand how folks can’t talk about ways to make the customers’ life easier. The business intelligence functions are dedicated to complexity.
Noah was to come to our rescue. You can read his Web log post, dated July 31, 2008, we think. The date appears in the comments section, leaving us with some ambiguity. He writes:
Microsoft has several business intelligence (BI) tools that seemingly overlap in features. This can be confusing to those trying to determine what BI tools will be most beneficial to their company. Many software packages have added an element of business intelligence -tools that lend to better business decisions. The reason for the addition of BI tools extends to acquisitions Microsoft has made. An example is the acquisition of ProClarity, a powerful analytics application platform that is included in the Performance point Server (PPS) license agreement. Additionally, as BI has become more available with the increase of data warehouses technologies, improvements to ETL practices, and reporting, software packages (particularly accounting and Excel based) have been able to add elements of BI.
Noah, you have nailed the problem. I think that “seemingly overlap” is a very courteous way of saying that mere mortals can’t figure out what Microsoft product does what.
The bulk of the Web log post consists of tables that purport to clarify these confusing elements. If you look at the post shown here as a screen shot, you will see a series of tables. It’s pretty obvious that these tables have three columns and some clunky formatting that cuts off the right hand side of each table. Look for yourself at the Web page or the screen shot:
Now let me tell you about the carelessness and confusion. Norm’s tables contain more information than the Microsoft Web log earthworm layout can display. I guess I am not in such a hurry, and I generally want to make certain that I present content that a reader can access.
Here’s my rework of these tables. I have included the missing content that Norm’s presentation obfuscates.
The first table presents information about “Monitor” which means to know what the heck is going on with a complex business intelligence system:
| Features | Perf Point | SharePoint BI | Comments |
| Dashboard Designer | Yes | Yes | None |
| Scorecard and KPI Elements | Yes | Yes | SharePoint’s KPIs are displayed in customized document list. Excel Services allows users to build scorecards in Excel and display them inside SharePoint. Performance point Server allows drill down. |
| Reports | Yes | Yes | See Reports below |
The second table presents information about “Analyze”, which I think means to figure out something from the data.
| Feature | Perf Point | Share Point BI | Comments |
| Excel | Yes | Yes | See how Excel is used with PPS-Planning Business Modeler under PLAN. |
| Advanced analytics | Yes | No | PPS-analytics include graphs, key performance indicators (KPIs), data grids, and advanced visualization in order to allow multidimensional slice and dice, drill-across, drill-to-detail, root-cause analysis, and centralized business logic definitions. PPS-ProClarity also allows ad-hoc queries, various filters such as applying an MDX query template, and shows relationships between dimension hierarchies, attribute hierarchies and measures thereby simplifying the navigation of cubes. All available in a thin client with trusted data as the hub. |
| Excel services | Yes | No | Excel Services allows Web access to workbooks. Excel interface is a familiar end-user analytics tool. |
The third table is “Plan” which is using the tools to forecast and budget; that is, enjoy spreadsheet fever:
| Feature | Perf Point | SharePoint BI | Comment |
| Planning | Yes | No | PPS-Planning Business Modeler makes planning, budgeting, and forecasting part of a dynamic, ongoing performance management process. The planning application provides users with a complete, enterprise view of the data offering consolidation, allocation, and elimination. Integrates with Excel, Outlook, and SharePoint for workflow and collaboration. |
| Excel Add In | Yes | No | Companion to PPS_Planning Business Modeler. Excel add-in can populate a spreadsheet with financial data and allows annotations. |
The fourth table is “Report,” which is getting data out of the system. I admit I use Crystal Reports.
| Feature | Perf Point | SharePoint BI | Comment |
| Reports | Yes | Yes | Both SharePoint and PPS can render SQL Server Reporting Services reports. In Dashboard Designer, you can expose data in a dashboard by creating supportive reports with any number of templates. See below. |
| Advanced financial and management reporting. | Yes | No | PPS-Management Reporter is a report writer designed for financial tasks such as consolidation. It can extract from the financial data mart. It can turn advanced financial analysis, such as sensitivity and variance analysis (for example, price, quantity, customer, product mix, timing), into easy-to-understand reports. |
Okay, now you have the obfuscated data. After reviewing the comments, we noticed a number of points that underscore the serious disorganization within the Performance Point and SharePoint servers. I may dig into the SQLServer issues in a future post. Such carelessness! I guess some people are too busy and too important to make tables that a customer or a consultant can actually use. I won’t pick on the comments, which are chock full of ambiguities as well. That’s enough Microsoft rework. I want to watch the basketball game.
Stephen Arnold, August 1, 2008
SearchCloud: Term Weighting Arrives
August 1, 2008
Yahoo’s BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service) has caught the attention of a number of companies in the information retrieval sector. A happy quack to the reader who alerted me to SearchCloud.net, a BOSS user.
SearchCloud.net, according to KillerStartUps, allows the user to weight certain terms:
The hook used by SearchCloud is providing users with the ability to weight the importance of keywords by changing the size of the fonts. Theoretically, this should allow for more accurate search results and the ability to search within given Web sites by simply placing the site name in a big font and the topic in a smaller one. While it is a great idea with a lot of potential, testing of the engine brought back very mixed results and the interface is not very well-designed. Searching for “Killerstartups” in a large font and “Cuil” in a smaller one did bring back a number of Killerstartups related pages but none with “Cuil” referenced.
You can read the KillerStartUps review here. In talking with the developers of SearchCloud.net, the SearchCloud.net team pointed out that KillerStartUps search would have returned better results had KillerStartUps reverse their weightings. The most specific search terms should be weighted higher by using larger letters. Here’s an example:
You can see the weights I assigned to each of my query terms. A larger font means the term has more weight in the query.
You can see that the terms that I wanted to emphasize I put in larger letters using the selector button above the cloud. And you may be interested in a contrarian review of SearchCloud.net on TechCrunch review here. I am tipping toward the positive with regard to this new service.
I found SearchCloud.net intuitive, and the system allows me to control the importance of certain terms in my query. For example, let’s take a query I ran this morning for a client about Google’s mobile search results.
I saw a report from South Africa that suggested Google was delivering a “mash up” of results from different Google indexes. I needed to locate information about this alleged Google function. You can read about what I learned here. I found SearchCloud.net–despite some start up rough edges–quite useful.
The tag cloud appears to the left of the results list. I have selected the grid display of results. I can scroll through a large number of relevance ranked hits very quickly. This is a useful interface option.
SearchCloud.net, like Kartoo.com, exploits Adobe technology to good effect.
There are some functions that I would like to see the SearchCloud.net team add; for example, in the results view, I want to be able to fiddle with the term weights and see the results rerank themselves. My hunch is that this function will be implemented, but like most start ups, SearchCloud.net must husband its resources.
When I spoke with the young-at-heart owners of SearchCloud.net, I was impressed with their candor and willingness to listen to my questions and suggestions. Right now, the company is self-funded and based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Ads are one of the revenue sources the team is discussing at this time.
Steven Eisenhauer, president, told me:
We would like to see the major players in the industry realize that the user is smart enough to control the parameters of their searches. It would be nice too see Google or Yahoo integrate our technology as an option for their users.
Milwaukee is known for beer, not investment banks. If you want to own a piece of a search company, maybe you could contact SearchCloud.net at info at searchcloud dot net?
SearchCloud.net shows considerable promise, and I have long been skeptical of Adobe’s Web technology. I may have to soften my stance based on what the SearchCloud.net wizards have been able to accomplish with Flex. I have added this company to my watch list.
Stephen Arnold, August 1, 2008
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