Microsoft’s Web Search Strategy Revealed: The Scoble Goldberg Interview
June 16, 2008
Online video does not match my mode of learning. Robert Scoble, a laurel leaf wwearerin the new world of video and text Web logs, conducted an interview with Brad Goldberg.
The interview is part of the Fast Company videos, and it is available here. The interview is remarkable, and I urge you to spend 31 minutes and listen to Brad Goldberg, General Manager of Microsoft Search Business Group.
The interview reveals useful information about the time line for Microsoft to capture market share fro9m Google and Microsoft’s ideas for differentiating itself from Google in Web search.
Surprisingly, there were no references that I could pick up to enterprise search, nor was there any indication that Mr. Goldberg was aware of the Fast Search & Transfer Web search technology which was quite good. As you may know, Fast Search withdrew from Web search in 2003, selling its AllTheWeb.com Web index to Overture. Yahoo gobbled Overture and used bits and pieces of the Fast Search technology recently. The “auto suggest” feature is still available from Yahoo’s AllTheWeb.com site. My tests suggest that today’s AllTheWeb.com uses the Yahoo Search index built by the Slurp crawler and the Fast Search technology for some of the bells and whistles on the site. The news search function is actually quite useful. If you are not familiar with it, you can try it here.
During the interview, Mr. Goldberg uses some sample queries to illustrate his claims about Live.com’s search performance, precision, and recall. I ran the “Paris” query on each of these systems, and I ran comparative queries on this Web log as well. After the interview, I took a look at the 2005 analysis of mainstream Web search systems here so I could gauge how much change has taken place in the last three years. Quick impression: Not much. You may want to perform similar as-you-listen tests. It is easy to see what search system responds most quickly, how the search results differ, and the features that each system makes available.
Three points in Mr. Goldberg’s remarks stuck in my mind. I want to mention each of these and then offer a few observations. Judging from the edgy comments to some my essays, I want you to know that you may not agree with me. That’s okay with me. Please, use the comments section to set me straight. Providing some facts to go along with your push back is helpful to me.
Key Points for Me
1. Parity or Microsoft’s Relevancy Is As Good as Google’s
Mr. Goldberg asserted that the major search services were at parity in terms of relevance and coverage. I found this notion somewhat difficult to comprehend. The data about Web search market share undermines any argument about parity which means, according to my understanding of the word “equality” or “equivalence”. I have had difficulty interpreting comments by whiz kids before, so I may be off base. My thought was that Google continues to gain market share at the expense of both Microsoft and Yahoo. The dis-parity is significant because Google, according to data mavens, accounts for 60 percent of more of user queries in the US. In Europe, the market share is higher. US search systems do not hold commanding leads in China, Korea, and other Eastern markets.
Should parity mean visual appearance, yes, Microsoft is looking more like Google. Here is the result of one of my test queries: “real estate baltimore maryland”.
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On the surface these look alike. Closer inspection reveals that Google includes a canned form so I can narrow my result by location and property type. Google eliminates a step in looking for real estate in Baltimore. Microsoft’s result does not offer this feature, preferring to show “related searches”. I like the Google approach. I don’t make much use of machine-generated related queries. I have specialized tools to discern relationships in result sets.
Search Security: Not a Chance
June 16, 2008
USA Today (June 16, 2008) contains a story by Michelle Kessler. “Some Employees Buy Own Laptops, Phones for Work.” Navigate to a USA Today-equipped news stand or try to locate the story on the USA Today Web site here. Gannett is one of the traditional publishers whose Web site often befuddles me. Chasing down the story is worth the effort.
The key point for me is that the USA Today figured out that the expediency, management laxity, and financial pressures have changed the rules for providing employees with company-purchased computers and mobile devices. The data in the article are the usual “big numbers for big impact” and nifty looking charts. So forget the assertion that 39 percent of employees buy a laptop for work or that 43 percent purchase their smartphone. Divide these figures in half. The problem is clear.
If you have any illusions about the security of information in a search and retrieval system, you want to rethink your assumptions and question the assertions about secure behind-the-firewall search. In the work that I do, when an outside device is live and connected within an organization, a security problem exists. True, nothing may happen. But when a single outside device is behind the firewall and capable of receiving information from the organization’s system, a security risk exists. Feel free to pooh-pooh this if you wish.
In one investment bank, the information technology department locked down access to the Internet, instant messaging, and external mail accounts. What was the work around? A personal smartphone or a low cost access device with a secure digital slot or a USB connector.
I chuckle when search system vendors make their security features the key differentiator for their online search systems. Most vendors use the security procedures in place and do not try to layer more security on top of the organization’s existing security methods and systems. Verity’s token system was one of the better approaches. But even that method is vulnerable when users have their own gizmos behind the firewall.
The USA Today article makes it clear that organizations are allowing employees to purchase computing devices. The horse is out of the barn. A happy quack to the USA Today editor who okayed Ms. Kessler’s story.
Stephen Arnold, June 16, 2008
Google Customers, Actually Superstar Customers
June 15, 2008
Google is a secretive outfit, despite the river of information about various doings at the Googplex in Mountain View, California. If you want to know who some of Google’s enterprise customers are, you can find six of them with profiles here. I assume the notion of a “superstar” is different from being a real live Googler, but the designation is interesting as is the first name familiarity. These superstars may warrant a contact at Google who takes their calls and answers their emails. Grab the names and profiles before the range information drifts away. The enterprise applications range from federated search to collaboration.
Stephen Arnold, June 15, 2008
IBM Explains Text Analytics
June 15, 2008
A colleague called my attention to this April 2008 description of IBM’s view of text analysis. The essay “From Text Analytics to Data Warehousing” is more than processing content. The article by Matthias Nicola, Martin Sommerlandt, and Kathy Zeidenstein points toward what I call a “metaplay” or “umbrella tactic”. (You will want to read the posting here. When accessing IBM content, it is important to keep in mind that it can be difficult, if not impossible, to locate IBM information via the IBM search function. Pages available via a direct link like this “From Text Analytics to Data Warehousing” may require that you register, obtain an IBM user name and password, and then relaunch your search to locate the information. Other queries will return false drops with the desired article nowhere to be found. I’m not sure if this is OmniFind, Fast Search, Endeca, or some other vendor’s handiwork. But search and retrieval of IBM information on the IBM site can be frustrating to me. Click here now.)
The authors state:
This article review[s] the text analysis capabilities of IBM OmniFind Analytics Edition, including an analysis of the XML format of the text analysis results, MIML. It then examined different approaches that can help you extend the value of OmniFind Analytics Edition text analysis by storing analysis results from the MIML file into DB2 to enable standard business intelligence operations and reporting using the full power of SQL or SQL/XML.
As I worked through this article, reviewed the diagram, and explored the See Also references, one point jumped out at me. The mark up generated by the IBM system can be verbose. The emphasis on the use of DB2, IBM’s database system underscored for me that IBM text analytics requires software, DB2, and storage. In fact, without storage, the IBM text analysis system could grind to a halt. To increase the performance, the licensee may require additional IBM servers, management software, and other bits and pieces.
You have to store the “star schema for MIML” somewhere. Here’s what the structure looks like. Of course, the image is IBM’s and copyrighted by the company.
I want to point out that this is one of the simpler diagrams in the write up.
Observations
- This write up suggests to me that IBM is defining text analytics as a component in a much, much larger array of software, hardware, and systems. My hunch is that IBM wants to shut the barn door before more standalone text analytics tools are sold into IBM shops.
- IBM is making explicit that text analytics is an exercise in data management. Google, I think, has much the same notion based on my reading of its technical papers.
- IBM has done a good job of making clear that software alone won’t deliver text analytics. Without the ability to scale, text analysis can choke most systems. Now IBM has to get this message to the information technology professionals who assume that their existing servers and infrastructure can handle text analytics.
- IBM has done an excellent job of moving the concept of text analysis as an add on into a larger constellation of operations. The notion of a metaplay or an umbrella tactic is important because individual vendors often ignore or understate the broader impact of their content processing subsystems.
I think this is an important write up. A happy quack to the reader who called the information to my attention.
Stephen Arnold, June 15, 2008
Search Wizards Speak Interviews
June 15, 2008
One of the handful of people who read my musings in this Web log told me that it was hard to locate the interviews with influential people in the enterprise search market. You can find the index to the 18 interviews at http://www.arnoldit.com/search-wizards-speak/ or click on this link.
On Monday, we will post another interview. This one is particularly exciting because it takes a look at a company with sophisticated technology based on search, database and content processing. The firm provides a solution of which search and indexing are components. I will give you one clue: the firm is growing at a double-digit pace in the enterprise publishing system sector. The company competes with some of the Big Names in search as well as with firms that are off the radar of many information access vendors. We’ll post the new interview on Monday, June 16, 2008. With this interview, I am going to take a hiatus because it is becoming quite difficult to reach people over the summer period in the United States.
However, I will be posting brief profiles of companies in the search and content processing sector. These will be updated on an irregular basis, and I will post an index page to these profiles. I want to create several test profiles, gauge reader reaction, and then finalize a standard format for the information.
Here are the direct links to the interviews completed through June 12, 2008. These are listed in alphabetical order.
| Company | Interview Subject | Date of Interview |
| Attivio | Ali Riaz |
26-May-08 |
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14-Apr-08 |
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18-Feb-08 |
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31-Mar-08 |
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11-Mar-08 |
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10-Jun-08 |
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17-Mar-08 |
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25-Feb-08 |
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12-May-08 |
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5-Mar-08 |
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28-Apr-08 |
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2-Jun-08 |
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19-May-08 |
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12-Jun-08 |
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21-Apr-08 |
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7-Apr-08 |
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24-Mar-08 |
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5-May-08 |
A special thanks to the executives who participated in the interviews. I extended invitations to Microsoft and Fast (sorry, we can’t talk to you), Google (no one responded including the top gun in enterprise search David Girouard), and Autonomy’s Andrew Kanter (no, can’t talk. Life is too manic). Too bad for me, I guess. For the folks who could talk, were thoughtful enough to respond to email, and in control of their time–thank you and a contented quack, quack.
Stephen Arnold, June 15, 2008
The Duh Factor: Email, Distractions, and Workers
June 15, 2008
When I awakened at 6 30 am, I took a look at what my crawlers snagged as I slept. Email stories. Hundreds of email stories. You can sample the floods on Techmeme.com, Megite.com, and other aggregation services. The catalyst for this blog-astrophy appears to be this essay by Matt Richtel of the New York Times. I’m not sure you need a link in this Web log because this story has gone viral. Email, distraction, and digital addiction are, in my view, part of the furniture of living. These behaviors will be with us for some time.
Now, let me summarize “Lost in E-Mail, Tech Firms Face Self-Made Beast.” Email is a problem. Workers, companies, and any one else in the message flow spends time fiddling around. Wasted time means an expensive, often futile, experience.
Some of the pundits commenting on this essay by Mr. Richtel has made the leap to distractions of which email is one in the modern work space. You can sample this line of thought in the Business Week article “May We Have Your Attention, Please?” by Maggie Jackson.
More, Not Fewer, Messages
I have a different view of the email problem, and I am not sure what to make of the furor over any digital messaging.
First, we have more types of electronic messaging that are exponentiating the cost and attention problems and their costs in money and time. SMS, for example, adds to the message traffic. When BearStearns used to be in business, my client sent me SMS messages, and these to him were must-answer communications. Email was too slow. SMS traffic I learned in one of my studies is larger than email traffic. I don’t have the motivation to dig out the 2007 data I have but I recall being flabbergasted at the number of SMS fired off and the revenue these generate for telcos.
Second, we now must deal with micro blogging. Twitter.com, the Silicon Valley in crowd communication medium, allows one to broadcast information of great import to anyone interested in receiving a friend’s postings. Here’s “tweet” I cadged from Popurls.com, a service which presents random tweets:
YoungnRich Apparel california. @holli I nap every Saturday there [sic] so rejuvenating
Very helpful this post, Holli.
Third, the notion of “soft interruptions” just adds to the flow of message traffic. Toss in instant messaging–a form of information that pops up–that runs across networks. I dislike instant anything, but that’s my 64-year-old biases coming to the fore.
Stepping Back
Distraction is a fact of life. When I leave my log cabin in rural Kentucky and venture to the big city, I find myself in meetings. One experience I had in Seattle in the last month is illustrative of the situations I encounter.
I am giving a talk about a company’s technology. I don’t work for the company whose technology I am describing. I don’t even care if it works or not. I’m describing what this company says its technology will do. There are five people in the room. Each has a laptop with a wireless connection, a smartphone, and a beverage. A person rushes into the room with a laptop, smartphone, and dog. The late comer is the “boss” and he says, “That diagram is wrong. That technology will never work.” He then sits down, attends to his laptop, and sends one message on his smartphone. He then interrupts and asserts, “That device can’t perform that function. It doesn’t have two radios. Quit telling us about that function. It won’t work.”
I’ m not sure what to do, so I say, “No problem. I go on to another slide.” A short time later the “boss” leaves. After the presentation, the other attendees wander off.
This situation is representative of what I find in my work.
- Many employees who are bright and confident in their ability to multi task. I find that humans who multi task may be operating at less than 100 percent efficiency, not the 100 percent plus that these folks think their doing two tasks at a time delivers. This old human does not multi task. I do one thing at a time. In fact, I have to work to keep my mind from wandering. Many of the people I encounter actively embrace wandering thoughts.
- Over the years, I have found that people in knowledge jobs go to great lengths to appear busy, engaged, and in demand. At Booz, Allen & Hamilton in the late 1970s, the fellow who trained me–Dr. William P. Sommers–appeared calm and unhurried. It was a false front. He was busy, but he managed his time effectively and separated himself from the lesser beings at Booz, Allen because he was under control. Today, the appearance of busy-ness is highly valued. Intrusive crap is embraced because it connotes success.
- The devices are fun for many people. I find small gadgets, including mini-notebook computers, maddening. I can’t see the screen. The keyboard is too small for my large, increasingly clumsy fingers. The gizmos are fragile, and I drop small slippery gadgets with great frequency. Younger folks enjoy the complexity and some watch videos on screens the size of match books. My hunch is that these professionals are playing with toys. Instead of Lego blocks, professionals today keep their childhood habits alive with digital play things.
- Most professionals I encounter don’t know what the heck they are doing. Their expertise often lacks a broader business context. Reinventing the wheel is a popular pass time in many of the high-tech environments in which I find myself. The interest in mobile search is somehow new. Nope, like metatagging, it is the same old stuff gussied up with a new name. If you don’t know what to do to make a direct and immediate contribution in your work, humans generate fake smoke. The blue flickers on digital gizmos are the equivalent of laser light shows for a touring rock band’s stage dressing. Distraction is a bit of fakery.
You probably disagree with my take on this email discussion. My reaction is like the Cheers’ character who says, “Duh.” As professionals more cut off from meaningful work, distractions become more attractive. I can gauge the focus of a meeting by counting the number of laptops and smartphones in the room. When there are more gizmos than people, I know the company is in a management whirlpool. In one meeting, I had an audiences of 62 people. There were 109 devices. This company, if I were to name it, is one the media, investors, and customers believes is in a death spiral.
So, as the economy falters, the pressure on employees goes up. If the employee doesn’t have a clue about managing time and setting priorities, the distractions flow. Forget how many emails pile up. When I return from a trip out side the US, I winnow emails ruthlessly. I don’t waste time on email. If a person wants me to do something, there are ways to get my attention. One young consultant at an Internet research firm wrote me to participate in a survey. I wrote back, “No. I will now delete email from you and your company automatically.” End of problem from my point of view.
Distractions, therefore, provide a way to measure the intellectual and managerial skill of a worker. The best employees and colleagues know how to manage distractions. I like to think about Alexander, sitting in a stinking tent, somewhere east of modern Afghanistan and his ability to manage distractions. I can imagine his hearing, “The troops don’t have water” and “We don’t know where the enemy is” and “We don’t have enough fodder for the pack animals”. A New York Times writer observing this situation could easily report that Alexander is overwhelmed by yammering requires from his lieutenants, too many parchment or wax messages, and intrusions such as a raiding party intent on killing him. Alexander dealt reasonably well with distractions.
Is it possible that these squawks, cheeps, howls, and tweets about “the email problem” reveal the flaws of the individuals, not the problems of the messaging environment. Agree? Disagree? Let me know if you are not too distracted.
Update. Times of London introduces the notion of a “pond-skater mind” here. The fix may be to use other tools.
Stephen Arnold, June 15, 2008
Update 1: June 23, 2008 You may find “The Myth of Multitasking” by Christine Rosen germane. Writing in The New Atlantis, she summarizes the challenges of mutli tasking. I particularly liked her use of the phrase “acquired inattention”. You can read the full essay here. Highly recommended.
Update 2; June 24, 2008 Ars Technica has a useful essay about multi tasking. J.M. Gitlin’s “The Boss Made Me Do It” is here.
Search Rumor Round Up, Summer 2008
June 14, 2008
I am fortunate to receive a flow of information, often completely wacky and erroneous, in my redoubt in rural Kentucky. The last six months have been a particularly rich period. Compared to 2007, 2008 has been quite exciting.
I’m not going to assure you that these rumors have any significant foundation. What I propose to do is highlight several of the more interesting ones and offer a broader observation about each. My goal is to provide some context for the ripples that are shaking the fabric of search, content processing, and information retrieval.
The analogy to keep in mind is that we are standing on top of a jello dessert like this one.
The substance itself has a certain firmness. Try to pick it it up or chop off a hunk, and you have a slippery job on your hands. Now, the rumors:
Rumor 1: More Consolidation in Search
I think this is easy to say, but it is tough to pull off in the present economic environment. Some companies have either investors who have pumped millions into a search and content processing company. These kind souls want their money back. If the search vendor is publicly traded, the set up of the company or its valuation may be a sticky wicket. There have been some stunning buy outs so far in 2008. The most remarkable was Microsoft’s purchase of Fast Search & Transfer. SAS snapped up the little-known Teragram. But the wave of buy outs across the more than 300 companies in the search and content processing sector has not materialized.
Rumor 2: Oracle Will Make a Play in Enterprise Search
I receive a phone call or two a month asking me about Oracle SES10g. (When you access the Oracle Web site, be patient. The system was sluggish for me on June 14, 2008.)The drift of these calls boils down to one key point, “What’s Oracle’s share of the enterprise search market?” The answer is that its share can be whatever Oracle’s accountants want it to be. You see Oracle SES10g is linked to the Oracle relational database and other bits and pieces of the Oracle framework. Oracle’s acquisitions in search and retrieval from Artificial Linguistics more than a decade ago to Triple Hop in more recent times has given Oracle capability. As a superplatform, Oracle is a player in search. So far this year, Oracle has been moving forward slowly. An experiment with Bitext here and a deployment with Siderean Software there. Financial mavens want Oracle to start acquiring search and content processing companies. There are rumors, but so far no action, and I don’t expect significant changes in the short term.
Microsoft BIOIT: Opportunities for Text Mining Vendors
June 14, 2008
I came across Microsoft BIOIT in a news release from Linguamatics, a UK-based text processing company. If you are not familiar with Linguamatics, you can learn more about the company here. The company’s catchphrase is “Intelligent answers from text.”
In April 2006, Microsoft announced its BIOIT alliance. The idea was to create “a cross-industry group working to further integrate science and technology as a first step toward making personalized medicine a reality.” The official announcement continued:
The alliance unites the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, hardware and software industries to explore new ways to share complex biomedical data and collaborate among multidisciplinary teams to ultimately speed the pace of drug discovery and development. Founding members of the alliance include Accelrys Software Inc., Affymetrix Inc., Amylin Pharmaceuticals Inc., Applied Biosystems and The Scripps Research Institute, among more than a dozen industry leaders.
The core of the program is Microsoft’s agenda for making SharePoint and its other server products the plumbing of health-related systems among its partners. The official release makes this point as well, “The BioIT Alliance will also provide independent software vendors (ISVs) with industry knowledge that helps them commercialize informatics solutions more quickly with less risk.”
Rudy Potenzone, a highly regarded expert in the pharmaceutical industry, joined Microsoft in 2007 to bolster Redmond’s BIOIT team. Dr. Potenzone, who has experience in online with Chemical Abstracts, has added horsepower to the Microsoft team.
This week on June 12, 2008, Linguamatics hopped on the BIOIT band wagon. In its news announcement, Linguamatics co-founder Roger Hale said:
As the amount of textual information impacting drug discovery and development programs grows exponentially each year, the ability to extract and share decision-relevant knowledge is crucial to streamline the process and raise productivity… As a leader in knowledge discovery from text, we look forward to working with other alliance members to explore new ways in which the immense value of text mining can be exploited across complex, multidisciplinary organizations like pharmaceutical companies.
Observations
Health and medicine is an important player in the scientific, medical, and technical information sector. More importantly, health presages money. In the US, the baby boomer bulge is moving toward retirement, bringing a cornucopia of revenue opportunity for many companies.
Google has designs on this sector as well. You can read about its pilot project here. Microsoft introduced a similar project in 2006. You can read about it here.
Several observations are warranted:
- There is little doubt that bringing order, control, metadata and online access to certain STM information is a plus. Tossing in the patient health record allows smart software to crunch through data looking for interesting trends. Evidence based medicine also can benefit. There’s a social upside beyond the opportunity for revenue.
- The issue of privacy looms large as personal medical records move into these utility-like systems. The experts working on these systems to collect, disseminate, and mine data have good intentions. Nevertheless, this is uncharted territory, and when one explores, one must be prepared for the unexpected. The profile of these projects is low, seemingly controlled quite tightly. It is difficult to know if security and privacy issues have been adequately addressed. I’m not sure government authorities are on top of this issue.
- The commercial imperative fuels some potent corporate interests. These interests could run counter with social needs. The medical informatics sector, the STM players, and the health care stakeholders are moving forward, and it is not clear what the impacts will be when their text mining reveals hiterto unknown facets of information.
One thing is clear. Linguamatics, Hakia, and other content processing companies see an opportunity to leverage these broader industry interests to find new markets for its text mining technology. I anticipate that other content processing companies will find the opportunities sufficiently promising to give BIOIT a whirl.
Stephen Arnold, June 14, 2008
Goo Hoo: The Fox Is in the Hen House
June 13, 2008
I am breaking a self-imposed rule about ignoring Web search and focusing on the enterprise or behind-the-firewall search. I am also commenting about online advertising, another aspect of today’s world that is of little interest to me. But I can’t pass up the swarming of Web log authors who want to comment on the Google and Yahoo decision to tell the world that they are now going steady.
Goo Hoo is my moniker for this relationship. I have dipped and sampled about two dozen postings about this deal. You will want to read the comments of Stephen Shankland and his “Yahoo Inks Search-Ad Pact with Google”. It’s an excellent summary of the deal with some informed commentary about the value of the deal on Yahoo’s cash flow. I think this is important but it is not the main point of the tie up, a point to which I will return in the observations section of this news analysis. You will also want to read Henry Blodget’s summary of the key points of the deal. His perspective, as always, is helpful if you want a glimpse of how Wall Street reads the tea leaves on the back seat shenanigans of two high-profile Internet companies. Mr. Blodget’s June 12, 2008, commentary is here. You can grind through the mountain of links on Techmeme.com, Megite.com, and Newspond.com, among others.
The pick of the litter and the one that made me grin was Google’s own announcement here. Please, read this, preferably after taking a gander at my tongue-in-cheek essay called “Goo Jit Su: Google’s Art of Soft Force in Competitive Fights” here. When I wrote that piece in early 2008 for my KMWorld column but I decided it was too frisky for a “real” publication, not this wacky Web log with which I am now saddled.
Google says in its typical fun-free prose:
We have been in contact with regulators about this arrangement, and we expect to work closely with them to answer their questions about the transaction. Ultimately we believe that the efficiencies of this agreement will help preserve competition.
I quite like the phrasing about working closely with regulators. I also like the “preserve competition” phrase. I’m not sure if the logic is as crisp as that set forth in US20080140647, Google’s patent about universal search here, but I think the idea of preserving competition is memorable.
Observations
Let me offer my observations, which, as you know, are based on my view of the online world:
- The lawyers are going to be able to buy new cars on this tie up. No, I am not interested in working as a consultant to a law firm nor as an expert witness. But some folks will make a ton of money litigating about this action. The notion that a regulatory body has a firm grasp of how online works is going to get quite a test in the coming months. There is always the chance that the knife that cuts Google’s Achilles’ tendon is going to be wielded by a female attorney from Duke Law.
- The GOOG without much effort has managed to rain on the Microsoft parade. Just as the Redmond crowd gets free of the Don Quixote charge at Yahoo, Google announces that the Mountain View couple has become an item. I anticipate T shirts that say, “Goo Hoo”. Maybe I will have Zazzle make a few?
- Advertisers won’t know what’s happening for months, if ever. The GOOG makes it clear that no human is involved in the ad system. If Google wizards show a Madison Avenue type an algorithm, I’m not sure that will clear the fog about who does what, how, under what circumstances, and where the money actually goes.
- The consultants are going to have a banner quarter. I anticipate expensive analyses from consultancies world wide explaining the upside and the downside of this deal. Let me save you some money: Google wins. Yahoo is now wearing a shock collar and Google controls how much pain to administer and when. Microsoft is puzzled. Attorney are looking for new condos in Costa Rica and Belize. Regulators have a chance to make the six o’clock news for the next three to six months. And that competition point. Hmmm.
Maybe I should change “Goo Hoo” to “Boo Hoo”? The Googlers have done it again. Goo Jit Su. With little effort, the fox-like Google is in the hen house now.
Stephen Arnold, June 13, 2008
Goo Jit Su: Google’s Art of Soft Force in Competitive Fights
June 13, 2008
Note to PR mavens. This is an essay based on my personal opinions. Please, don’t call me to set me straight. The author wears bunny rabbit ears. Thank you for your attention.
I have a friend who is a Georgia Tech computer wizard. I don’t think he went to class; he just took tests and aced them. But like me, he’s logged a number of years on his disc drives. But I recall fondly his many references to various martial arts. He was fascinated by akido, the art of soft force. He even introduced me to his sensei before the two of these unathletic looking lads went off to the Times Square subway station in the hopes of having a street gang try to mug them. Quite a duo: A math wizard and an umpteenth degree black belt from somewhere west of Marina del Rey.
The idea of “soft” fighting is that you use your opponent’s force to defeat the opponent. I remember one day when my son was in high school. My friend asked me, “Will your son wrestle me?”
Now, my son was a quite a good high school footballer and quite fit. He had muscles where I didn’t know one could have muscles. When he arrived home from school, I said, “Howie wants to wrestle you. Please, don’t hurt him. We have to get the system running tonight, and I don’t have time to take him to the hospital.” “Sure,” he said.
My son smiled and then without warning grabbed my friend’s arm and twisted it–or tried to twist it. This Georgia Tech engineer who looked like a Georgia Tech engineer, not a street fighter, turned toward my son and gently put him to the ground. My son went for a tackle and ended up in the marigolds. “That’s it,” my wife said. “You guys get out of my flowers.” My son asked my friend, “How do you do that?”
My friend said, “Ah, grasshopper, you need to study akido with my sensei. The secret is to use use your energy to achieve my ends. It is strength from soft force. It is power without effort.”
I thought it was baloney. But that “power without effort” idea stuck in my mind. I also quite liked the phrase soft force. I thought the silliness of dojos, pajamas, and strength with minimal effort was poppycock. But there it was: My fit son gently deflected and controlled by my Georgia Tech pal and his grasshopper parody from the old TV show Kung Fu.
Then I made the connection between my friend, a math and computer whiz, and Google. I realized that the GOOG was practicing its own black art of Goo Jit Su.
This is an illustration of Googzilla, dressed in traditional garb designed to make US wrestlers chuckle, using “soft force” to throw an opponent into a tizzy. Notice that Googzilla expends little effort. The opponent is headed for a shock with his energy redirected against him. Googzille seems to be lowering the opponent to the ground almost gently. Appearances can be deceiving.
Let me explain.
Google has demonstrated for the second time in less than a year its mastery of a new form of “soft” force. I call this form of fighting “Goo Jit Su”. Instead of defining it and using those cute line drawings that show how to kill an opponent with the crane or other animal inspired technique, let me give you two examples of Goo Jit Su.
Verizon
Google is a peanut compared to Verizon. It’s not just revenue. Verizon is big. It has the AT&T pre-Judge-Green DNA in its digital marrow. Verizon understands lobbying. Verizon knows how to win government contracts. Verizon knows how to squeeze money from its customers. I heard that in Washington, DC, even the drug dealers pay their Verizon wireless bills on time. No reason to annoy Mother Verizon.
Verizon’s approach to business combat is similar to extreme martial arts–anything goes. There’s one objective: triumph.
Google pulled its Goo Jit Su on Verizon. Without any effort beyond some letter writing and hiring familiar lobbyist type drones, Verizon agreed to open its wireless spectrum. I don’t have a clue what “open” means, but as a former Bell Labs contractor, work at Bellcore, and my USWest Web work, “open” is not what phone companies do. AT&T defined “open” in one way–AT&T’s way. Verizon’s agreeing to open spectrum is tantamount to one of the Mt. Rushmore faces turning up in the Poconos.
How did Google achieve this feat with little cost, modest effort, and generally disorganized PR? The answer, “Goo Jit Su.” Google used the force of Verizon the way my friend turned a collision with my son into a romp.
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