Portfolio Magazine on the Microsoft Fast Problem
October 25, 2008
Portfolio Magazine has a solid, interesting story about the police raid on Microsoft Fast in Oslo, Norway, earlier in October 2008. You can read the full text of the story here. A quote from the addled goose found its way into this story. I must admit that my observation that when the police raid a company, seize data, and scurry back to their secure facility, the company has lost control of its future. If I had been the editor on the story, I would have sent my remark to the bit bucket. The Portfolio story summarizes a number of important actions prior to the police raid. These range from board members squabbling to allegations of improper financial dealings to a precipitous drop in revenues without warning shareholders or Wall Street. I know something about Fast Search & Transfer Enterprise Search Platform. I know less about what Microsoft plans to do with that amalgamation of aging code, open source, and acquired technologies. I do know that Microsoft thought it was a great idea to spend $1.23 billion for a vendor whose files and other information are now in the capable hands of Norwegian police. I have some experience with police and intelligence officials in Scandinavia. My impression is that the reputation for investigative and intelligence excellence is well deserved. Microsoft has its hands full with Google. Now the company has to deal with its Google-killing acquisition spending time giving depositions, digging through email for information, and facing the astounding costs of litigation. Microsoft has to close the search gap between itself and Google. Any distraction from this mission is a benefit to Google. I wonder who did the due diligence on this deal for Microsoft. If you know, let me know. I would like to try and interview the person. I bet I could learn something useful.
Stephen Arnold, October 25, 2008
A Google Advertorial
October 25, 2008
I am having a tough time figuring out what information is developed by someone trying to write an objective article and someone who is writing an advertisement disguised as a news story. My newsreader displayed this headline to me on October 24, 2008: “Google’s Enterprising Future.” The author was according to the by line Nitin Mangtani. At the foot of the article which ran on Forbes.com here, Mr. Mangtani’s day job was displayed in type these 64 year old eyes would describe as small and gray. That day job is lead product manager for Google Enterprise Search.
I quite like marketing collateral. I find it a feast of buzzwords, cutting edge ideas, and knockwurst. I read the article and identified several useful items; for example:
- The Google advertorial was sponsored in some way and to some degree by SAP, the German software giant that apparently sees a reader like me as a prospective licensee for a multi million dollar software system.
- Google processes “1 trillion unique URLs“
- “The Google Search Appliance instantly assesses more than 100 variables for each user query”
- Google delivers “a universal search experience”
- Google Search Appliance users “can quickly refine their searches through an automated grouping of search results by topic we call “dynamic clustering.”
- Competitors’ products are often “developer platforms–complex systems that take huge amounts of time, money and expertise to set up and maintain”
Was this a news story? Was this an advertorial? I felt like a confused ad executive. Like McDonald’s the write up says to me, “Over one trillion urls processed.” Great. Just not germane to the enterprise message Google’s trying to get me to embrace.
Several other thoughts ran through my mind:
First, Google has enough money to buy space in Forbes. Most companies don’t. Therefore, Google will gain share of mind.
Second, the argument set forth in the advertorial makes sense to Google. I don’t think I buy the pitch. “Universal search experience” sounds good, but what my research suggests is that companies want a solution, not an experience. Search is not a visit to Disney World in an organization. Search is necessary in most cases to do work.
Third, not all competitor products are developer platforms. For example, Clearwell Systems, Coveo, Exalead, Index Engines, ISYS Search Software, and other vendors’ products are not platforms. These are products that deliver specific solutions. Sweeping generalizations may be okay for a math student who is now a marketer, but the generalizations are going to work for me.
Finally, what’s with the SAP logos slapped around the advertorial? I found the whole presentation a welter of brand names. There’s Forbes. There’s SAP. There’s Google.There’s Investopedia. There’s Bankrate. The Google message’s useful bits are lost in a presentation that invites me to dismiss the messages.
The big omission was Google’s email archiving service. Yep, Google does low cost email archiving and offers eDiscovery services. That’s a big part of enterprise search to me. Probably an oversight or a business not integrated into the Google Search Appliance that Google doesn’t want to explain to me. Omission works pretty well because most people have little knowledge of the Postini hosted services that are not bundled with the Google Search Appliance. Same content, just not actually “universal”. Ah, details.
Agree? Disagree? 20-somethings, please, explain what I am not appreciating in this Googley advertorial.
Stephen Arnold, October 25, 2008
Stephen Arnold, October 25, 2008
Exalead: Making Headway in the US
October 25, 2008
Exalead, based in Paris, has been increasing its footprint in the US. The company has expanded its US operation and now it is making headlines in information technology publications. The company has updated its enterprise search system CloudView. Peter Sayer’s “Exalead Updates Enterprise Search to Explore Data Cloud” here provides a good summary of the system’s new features. For me, the most important comment in the Network World article was this comment:
Our approach is very different from Google’s in that we’re interested in conversational search,” he [the president of Exalead] said. That ‘conversation’ takes the form of a series of interactions in which Exalead invites searchers to refine their request by clicking on related terms or links that will restrict the search to certain kinds of site (such as blogs or forums), document format (PDF, Word) or language.”
Exalead’s engineering, however, is the company “secret sauce.” My research revealed that Exalead uses many of the techniques first pioneered by AltaVista.com, Google, and Amazon. As a result, Exalead delivers performance on content and query processing comparable to Google’s. The difference is that the Exalead platform has been engineered to mesh with existing enterprise applications. Google’s approach, on the other hand, requires a dedicated “appliance”. Microsoft takes another approach, requiring customers to adopt dozens of Microsoft servers to build a search enabled application.
On a recent trip to Europe, I learned that Exalead is working to make it easy for a licensee to process content from an organization’s servers as well as certain Internet content. Exalead is an interesting company, and I want to dig into its technical innovations. If I unearth some useful information, I will post the highlights. In the meantime, you can get a feel for the company’s engineering from its Web search and retrieval system. The company has indexed eight to nine billion Web pages. You can find the service here.
Stephen Arnold, October 25, 2008
Dead Tree Outfits and Online
October 25, 2008
Reflections of a Newsosaur snagged my attention on October 24, 2005. The article “Voodoo Newspaper Economics” here struck a chord. I have been thinking about the plight of companies whose business model is under siege. Companies don’t have a super hero to rescue them. Even if they did, that super hero would probably get news on a mobile device. I don’t think there is a super hero able to come to the rescue of what I call “dead tree outfits.” The Newsosaur must have been on my wavelength. You must read the Newsosaur’s analysis. For me, the most compelling point in the write up was:
For the record, the secular forces dragging down newspapers are: Declining readership, shrinking advertising, high fixed costs and growing online competition that makes it increasingly difficult to charge the premium ad rates that were possible prior to the Internet.
None of these points shouts, “Digital.” But in my opinion, these “secular forces” are subject to some painful economic realities. For example, declining readership is a function of demographics. This means that those who are fond of print newspapers are a declining species. Without eyeballs, ad revenue flags. The online competition may be surprised to find itself as a cause of traditional publishing’s problems. Today’s online ecosystem flourished around the dead tree outfits, swarming over the traditional publishers’ online efforts like kudzu. So now we have citizen Web log writers with audiences larger than some daily newspapers. The torch has been passed, and its sparks are setting the dead tree outfits on fire. To put out the blaze, the dead tree outfits pour red ink on the blaze. Not surprisingly, the consequences are unpleasant.One other point in the Newsosaur’s article warrants highlighting; to wit:
If the company abandoned print but were able to double its online sales to $20 million, it would lose $14 million in a year, for an operating margin of a negative 70%. To break even, the prototypical publication would have to more than triple its sales from the current levels. To make a profit of 15%, the company would have to quadruple it sales.
When I read these words, the conclusion seems obvious. Dead tree outfits will fall in the forest. Will anyone hear? Will anyone care? I like traditional newspapers. In a few years, folks like me will be playing bingo in the retirement village. The demographics, not the economics, put the final nails in some traditional publishing companies’ coffins.Stephen Arnold, October 25, 2008
Twine’s Semantic Spin on Bookmarks
October 25, 2008
Twine is a company committed to semantic technology. Semantics can be difficult to define. I keep it simple and suggest that semantic technology allows software to understand the meaning of a document. Semantic technology finds a home inside of many commercial search and content processing systems. Users, however, don’t tinker with the semantic plumbing. Users take advantage of assisted navigation, search suggestions, or a system’s ability to take a single word query and automatically hook the term to a concept or make a human-type connection without a human having to do the brain work.
Twine, according to the prestigious MIT publication Technology Review, is breaking new ground. Erica Naone’s article “Untangling Web Information: The Semantic Web Organizer Twine Offers Bookmarking with Built In AI” stop just short of a brass band enhanced endorsement but makes Twine’s new service look quite good. You must read the two part article here. For me, the most significant comment was:
But Jim Hendler, a professor of computer science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a member of Twine’s advisory board, says that Semantic Web technologies can set Twine apart from other social-networking sites. This could be true, so long as users learn to take advantage of those technologies by paying attention to recommendations and following the threads that Twine offers them. Users could easily miss this, however, by simply throwing bookmarks into Twine without getting involved in public twines or connecting to other users.
Radar Networks developed Twine. The metaphor of twine invokes for me a reminder of the trouble I precipitated when I tangled my father’s ball of hairy, fibrous string. My hunch is that others will think of twine as tying things together.
You will want to look at the Twine service here. Be sure to compare it to the new Microsoft service U Rank. The functions of Twine and U Rank are different, yet both struck me as sharing a strong commitment to sharing and saving Web information that is important to a user. Take a look at IBM’s Dogear. This service has been around for almost a year, yet it is almost unknown. Dogear’s purpose is to give social bookmarking more oomph for the enterprise. You can try this service here.
As I explored the Twine service and refreshed my memory of U Rank and Dogear, several thoughts occurred to me:
- Exposing semantic technology in new services is a positive development. The more automatic functions can be a significant time saver. A careless user, however, could lose sight of what’s happening and shift into cruise control mode, losing sight of the need to think critically about who recommends what and from where information comes.
- Semantic technology may be more useful in the plumbing. As search enabled applications supplant key word search, putting too much semantic functionality in front of a user could baffle some people. Google has stuck with its 1950s, white refrigerator interface because it works. The Google semantic technology hums along out of sight.
- The new semantic services, regardless of the vendor developing them, have not convinced me that they can generate enough cash to stay alive. The Radar Networks and the Microsofts will have to more than provide services that are almost impossible to monetize. IBM’s approach is to think about the enterprise, which may be a better revenue bet.
I am enthusiastic about semantic technology. User facing applications are in their early days. More innovation will be coming.
Stephen Arnold, October 25, 2008
VC Triage: Collateral Damage
October 24, 2008
The phrase “collateral damage” possesses a certain strangeness. A pragmatist accepts damage that is accidental, incidental, or a “slip twixt cup and the lip”. Stacey Higginbotham’s “To Prep for Downturn, VCs Turn to Triage” here carries a banner that sums up the article quite well, “Technology and the Credit Crunch”. The connection between the erosion of easy, fast, and cheap credit puts people in a box with few or tiny air holes. Please, read her write up because she makes the venture capital side of the credit equation vivid. For me, the most telling comment in her write up was this statement, attributed to Fred Wang, Trinity Ventures:
This time around he doesn’t know what percentage of the firm’s investments might be affected, but he compared the process of decision-making about further investments to playing cards. “It’s a little bit like poker in the sense that if the company is not burning a lot of capital and the cost of buying a card is low, it’s a little bit easier,” Wang says. “If $1 million buys them another 12 months that’s easy to call, but if the cost of a card is $5 million to $10 million then it’s a lot harder.” He estimates that we’ll start seeing companies forced to shut down next quarter as funding dries up, and says he believes the carnage could continue through 2009.
As I thought about this observation, I jotted down a quick list of the collateral damage that may occur if Mr. Wang is correct:
- Small, traditional publishing companies that rely on high-tech firms for ad revenue. Get that burger flipping motion down, folks. I think that many of these operations will be forced to cut back, maybe close altogether. If it can happen to the New York Times, it can happen to mom and pop publishing companies leveraged to the nines.
- Conference operators who try to pull traffic with wacky buzzwords. I think of the popularity of “social”, “semantic”, and “business intelligence” as candidates. When cash is tight, who wants to blow $10,000 on a booth boondoggle where most of the attendees are students looking for a job, consultants looking for gigs, or fellow vendors looking for a white knight?
- Mid-range consulting firms that jump into hot new sectors and go from engagement to engagement without the lucrative retainers that blue chip firms manage to land. The consulting game is very different today from what it was just 10 years ago. Outfits like Gerson Lehrman Group and others hire retired blue chip consultants and then peddle expertise by the minute. Who loses in this game? The firms that try to create multi client studies or five figure reports that are expensive to market. Experts, the new players like Gerson, and the blue chips will do okay. Others may find that other occupations hold more promise.
- Public relations will get poked in the eye. Marketing communications and sales support for WebEx type meeting will fare better.
I am probably walking on muddy ground here, but I think the food chain in technology is going to be reworked in the next three to nine months. Will companies have enough cash to survive? Will the firms that borrow to bet on a turnaround be the winners? Will the Darwinian nature of these support and sales-related needs be friendly to the four sectors I identified as “at risk”? I don’t know. I won’t be betting too much money that these four secondary sectors will avoid becoming collateral damage. What sectors do you think will face a firestorm of challenges?
Stephen Arnold, October 24, 2008
Google’s Cloud Computing Infrastructure Lead May Be Growing
October 24, 2008
Cloud computing has become commonplace. In the last 48 hours, Amazon pumped steroids into the Amazon Web Services product line. To refresh your memory, check out this write up by Andrea James in the Seattle Tech Report here. Rumors have been flying about Microsoft’s cloud ambitions. Information about “Strata” is fuzzy like a cirrus cloud, Microsoft executives have been providing forecasts of a bold new service offering. For a useful recap of this rumor, read Chris Crum’s “Microsoft’s Next OS a Nod to the Stratosphere” in Web Pro News here. Other vendors blasting off from mother earth to loftier realms include IBM, Intel, Rackspace, and other big name firms.
One of the most interesting documents I have read in months is a forthcoming technical paper from Microsoft’s Albert Greenberg, Paranta Lahiri, David Maltz, Parveen Patel, and Sudipta Sengupta. The paper is available from the ACM as document 978-1-60558-181-1/08/08. I have a hard copy in my hand, and I can’t locate a valid link to an online version. The ACM or a for fee database may help you get this document. In a nutshell, “Towards a Next Generation Data Center Architecture: Scalability and Commoditization” explains some of the technical innovations Microsoft is implementing to handle cloud-based, high-demand, high-availability applications. Some of the information in the paper surprised me. The innovations provide a good indication of the problems Microsoft faced in its older, pre-2008 data centers. It was clear to me that Microsoft is making progress, and some of the methods echo actions Google took as long ago as 1998.
What put the Amazon and Microsoft cloud innovations into sharp relief for me was US2008/0262828 “Encoding and Adaptive Scalable Accessing of Distributed Models.” You can download a copy of this document from the easy-to-use USPTO system. Start here to obtain the full text and diagrams for this patent application. Keep in mind that a patent application does not mean that Google has or will implement the systems and methods disclosed. What the patent application provides is a peep hole through which we can look at some of the thinking that Google is doing with regard to a particular technical issue. The peep hole may be small, but what I saw when I read the document and reviewed the drawings last night (October 24, 2008) sparked my thinking.
Before offering my opinion, let’s look at the abstract for this invention, filed in February 2006 in a provisional application. Keep in mind that we are looking in the rear view mirror here, not at where Google might be today. This historical benchmark is significant when you compare what Amazon and Microsoft are doing to deal with the cloud computing revolution that is gaining momentum. Here’s Google’s summary of the invention:
Systems, methods, and apparatus for accessing distributed models in automated machine processing, including using large language models in machine translation, speech recognition and other applications.
In typical Google style, there’s a certain economy to the description of an invention involving such technical luminaries as Jeff Dean and 12 other Googlers. The focus of the invention is on-the-fly machine translation. However, the inventors make it clear that the precepts of this invention can be applied to other applications as well. As you may know, Google has expanded its online translation capability in the last few months. If you have not explored this service, navigate to http://translate.google.com and try out the system.
The claims for this patent document are somewhat more specific. I can’t run through the 91 claims in this patent document. I can highlight one, and I will leave review of the other 90 to you. Claim 5 asserted:
The system of claim 4, wherein: the translation server comprises: a plurality of segment translation servers each operable to communicate with the translation model server, the language model servers and replica servers, each segment translation server operable to translate one segment of the source text into the target language, a translation front end to receive the source text and to divide the source text into a plurality of segments in the source language, and a load balancing module in communication with the translation front end to receive the segments of the source text and operable to distribute the segments to the segments to the segment translation servers for translation based on work load at the segment translation servers, the load balancing module further operable to direct translated segments in the target language from the segment translation servers to the translation front end.
The claim makes reasonably clear the basic nesting architecture of Google’s architecture. What impressed me is that this patent document, like other recent Google applications, makes use of an infrastructure as platform. The computational and input output tasks are simply not an issue. Google pretty clearly feels it has the horsepower to handle ad hoc translation in real time without worrying about how data are shoved around within the system. As a result, higher order applications that were impossible even for certain large government agencies can be made available without much foot dragging. I find this remarkable.
This patent document, if Google is doing what the inventors appear to be saying, is significantly different from the innovations I just mentioned from such competitors as Amazon and Microsoft. Google in my opinion is making it clear that it has a multi-year lead in cloud computing.
The thoughts that I noted as I worked thorough the 38 pages of small print in this patent document were:
- Google has shifted from solving problems in distributed, massively parallel computing to developing next-generation cloud-centric applications. Machine translation in real time for a global audience for free means heavy demand. This invention essentially said to me, “No problem.”
- Google’s infrastructure will become more capable as Google deploys new CPUs and faster storage devices. Google, therefore, can use its commodity approach to hardware and experience significant performance gains without spending for exotic gizmos or try to hack around bottlenecks such as those identified in the Microsoft paper referenced above.
- Google can, with the deployment of software, deliver global services that other companies cannot match in terms of speed of deployment, operation, and enhancement.
I may be wrong and I often am but I think Google is not content with its present lead over its rivals. I think this patent document is an indication that Google can put its foot on the gas pedal at any time and operate in a dimension that other companies cannot. Do you agree? Disagree? Let me learn where I am off base. Your view is important because I am finishing a write up for Infonortics about Google and publishing. Help me think straight. I even invite Cyrus to chime in. The drawings in this patent application are among Google’s best that I have seen.
Stephen Arnold, October 24, 2008
U Rank: Another Microsoft Search Innovation
October 24, 2008
A happy quack to the reader who alerted me to U Rank. I did some poking around and located a useful article in the October 21, 2008, InfoWorld here. Heather Havenstein’s “Microsoft Prototype Search Engine Personalizes Results” provides a good summary of the reason Microsoft keeps innovating in search–Google. For me, the most significant comment in her article is this quote from a Microsoft Web log:
“U Rank is a research project to help us learn more about how people organize search results as they go about larger information tasks, how people collaboratively search, and generally, how people edit and share searches,” the company said “We believe that finding something on the Web is only the first step for many tasks. To better support people as they are exploring a topic, U Rank has general support for organizing, annotating, remembering, and sharing search results.”
To access the service, I had to sign up for a Microsoft ID. I had some trouble figuring out the captchas. Once I was able to key the eight letters, I was on my way. I must admit that I forget my new Microsoft ID. My “old” Hotmail ID no longer works, and I haven’t bothered to figure out why.
You can begin the process to access the U Rank system by clicking here. If you can’t get this url to work, you will have to back track and run searches on Live.com in order to find the path to this service. Here’s a typical result set:
I ran a number of queries and noticed that the relevance ranking was okay, but I didn’t think it was as useful to me as Google’s results for the same queries. For example, when I searched for the name of this Web log, the number one result on U Rank was an SEO company named “Beyond Search”. On Google, the first hit is to this Web log.
The unique features of the service were:
- A pop up window that allowed me to delete a result or perform other actions on a single hit
- A feature to allow me to add friends with a mouse click. I didn’t recognize any of the suggested names
- Social functions such as sharing favorite sites with friends and making recommendations.
U Rank is a social search system. I think a number of features will appeal to those who are interested in creating bundles of Web sites to share and getting a Mahalo-type component in a Web search system. I am not confident that the mass of present Web search users will perceive U Rank as a suitable alternative to Google. A great deal of engineering went into this demonstration site, but as it existed when I ran test queries, but I don’t think it will leap frog Google. Perhaps in time? Agree? Disagree?
Stephen Arnold, October 24, 2008
Time May Be Running Out for the New York Times
October 24, 2008
Henry Blodget’s “New York Times (NYT) Running on Fumes” is an important Web post. You can read the full text here. The New York Times was one of the main revenue drivers for the Nexis news service. Lexis was the legal side of the online service that moved from start up to Mead Paper and eventually to Reed Elsevier, the Frankenstein company with Dutch and English ownership. Along the way, the NYT decided to pull its full text content from the Nexis service. The NYT, like many newsosaurs, assumed that its print reputation would translate to riches for the New York Times Co. What happened was that Nexis never regained its revenue horsepower. The NYT floundered in indexing, online, and its “new media” operations. I find it amusing to reflect on the unexpected consequences, the New York Times’s online decisions triggered. Indeed, some of today’s challenges are outgrowths of management’s inability to think at an appropriate level of abstraction about the impact of online on traditional “dead tree” operations.
Mr. Blodget’s analysis summarizes a quarter century of operations in an increasingly online world. The result is a potential financial crisis for the Gray Lady, as the newspaper is fondly known. For me, the most important comment in Mr. Blodget’s analysis which you will want to read in its entirety was:
The company has only $46 million of cash. It appears to be burning more than it is taking in–and plugging the hole with debt. Specifically, it is funding operations by rolling over short-term loans–the kind that banks worldwide are canceling…
When I read this passage, I immediately visualized another BearStearns’s meltdown with confused professionals so confident of their future and power wandering around on New York sidewalks with banker boxes. If Mr. Blodget’s analysis is accurate (and I think it is dead on), changes will be coming to the New York Times. I anticipate downsizing, crazy pop ups on the online service, and a smaller news hole. My daily delivery in rural Kentucky is likely to be replaced with a US mail option. Someone will step forward and buy the property, maybe Rupert Murdoch, maybe a billionaire with a yen to control a major US daily?
Do you think the New York Times could have saved itself with a more prescient online strategy? I do. Agree? Disagree? Help me learn.
Stephen Arnold, October 24, 2008
Volt Flips the Switch for Search Enabled Applications
October 24, 2008
Volt Information Sciences, a specialist in “customer-centric solutions and services,” has an enterprise search program built into its software solutions. VoltTrack is a database system they offer for customer project management. One of Volt’s five focuses is staffing service, so they screen their thousands of applicants to match them with job descriptions. They also sell the system for use in inventory upkeep, vendor and sales tracking, etc. So buy the database, the search program comes with. In company released news here a press release here, Volt revealed that by using
“its proprietary software tool, called VoltTrack, and implementing a capability to use artificial intelligence-based statistical and mathematical models, the software matches words in the context of customer job descriptions and quickly and easily searches a database of millions to find the candidate who best fits a customer’s staffing requirement.”
Volt was recently praised by InformationWeek for the search function in VoltTrack. VoltTrack is marketed to companies that would be searching a database to screen candidates for staffing requirements, referencing requisitions, tracking data and usage reports, and vendor interface.
Volt offers a list of services about a mile long in small text, including topics as diverse as jacking and boring, drilling, directional boring, excavation for and installation of cable, conduit and manhole systems; analyzing educational tests scores and data; and providing temporary use of on-line non-downloadable software for use in database management. You can see the list here.
Who buzzed into Volt in August 2008? U.S. Yellow Pages. We will watch how this develops.
Jessica Bratcher, October 23, 2008
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