More on the Microsoft Commitment to Cloud Computing
October 8, 2008
The Cloud Computing News Desk at this hard-to-remember url ran Maureen O’Gara’s ” Ok, Boys, Cloud Computing Is in the Plan – Steve Ballmer” on October 4, 2008. (Note; when you click the link dismiss the pop up ad and turn off the video for the Windows Server 2008 ad. Pretty annoying, but it pays the bill I assume.) This is a good round up of the recent flurry of news about Microsoft’s commitment to Google-style computing. I tucked this article in my Microsoft architecture file. Three points struck me as particularly important:
- Vista continues to require PR support. The idea is to remove “lingering doubts” about that operating system. I find this interesting because Microsoft just gave Windows XP six more months to live and Apple Mac’s continue to creep up in market share, approaching 10 percent if I recall the last data I saw.
- Microsoft will out innovate Google. I will post on October 8, 2008, a May 2007, interview with a Googler who explains Google’s approach to innovation. The contrast between Microsoft’s mandate to innovate and the semi-chaotic approach at Google is stark. Check this Web for the posting called “Google Character and Its Innovation Method”.
- The inclusion of the full text of a July 23, 2008, memorandum penned by Mr. Ballmer that addresses the strategic initiatives underway at Microsoft. Very useful document with many nuggets; for example, “we’ll make progress against Google in search first by upping the ante in R&D through organic innovation and strategic acquisitions. Second, we will out-innovate Google in key areas…”
A happy quack to Ms. O’Gara for her article and to the Sys-Con team for publishing it. Now about those annoying pop ups.
Stephen Arnold, October 7, 2008
Google Character and Its Innovation Method
October 8, 2008
One of my two or three readers provided me with a link to a May 2007 write up about Google. The story is by Nimrod Kamer and called “The Google Stuff.” You can read the May 4, 2007, article here. The write up is an interview with Yoelle Maarek who was named the director of the Google R&D center in Haifa. Though some of the information may be dated, I found several points illuminating. I can’t summarize the entire piece. However, one passage struck me as particularly relevant as more and more organizations are trying to figure out how Google operates and what its infrastructure make it seemingly trivial for the company to do without warning or ramp up; to wit:
- “A bunch of talented kids take a risk and it works out for them. This is what this company’s entire culture is all about – risks and boldness. “–Dr. Maarek
- “The people that work here have to conceive and develop ideas and solve problems themselves”–Dr. Maarek
- “Everything is instant. Everything is online and on the server. There are a lot of engineers and we all help one another. I report directly to the big boss of all the engineers in the US, without any intermediaries and without forms. Every programmer has genuine authority to take whatever he wants all the way.”–Dr. Maarek
- “At Google, they hate hesitation, narrow-mindedness, and laziness, and they get angry about that. Waiting to be told what to do, that’s very non-Google handing down orders. Programmers exercise immense power, so as I said earlier, we have to careful who we recruit.”–Dr. Maarek
There’s more useful information in the write up, particularly about the broader cultural approach at Google. I will be including that information in my next for fee Google report for Infonortics Ltd. later this year. If you think you are a Google person, this article will help you muster your resolve to get a Googler to insert you into the hiring system.
Stephen Arnold, October 7, 2008
TechRadar: Knife Stabs Deep into Microsoft
October 7, 2008
If you want a world without Microsoft, you will revel in TechRadar’s “analysis” of Microsoft here. The in-depth review “Has Microsoft Lost It?” covers Vista, the Yahoo play, cloud challenges to Office, Live.com, Zune, and more. After reading the well-written, detailed write up, I was not sure what to think. Microsoft has $65 billion in revenue, cash, and 100 million SharePoint licenses, and some other assets such as 93 percent of the desktops running Windows. I get frustrated with Microsoft because the “we’re really smart” attitude of some of the Microsoft employees throws grit into decision making. The result is weird stuff like Microsoft software that doesn’t work on SharePoint or SQL Server back ups that don’t restore. Please read the article and make up your own mind. For me, I just want to know what’s the fit between MOSS and Fast Search ESP. I am a simple goose.
Stephen Arnold, October 7, 2008
MarkLogic 4.0: A Next-Generation Content System
October 7, 2008
Navigate to KDNuggets here, and you can see a line up of some of the content processing systems available on October 2, 2008. The list is useful but it is not complete. There are more than 350 vendors in my files, and each asserts that it has a must-have content system. Most of these systems suffer from one or more drawbacks; for example, scaling is problematic or just plain expensive, repurposing the information is difficult, or modifying the system requires lots of fiddling.
MarkLogic 4.0 addresses a number of these common shortcomings in text processing and XML content manipulation. The company “accelerates the creation of content applications.” With MarkLogic’s most recent release of its flagship server product, MarkLogic offers a content platform, not a content utility. Think in terms of most content processing companies as tug boats. MarkLogic 4.0 is an ocean growing vessel with speed, power, and range. When I spoke with MarkLogic’s engineers, the ideas for enhancements to MarkLogic 3.2, the previous release, originated with MarkLogic users. One engineer said, “Our licensees have discovered new uses for the system. We have integrated into the code base functions and operations that our customers told us they need to get the most value from their information. Version 4.0 is a customer driven upgrade. We just did the coding for them.”
Most text processing systems, including XML databases, are useful but limited in power and scope. The MarkLogic 4.0 system is an ocean going vessel among harbor bound craft.
You can learn quite a bit about the functionality of MarkLogic in this Dr Dobbs’s interview with Dave Kellogg, CEO of this Sequoia-backed firm. The Dr Dobbs’ interview is here.
MarkLogic is an ocean going vessel amidst smaller boats. The product is an XML server, and it offers search, analytics, and jazzy features such as geospatial querying. For example, I can ask a MarkLogic system for information about a specific topic within a 100 mile radius of a particular city. But the core of MarkLogic 4.0 is an XML database. When textual information or data are stored in MarkLogic 4.0, slicing, dicing, reporting, and reshaping information provides solutions, not results lists.
According to Andy Feit, vice president, MarkLogic is “a mix of native XML handling, full-text search engines, and state-of-the-art DBMS features like time-based queries, large-scale alerting, and large-scale clustering.” The new release adds important new functionality. New features include:
- Geospatial support for common geospatial markup standards plus an ability to display data on polygons such as state boundaries or a sales person’s region. The outputs or geospatial mash ups are hot linked to make drill down a one-mouse click operation
- Push operations such as alerts sent to a user’s mobile phone or triggers which operate when a content change occurs which, in turn, launches a separate application. The idea is to automate content and information operations in near real time, not leave it up to the system user to run a query and find the important new information.
- Embedded entity enrichment functionality including support for Chinese, Russian and other languages
- Improved support for third party enterprise entity extraction engines or specialized systems. For example, the new version ships with direct support for TEMIS’s health and medical processing, financial services, and pharmaceutical content processing system. MarkLogic calls its approach “an open framework”
- Mobile device support. A licensee can extract data from MarkLogic and the built in operations will format those data for the user’s device. Location services become more fluid and require less developer time to implement.
The new release of MarkLogic manipulates XML quickly. In addition to performance enhancements to the underlying XML data management system, MarkLogic supports the Xquery 1.0 standard. Users of earlier versions of MarkLogic server can continue to use these systems along side Version 4.0. According to Mr. Feit, “Some vendors require a lock step upgrade when a new release becomes available. At MarkLogic, we make it possible for a licensee to upgrade to a new version incrementally. No recoding is required. Version 4, for example, supports earlier versions’ query language and scripts.”
Amazon: Getting in an Elephant Fight
October 7, 2008
I find Amazon fascinating. In the last two years, the company has figured out how to spend much, much less than Google and Microsoft on engineering and infrastructure. In the same period, Amazon has out innovated both Google and Microsoft in cloud computing. The cherry on top of this technical confection is that Amazon can defray the cost of the plumbing needed to run its ecommerce business. MBA programming genius Jeff Bezos is the person whom I describe as the smartest man in the world. It’s up to you to determine if my characterization is accurate. Amazon is an elephant and so are Apple, Google, and Microsoft in my opinion–big beasts in online and revenue generation.
When elephants fight, only the grass gets trampled.–Alleged Zulu proverb.
A story ran on September 24, 2008, in Xconomy Seattle, an interesting Web site that reports on “business and technology in the exponential economy”. The article “In Google’s Phone, a Major Clash between Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft Heats Up.” You must read Gregory T. Huang’s article here. Mr. Huang has focused on Amazon’s on-going efforts to snag deals and I assume revenue from the three giants stomping around in the cloud computing, mobile services, and online hypermarkets; namely, Apple, the leader in consumer gizmos and online music sales; Google, the business model and infrastructure champion in Web search and advertising plus other initiatives; and Microsoft, the 21st century reprise of the 1980 version of IBM.
I can’t summarize this compact, information filled article. I would like to cite one of Mr. Huang’s points that struck me as dead on:
[Amazon’s] music store, currently a distant #2 to Apple’s iTunes, offers some 6 million songs from the four major labels plus thousands of independent labels. The G1 partnership could push Amazon over the hump and position it squarely as Apple’s chief music competitor.
And what about Amazon’s Microsoft play in cloud computing with Amazon running Windows servers as a service on Amazon Web Services? Mr. Huang wrote, quoting an individual from Seattle-based software firm Cozi and founder of SnapTune:
The basic strategy is to suck all the oxygen (licensing revenue) from Microsoft and Apple, leaving only oxygen for Google (ad revenue) which they alone could dominate.
In my little Kentucky hollow, I will kick back and watch these elephants fight. I recall the African proverb my guide to Soweto told me as we walked a long a narrow dirt street to his aunt’s six by six: “When elephants fight, only the grass gets trampled.”
Stephen Arnold, October 7, 2008
Microsoft MOSS Performance
October 7, 2008
A happy quack to the Blah Blah Blog and Ryan Rogers for his MOSS performance round up. The article is “A Look at MOSSS 2007 Performance Part I – Performance Pointers”. I’m not sure if this is a Microsoft-sponsored Web log or an MSDN-centric Web log that Microsoft “likes”. Nevertheless, Mr. Rogers provides a very useful table of the performance counters available for the MOSS base operating system. He provides in the table the counter name, the threshold setting, a recommendation, and a brief description of the counter. I was not able to locate Part II of the series, nor could I determine if the original pos was written by a person named joekr. Better snag this useful document while it is available. Compiling the data in the table was not trivial, and if you want to get MOSS running like Carlos Montoya’s NASCAR ride, you need these data. (I know his care is not the fastest on the track, but he’s in the race. That’s where MOSS is in the enterprise information series in my opinion.)
Stephen Arnold, October 7, 2008
Ask.com: Housecleaning, New Paint, Same Damp Basement
October 6, 2008
My newsreader is stuffed like a six-year old’s teddy bear with views, opinions, and analyses of the “new” Ask.com. I remember when humans worked like beavers to hand craft “answers” for the AskJeeves.com “natural language search engine.” That is in the mid 1990s. About a year ago, a semi-wizard from a third-tier consulting firm regaled me at dinner with insights into the innovations that AskJeeves.com (updated as Ask.com) was unleashing to hoards of Web searchers. Then I learned that some of the Rutgers’ wizards had returned to academe. I suffered through a technical paper that explained how Ask.com could scale. As skeptical as I am of Amazon’s approach, the Ask.com presentation was even less convincing.
Today’s stories are capped with the snow on the journalistic Mount Everest. Miguel Helft’s “Ask.com Revamps Search Engine” is the summit from which this Ask.com bobsled launches. You can find his write up here. Please, read this story. See if you agree that one of the most interesting comments in the piece is this statement:
The new Ask.com also includes an index of various question-and-answer sites from around the Web, including Yahoo Answers and WikiAnswers, that proves effective at returning results for some queries posed as questions.
I interpret this as a metasearch play. Now metasearch technology has made great strides since the early days of Dogpile.com. Among the services I use are Ixquick.com, the remarkably helpful Devilfinder.com, and the relative newcomer, Clusty.com. I also keep a copy of Copernic on one of my machines because it’s built in collection narrowing function is helpful for some of my queries.
I tested Ask.com with this query, “What’s the capital of Tasmania?” The system’s first result was “Hobart.” The second result was correct as well and pointed me to Wikipedia, the go-to site for general information. Powerset leveraged a demo featuring Wikipedia content into $100 Microsoft dollars not long ago. My second query was a different kettle of fish or “answers”. The query was, “What is the architecture of the Google File System?” The first result pointed to a useful article from the HighScalability.com site here. My other test queries returned useful results, and I concluded that the “new” version of Ask.com was pretty good.
The Search Engine Land write up focused on the notion of “structured search”. With the shift to XML and the crossover from flat ASCII to XML having taken place sometime last year (according to a Google document I located using the Google.com search engine), this is a good point to make. In fact, the Search Engine Land story here made this point:
…we expected this to come. After seeing it, I personally still do not consider Ask.com to be a core search engine and thus do not consider them to be in the race with Google, Yahoo or Microsoft. In fact, I find it interesting that Ask.com is bring back the Jeeves approach, which failed back then – but they hope will work now.
I did not see this coming because I don’t pay much attention to the machinations of Barry Diller’s Web and online empire. I don’t think of Ask.com as a resource suitable for my research needs. I probably won’t change my information retrieval habits to much either. Now look at the usage data for the top search engines. I have used the comScore data from this source.
Here’s a Google Trends’ report on the incidence of queries for the top four search engines: Ask.com, Google.com, Live.com, and Yahoo.com. You can update this query here.
Yahoo.com is leading the pack in queries on Google. My hunch is that Yahoo’s financial and business challenges make it popular. What do these data tell us? A Web site can get traffic by becoming a major business story. A Web site with a five percent share of Web query traffic with an improved search engine has a lot of work to do to get traffic.
Ask.com, therefore, has to have a better search engine, and it has to set the media on fire with its search engine. I will check out my newsreader 24 hours from now to see if the Ask.com “news” has staying power. My hunch is that this upgrade won’t have enough horsepower to pull up the Ask.com market share. More is needed. I want to be candid. I am not sure what Ask.com can do to build buzz. Crazy advertisements, staff churn, and a different interface catch my attention, but these are not sufficient to change my research behavior. Google will probably get a bump because people will navigate to Google and type the query “ask” in order to get a direct link to the Ask.com service. Agree? Disagree? I really want to hear from the Traces and Whitneys working at consulting firms to set me straight on my perception that Ask.com is stuck in the damp basement of consumer online Web traffic.
Stephen Arnold, October 6, 2008
Sun Grid for Dummies
October 6, 2008
If you are interested in the basics of setting up a Sun Grid Engine, you can download a useful technical document. The PDF is here.The actual title of the document is Beginner’s Guide to Sun Grid Engine 6.2″ by Daniel Templeton. Templeton is the Strategic Liaison Manager for the Sun Grid Engine. If you don’t know what a Sun Grid Engine is, click here to learn about this interesting hardware. I have always had a soft spot for Sun hardware, but Google has given some people an education about the performance and cost payoff of almost-vanilla commodity hardware. Nevertheless, if you want to pick up some useful information, check out the beginner’s guide.
Stephen Arnold, October 6, 2008
Powerset’s Approach to Search
October 6, 2008
Powerset was acquired by Microsoft for about $100 million in June 2008. I haven’t paid too much attention to what Microsoft has done or is doing with the Powerset semantic, natural language, latent semantic indexing, et al system it acquired. A reader sent me a link to Jon Udell’s well Web log interview that focuses on Powerset. If you want to know more about how Microsoft will leverage the aging Xerox Parc technology, you will want to click here to get an introduction to the Perspectives interview conducted on September 30, 2008, with Scott Prevost. You will need to install Silverlight, or you can read the interview transcript here.
I can’t summarize the lengthy interview. For several three points were of particular interest:
- The $100 million bought Powerset, but Microsoft had to then license the Xerox Parc technology. You can get some “inxight” into the functions of the technology by exploring the SAP/ Business Objects’ information here.
- The Powerset technology can be used with both structured and unstructured information.
- Microsoft will be doing more work to deliver “instant answers”.
A happy quack to the reader who sent me this link, and two quacks for Mr. Udell for getting some useful information from Scott Prevost. I am curious about the roles of Barney Pell (Powerset founder) and Ron Kaplan (Powerset CTO and former Xerox Parc wizard) in the new organization. If anyone can shed light on this, you too will warrant a happy quack.
Stephen Arnold, October
Mercado Israel: More Trouble
October 6, 2008
Israel’s The Marker IT Computer World here ran a story that Mrku (Mercado) sent 88 workers home. I haven’t been able to verify this story, but I wanted to post the link to it in Hebrew here. Investors, it seems, would not pony up more cash. Stay tuned.
Stephen Arnold, October 6, 2008
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