MSE360: Cooler than Cuil
January 6, 2009
I received an email from Daniel Clark. He provided me with some information about a new Web search engine, MSE360.com. I ran a number of test queries on the system and found it to be useful. The most interesting feature to me is what Mr. Clark calls “deep search”. He said:
We… have introduced Deep Search methods to try and provide the user with a notice when a site is known to host a valid privacy policy. Although this feature is still in beta and thus only a few million sites have been deep searched, the platform will in the end provide users with a way to decide what sites to trust.
When we do spot checks on some potentially useful but really low traffic Web sites like the National Railway Retirement Board, we have found that Google does not visit very often nor does the GOOG go much beyond three links deep. The key point, of course, is how often a Web indexing system pings a site to determine if there is new or changed information available. If you have a billion Web pages indexed and refresh only 10 percent of them, the index is not too useful. Other vendors only index sites that contribute to popular searches. This approach saves money and returns useless results unless one has the knack of searching what rings the bells of 15 year olds.
MSE360.com wants to change these practices. The engine also beeps when its visits a site with a virus. I was able to find a site that would inject trojans and the MSE360.com did not squawk. The system is new, and I think its virus alert will improve. The company also wants to protect users’ privacy. Google does this too, and until I see how the company grows, I applaud MSE360.com’s privacy initiative, but policies can change. You can generate tag clouds which show some of the popular searches on the system.
I ran a query for my Web log Beyond Search. We pop up on the results list but not in the top spot. No problem on my end. You can see from the screen shot below, that MSE360.com presents hits from Wikipedia, Web logs, traditional results in the middle panel, and images on the right hand panel. I was not able to run an image search, but I did not dig into the advanced search options very deeply. You can see more results by clicking a relatively tiny hot link at the bottom of the very dense results page.
Mr Clark said:
We wanted to allow users to get the most out of there time, so in turn we designed the 3 tier layout. This layout allows for the user to get images, blogs, Wikipedia and web results, all on one page. When we polled 250 random Internet users over 70% said they preferred the layout over Yahoo. Of course the other 30% didn’t!
I found the system useful. Check it out. I will keep my eye on the service. I don’t have substantive information about funding and other basic facts. When I get them, I will pass them along.
Stephen Arnold, January 6, 2009
Sky Grid: Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg Challenger
January 6, 2009
A reader in the Eastern Mediterranean alerted me to SkyGrid, founded in 2005. After a bit of checking, I found some information in the TechCrunch write up here. The SkyGrid Web site here provides a run down of the media coverage the firm’s for-fee service has achieved. The founder of the company is Kevin Pomplun who combined high value content and what one commentator called “flow based architecture”. The notion is that information is dynamic, and the SkyGrid system is constantly refreshed. Once configured, the system delivers search without search. The service costs about $500 per month per user. The target market appears to be Wall Street’s analysts and related disciplines; for example, some intelligence and law enforcement professionals will find the service interesting. Based on information available to me, SkyGrid uses proprietary methods to acquire, process, and personalize information for each user. The technologies embraced by SkyGrid hit such hot buttons as sentiment analysis (whether information is positive or negative), categorization (figuring out what an article is about and tagging it with a classification code and term), and graphic displays of data (stock price change, for example). When I reviewed the service, I noticed parallels between SkyGrid and data on the terminals in financial shops now. The dense display (shown below) appeals to those in the financial business. The idea is to provide hot information in one place. There are some similarities between SkyGrid and Silobreaker, which I have described in this Web log. Other services that offer similar functions include FirstRain (which asserts that its technology “changes the rules of research). Monitor110 was another similar service but fell upon hard times in mid 2008.
Source: SkyGrid 2008
Several comments will let me capture my thoughts:
First, the financial services sector has some challenges facing it. As a result, I expect some of the big name Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters customers to start demanding more value. The word value, in my opinion, means price cuts. This may be good or bad news for companies like SkyGrid. The good news is that its price point is appetizing compared to the hefty fees assessed by the incumbent real time data providers on Wall Street. The bad news is that a start up lacks the track record of the incumbents, so the cost of sales might be an issue. Long decision cycles may also work against the newcomers.
Second, other companies are pushing into real time. These range from “utility” type vendors such as Exegy. This company’s value proposition is speed; that is, no bottlenecks. Latency is a big deal for the surviving financial services firms. Also, such companies as Connotate and Relegence offer appealing services that are even more customized than some of the services now trying to make sales to the Wall Street crowd (minus Mr. Madoff’s operation, BearStearns’ and Lehman Brothers, of course).
Third, these new services are at their core “dataspace” plays. As the volume of information increases, the cost of the plumbing will be an ongoing issue for these challenges to Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters. Cluuz.com, for example, has shifted from direct indexing of Web content for its demonstration service to the Yahoo “build your own search service”.
Fourth, the for fee content vendors are going to have little choice but raise their rates. The Factiva unit of Dow Jones struggled as an independent entity. Now that company is inside Dow Jones and as Dow Jones’s financial pressure mount, watch for Factiva to charge more for its services, particularly the Wall Street Journal and Barron’s data.
Fifth, the Google looms over this entire sector. Here’s why that company is a serious mid term threat to both incumbents and start ups:
- Scale. Google has plumbing. Incumbents and competitors have to get it. Expensive that.
- Data. Google has quite a bit of structured and unstructured data. The incremental cost to the GOOG to expand http://finance.google.com is incremental, maybe incidental.
- Brand. The GOOG has the hot brand. Brand visibility sells.
In closing, I think there will be consolidation and attrition in this sector. I don’t think the services have flaws. I think that the broader datasphere is marshalling forces that will make life difficult.
Stephen Arnold, January 6, 2008
Google and Publishing
January 5, 2009
Two articles appeared in my newsreader. Both discuss Google and its impact on publishing. I won’t spoil your fun by summarizing these write ups. I want to highlight each and make one observation pertinent to search and content processing.
The first article is by the New York Times (a troubled ship is she too). The author is Motoko Rich and you can read “Google Hopes to Open a Trove of Little Seen Books” here. The subject is Google Book Search, the scanning project, and the usefulness of the service to the curious.
The second article is by an outfit doing business as Ohmy News. Its article is “The Web Is Winning the News War.” Peter Hinchliffe (Hinchy for short I think) points out that Web services are a challenge for the traditional news outfits. Hinchy does not mention Google, but the shadow falls over the story.
My observation is a modest one. Google disintermediates people, streamlines production, and relies on digital distribution. Books, news–whatever. The writing is on the wall. The Google is a disrupter and the implications have not been converted to learnings.
Stephen Arnold, January 5, 2009
Cloud Data Storage
January 5, 2009
The UK publication Sys-con.com published “Data Storage Has Been Taken for Granted” here. You may have to fight through some pop ups and kill the sound on the auto-running commercial, but you will want to put up with this wackiness to read Dave Graham’s article. Mr. Graham does a good job of highlighting the needs for cloud data storage. This initial article will be followed by other segments, so you will want to snag each of them. In this first installment, for me the most important comment was:
Each type of content, whether it be structured or unstructured, has different influencing factors affecting its storage and retrieval.
The significance of this comment is that a vendor or storage provider will have to have the specific framework in place to handle the demands of different types of data storage and access. Why is this important? I run into quite a few people who dismiss storage as a non-issue. These issues are not trivial and data management remains one of the factors that govern the performance and cost of a storage system. The phrase “garbage in, garbage out” has given way to “get data in, get data out” easily, quickly, economically.
Stephen Arnold, January 5, 2009
New Conference Pushes beyond Search
January 5, 2009
After watching some of the traditional search and content processing conferences fall on their swords, muffins, and self-assurance in 2008, I have rejiggled my conference plans for 2009. One new venue that caught my attention is The Rockley Group’s event in Palm Springs, California, January 29-30, 2009. You can get more informatio0n about the program here. The event organizer is Ann Rockley, who is one of the people emphasizing the importance of intelligent content.
Ann Rockley, The Rockley Group
I spoke with Ms. Rockley on January 2, 2008. The text of that conversation appears below:
Why is another conference needed?
Admittedly there are a lot of conferences around for people to attend, but not one that focuses specifically on the topic of Intelligent Content. My background is content management, structured content and XML. There are lots of conferences that focus mainly on the technology, others that focus on the content vehicle or channel (e.g., web) and others that focus on XML. The technology oriented conferences often lose sight of the content; who it’s for, how can we most effectively create it and most importantly how can we optimize it for our customers. The content channel oriented conferences e.g. Web, focus only on the vehicle and forget that content is not just about the way we distribute it; content should be optimized for each channel yet at the same time it should be possible to repurpose and reconfigure the content for multiple channels. And XML conferences tend to be highly technical, focusing on the code and the applications and not on how we can optimize our content using XML so that we can manipulate it and transform it much the way we do data. So this conference is all about the CONTENT! Identifying how we can most effectively create it so that we can manipulate it, transform it and deliver it in a multitude of ways personalized for a particular audience is an area of focus sadly lacking in many conferences.
With topics like Web 2.0 and Social Search I am at a loss to know what will be covered. What are the issues your conference will address?
Web 2.0 is about social networking and sharing of content and media and it has had a tremendous influence on content. Organizations have huge volumes of content stuck in static web pages or files and they have a growing volume of content stuck, and sometimes lost in the masses of content being accumulated in wikis, blogs, etc. How can organizations integrate their content, share their content and make it most useful to their customers and readers without a lot of additional work? How do we combine the best of Web 2.0 with the best of traditional content practices? Organizations don’t have the time, resources or budget to do all the things we need and want to do for our customers, but if we create our content intelligently in the first place (structure it, tag it, store it) we can increase our ability to do so much more and increase our ability to effectively meet our customers’ needs. This conference was specifically designed to answer those questions.
Intelligent Content provides a venue for sharing information on such topics as:
- Personalization (structured content, metadata and XQuery)
- Intelligent publishing (dynamic multichannel delivery)
- Hybrid content strategies (integrating Web 2.0 content with traditional customer content)
- Dynamic messaging/personalized marketing
- Increasing findability
- Content/Information Management
Most attendees complain about two things: The quality of the presentations and the need for better networking with other attendees. How are you addressing these issues?
We are doing things a little differently. All the speakers have been assigned a mentor for review of their outline, drafts and final materials. We are working with them closely to ensure that the presentations are top notch and we have asked them all to summarize their information in Best Practices and Tips. In addition, Intelligent Content was designed to be a small intimate conference with lots of opportunities to network. We will have a luncheon with tables focused on special interests and we are arranging “Birds of a Feather” dinners where like-minded people can get together over a great meal and chat, have fun and network. We also have a number of panels which are designed to work interactively with the audience. And to increase the feeling intimacy we have not chosen to hold the conference in a traditional “big box” hotel, rather we have chosen a boutique hotel, the Parker Palm Springs (http://www.starwoodhotels.com/lemeridien/property/overview/index.html?propertyID=1911), a hotel favored by Hollywood stars from the 1930s. It is a very cool hotel with lots of character that encourages people to have fun while they interact and network.
What will you offer attendees?
The two day conference includes 16 sessions, 2 panels, breakfast, lunch and snacks. It also includes organized networking sessions both for lunch and dinner, and opportunities to ask the Experts key questions. And the conference isn’t over when it is over, we are setting up a Community of Practice including a blog, discussion forum, and webinars to continue to share and network so that every attendee will have an instant ongoing network.
I enjoy small group sessions and simple things like going to dinner with a group of people whom I don’t know. Will you include activities to help attendees make connections?
Absolutely. We deliberately designed the conference to be a small intimate learning experiencing so people weren’t lost in the crowd and we have specifically created a number of luncheon and dinner networking experiences.
How can I register to attend? What is the url for more information.
The conference information can be found at www.intelligentcontent2009.com. Contact info@intelligentcontent2009.com if you have questions. Note that the conference hotel is really a vacation destination so we can only hold the rooms at the special rate for a limited time and that expires January 12th so act quickly. And we’ve extended the early bird registration to Jan. 12 as well. If you have any other questions you can contact us at moreinfo@rockley.com.
Stephen Arnold, January 5, 2008
Interview Exclusive: Exalead’s New US Chief Executive Officer
January 5, 2009
On January 2, 2008, I spoke with Paul Doscher, the newly appointed chief executive officer for Exalead, the Paris-based information access company. I received a preview of Exalead technology in November 2008, and I will summarize some of my impressions in a short white paper on my ArnoldIT.com Web site in the next few days.
The full text of my interview with Mr. Doscher appears below:
Why are you expanding in the US market? What’s your background?
Exalead has seen tremendous growth in Europe over the past few years and unlike some of our competitors, our clients are with us for the long haul. We enjoy 100% customer referenceability in Europe. The US represents a significant growth engine for Exalead and we believe we are in a unique position not just to grow our US business – but to help redefine the information access industry.
I have been in the computer software space for 30 years starting in sales and sales management eventually leading to my most recent role as CEO. I have worked in companies such as Oracle, Business Objects and VMware. Before becoming CEO of Exalead, Inc I was CEO of JasperSoft, the leading open source business intelligence company.
What is the major content processing problem your system solves?
This is a new era in information access. In business, valuable information is increasingly stored in silos – dozens of various locations and data formats – that are hard to retrieve in a way that provides necessary context to the end user. Exalead CloudView has been designed to make sense of the structured and unstructured data found both internally behind the firewall and from external sources. Exalead offers quick-to-implement information access solutions that help workers, partners and customers make better, faster and more accurate business decisions.
What is the basis of your firm’s technical approach?
Exalead provides a highly scalable and manageable information access platform built on open standards. Exalead transforms raw data, whatever its nature, into actionable intelligence through best of breed indexing, extraction and classification technologies.
Can you give me an example of your system in action? You don’t have to mention a company name, but I am interested in what the problem was and what your system delivered to the customer?
Exalead is moving beyond what people generally think of when they think about enterprise search. I’ll give you two examples – one that discusses an innovative use case of searching structured data. The second discusses unstructured data.
First is an example of our dealing with structured data. GEFCO, €3.5 billion company, ranks among Europe’s leading transport and logistics firms. They are using Exalead to track their vehicles. GEFCO’s new “Track and Trace” application is built upon Exalead’s flagship platform that offers powerful search functionality and can provide up-to-the-minute information from an extremely large data set. Integrated into GEFCO’s Internet portal Gefconet, Track and Trace allows GEFCO staff, partners and customers to locate the exact position of vehicles, track their progress and optimize transport schedules in real time.
Second is a project where we search and make sense of unstructured data. Our engineers at Exalead built an unreleased project called Restminer – a site aimed at helping find restaurants in a large city like New York City. What we do here is interesting. Restminer gives the user useful, structured information extracted from the unstructured web including dedicated press, blog posts, restaurant reviews, directories – with relevant tips coming from different sources.
Exalead is French owned company. What’s the customer footprint? As you look forward what is your goal for the footprint in 2009?
At the end of 20008, we have around 190 customers across multiple vertical markets including on-line media/publishing, social networking, the public sector, on-line directories, financial services and telecommunications. We are looking for 50% growth in our customer base in 2009.
The Exalead software was quite solid? What are the benefits your system delivers to a typical enterprise customer? Is it search or another type of solution?
Exalead provides information access and search solutions in basically three market segments: OEM, B2C and B2B.
In the OEM [original equipment manufacturing] market, software companies have realized what a powerful embedded search platform can bring to their own solution. ISVs [independent software vendors] enrich their functional capabilities by introducing new sources of content and more powerful access retrieval into their core applications.
In the B2C space, consumer web sites such as our customer RightMove in the UK are finding that a highly scalable information access solution can save on hardware costs and make their visitor’s experience much better (for www.rightmove.co.uk). Globally, we are seeing sites use our cutting edge semantic mash-up technologies to bring search result from video, audio and text, such as http://virgilio.alice.it/ in Italy.
For our B2B customers, we are seeing companies implement real-time search across multiple data repositories. Any search platform tied to mission critical business applications have to be flexible, scalable and fast. Exalead’s product is used in various mission critical implementations, including track and tracing trucks; operational reporting and large scale document searches.
I recall hearing that your firm has patented technology? Can you provide me with a snapshot of this invention? What’s the patent application number? How many patents does your firm have? What are the key features of the Exalead CloudView system?
Exalead has a significant number of patents granted and pending both in the US and EU relating to the areas of intelligent searching, indexing, keyword extraction and other aspects of the search technology. For example, US Patent 7152064 was issued to Exalead in 2006, providing for improved unified search results – allowing for end users to more easily navigate and refine complex search results.
Our explosive growth continues to drive innovation and functionality into our products – we continue to submit for new patents as our product expands.
In the OEM sector, Autonomy seems to be the giant with its OEM deals with BEA and the Verity OEM deals. Some of the Verity deals date from the late 1980s. How do you see Exalead fitting into this sector?
There is always a place for innovation. We are confident in our capabilities and how they can meet the growing demands of OEMs.
We are beginning to see customers move away from our competitor’s legacy OEM solutions. We provide an easy to implement, scalable and manageable solution. Also, we see growing demand for our simpler licensing model – which makes life much easier for our customers.
Exalead OEM has all the rich features as our other product platforms such as Enterprise Search Edition and the 360 Edition. No matter how huge the volume of information processed by the OEM application, Exalead CloudView provides an easy to implement SOA architecture. OEM customers build applications that search their own system’s content – as well as from any kind of other sources that can be relevant. OEMs can dramatically increase their product functionality and differentiation by adding search of external Web sites, external knowledge bases and building in new hybrid services using our developer kit.
There’s quite a bit of turmoil in search. In fact, the last few weeks Alexa (an Amazon company) closed its web search unit and Lycos Europe (which purchased software from my partner and me in the mid 1990s) said it would close up shop. What’s that mean for Exalead going forward?
Our web search engine is available at www.exalead.com/search. Based on CloudView, it provides Internet users with an innovative way of discovering results and content from the Web’s 8 billion+ pages. Web search has always been a real world lab to test our technologies and user features – some of which, like facial recognition, have been implemented on Exalead well in advance of their use on other major search sites. But, more than this, we consider the Web as a key source of information – competitive intelligence, partner information, customer information, legal documents, external database providers, blogs, etc. There is more and more key information on the web that enterprises need to manage effectively. Exalead Web search is key in the overall Exalead strategy – and the functionality on our Internet search site will continue to drive innovation in our information access platform.
One trend in enterprise content processing is the shift from results lists to answers. Among the companies in this sector are Relegence (a Time Warner company), Connotate (privately held but backed by Goldman Sachs), and Attivio (a company describing itself as delivering active intelligence). Each of these firms is really in the search business but positioning search as “intelligence”. What’s your take on the changing face of search in an organization?
If making information instantly available for decisions is intelligence, we definitely are working in the information intelligence business. Our approach is driven by customer demand for TCO and ROI – we bring real value to businesses looking to make better, faster decisions. For example, at our customer GEFCO, structured data is available in real time for staff and customers so transportation cycles can be adjusted in real time – significantly improving their bottom line.
As the economic crisis depends, we continue to see our partners such as Capgemini, Logica, and Sogeti come up with new, exciting solutions for Exalead CloudView for their customers.
Google has been a disruptive force in search. In one US agency, different Google resellers have placed search appliances, often at $400,000 a unit in a major US government agency. No single person realized that there were more than $6 million worth of devices. As a result, the project to “fix” search means that Google is the default search system. What are the challenges and opportunities Google presents to Exalead? What about the challenges and opportunities Microsoft presents with its strong grip on the desktop and a growing presence in servers?
Ironically, former Google and Microsoft customers fuel much of our sales funnel – so we appreciate and benefit from everyone’s niche in this marketplace.
Google raised end-user expectations about what web search can achieve – it brought a new level of simplicity, relevancy and interactivity. But as we’ve seen as more Google Enterprise Search customers move to Exalead – bringing this functionality to enterprises is a different matter all together.
Google Enterprise Search has technical and functional limits in terms of scalability, security compliance, the ability to search structure and unstructured data and the ability to provide all the necessary context to make a search relevant. Enterprises know that information access means more than a flat list of results – which is driving more companies to look at Exalead.
Microsoft and its acquisition of FAST Search & Transfer brought many opportunities to us as well. For example, we’ve seen a growing number of companies who use Linux or other non-Microsoft operating systems look for a new partner instead of Microsoft.
Mobile search is slowly making headway. Some of the push has been because of the iPhone and Google’s report that queries on an iPhone are higher than from users with other brands of smart phones? What does Exalead provide for mobile search?
Exalead is actively working with mobile companies and telcos in a number of ways. We launched an iPhone search www.exalead.com/iphone in Europe. We are also working with mobile companies to help connect mobile devices to PCs and help accelerate access to mobile content. We will announce more of this functionality in 2009.
The economic climate is quite weak. How is Exalead adjusting to this global problem? I have heard that you have built out a US office with more than two dozen people? Is that correct?
We met all of our aggressive sales numbers in 2008 – in large part because our technologies provide our customers a high return on their investment. We unleash new levels of information access and allow better, faster decision-making. So far, it appears the appetite for our offerings is growing in this economic client.
What are the three major trends you see with regards to search and content processing in 2009?
The biggest trend we see in 2009 is that search will become a development platform. Open product platforms like Exalead will become a platform for new, unexpected solutions by 3rd party vendors.
Other big trends in 2009 will be continuation of what we’ve seen over past few years: smarter context around search results and better searching of rich content including audio and video.
Can you hint at what’s coming in 2009 in terms of features in the CloudView system?
The launch of Exalead CloudView 360 later this year will be a game changer for the industry. Exalead CloudView 360 will have functionality that will transform heterogeneous corporate data into contextualized building blocks of business information that can be directly searched and queried – and allow for an explosion of new applications to be built on top of the platform.
Stephen Arnold, January 5, 2008
Google and Time
January 5, 2009
Time is a big deal at Google. Only a few Web search outfits manipulate time in a useful way. The GOOG has a couple of patent documents that disclose some of the company’s methods for dealing with this slippery notion. You can see one example of a historical time graph by navigating to Google.com. If you are outside the US, you have to click navigate to a country news page, click on US, and then launch your query for there. Even that may not work for everyone. Here’s what you see for the Googley query “Albert Einstein”. You have to scroll to the bottom of the page.
In this example, Googzilla is including book results and related searches to help the curious in their quest for information about the special theory of relativity.
Stephen Arnold, January 5, 2008
Marissa Mayer: The Face of Google 2009
January 4, 2009
Even in the coal-run off region of Kentucky, I learn about Marissa Mayer. She is everywhere. Someone sent me a link suggesting that Ms. Meyer, Google employee number nine, wanted to escape the wild world of Google and devote time to other pursuits. Techradar ran a three part story here that struck me as positioning Ms. Mayer as the go-to face of the GOOG in 2009. She leaves her calendar free one hour each day to chat with fellow Googlers with ideas. You will want to read this write up by Oliver Lindberg. For me the most important comment in the interview was:
Mayer describes the concept of the ideal search engine as “Your best friend with instant access to all the world’s facts and a photographic memory you’ve seen and know.” To some that might seem scary: however, she claims a user’s privacy is respected by a good user experience that really embodies transparency and control. In Google’s personalized search, for example, you can already see your Web history and remove items if you wish.
Yep, Google is my best friend. Is Googzilla yours?
Stephen Arnold, January 4, 2008
SharePoint: Don’t Automate, Do Stuff by Hand
January 4, 2009
The SharePointer (a place of sharing pointers) published “MOSS Variations: Page Properties that Do Not Get Propagated to Target Variations” is a useful article for two reasons. First, it solves a mystery that the geese at Beyond Search have encountered. Second, the write up shows what’s wrong with SharePoint. Why automate a function when you can do the work manually? Makes sense to some, I guess.
The author of the useful article here is Tehnoon Raza, a Senior Support Escalation Engineer at Microsoft. I love that title. At Beyond Search we will definitely add that to our SharePoint expert’s title. Now to the good stuff. Mr. Raza’s article explains that when you propagate a source site to its variations, the copy does not copy everything. The work around is easy. Create a custom column and manually insert these items for each page you want to propagate:
- URL Name (seems important, right?)
- Title
- Description
- Schedule Start Date
- Schedule End Date
- Audience Targeting
- Contact
- Contact Name
- Contact E-mail Address (another important item, right?)
- Contact Picture.
I did not notice an explanation that made much sense to me, an addled goose. You may be more in tune with the Microsoft way. My thought was, “Why not copy the properties?” No problem when there is one page. The recommended approach begs for a script when there are two or more pages. Maybe I’m missing something, but this strikes me as sort of clunky. Oh, hold on. Tess, our SharePoint expert, has a comment. She says, “It’s something a box would definitely not do.” Wow. Harsh.
Stephen Arnold, January 4, 2009
Enterprise 2.0, 0, Buy Revenues, 1
January 4, 2009
Last year, I called attention to the silliness of the Enterprise 2.0 fabrication. Companies are having a tough time remaining viable Enterprise 1.0 outfits. Even the GOOG nuked thousands of rental wizards. If the likes of Yahoo can’t trim its sails as an Enterprise 1.0 operation, it may not have much of a chance to make it beyond Enterprise 1.5. I read with interest “2009: Enterprise 2.0 – Innovate through Acquisition?” here as a clear signal that there is not such thing as Enterprise 2.0. Sure, consultants, including some azure chipped outfits not able to make to the blue chip consulting category, can assert that Enterprise 2.0 is the next big thing. But assertions from consultants are manifestations of the Batista Madoff syndrome. Mike Gotta’s revelation is that big computer and software companies should look at smaller, more innovative companies, then buy some. Yep, that’s the fate of Enterprise 2.0. Acquire. Who should be doing the acquiring? Big companies that are the very Enterprise 1.0 operations that are struggling to grow and meet their financial targets. I think Mr. Gotta has identified some interesting companies. My problem is that the notion that a company can become an Enterprise 2.0 via acquisition is evidence that there is no such thing as Enterprise 2.0. Oh, one more thing: I think the acquisition path will not work. An old business model in the present financial climate may not work as advertised.
Stephen Arnold, January 4, 2009
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