Microsoft TomTom Update
March 13, 2009
Groklaw has a useful post about the thin ice on which the Microsoft TomTom action may be starting to walk. You can read “Two Qu9ick Words about Microsoft v. TomTom: Think Bilski” here. In addition to useful links, Groklaw offers the notion that other legal forces may be pushing against the Microsoft effort. The issue in my mind is that a company like Microsoft can afford litigation. Smaller companies might find themselves on the ropes regardless of the merit of the challenge.
Stephen Arnold, March 12, 2009
Microsoft: More Price Cuts
March 13, 2009
ZDNet in the UK reported here that “Microsoft Gives Discounts on Software Licenses”. I have been watching for discount and bundle offers. The ZDNet.co.uk story added some useful information to my stockpile. The most interesting comment in the article was:
One special promotion is ‘Simplify and Save’, which offers savings of 15 percent for those who consolidate at least two existing licence agreements into an Open Value agreement. Microsoft said the discount will run for the entire length of a three-year licence deal. Another offer is for between 15 percent and 25 percent off the price of the licence and the Software Assurance costs of running Exchange Server, Office Communications Server, SQL Server, Office SharePoint Server, Visual Studio, Office Project and other Microsoft software.
If accurate, these price cuts are similar to the old fashioned “price wars” that raged between Clark Oil Company and the Standard Oil Company gas stations on Prospect Avenue in 1960. The idea was that the lower price would pull fuel purchasers to the pumps of the lower priced fuel. Microsoft Incentives strike me as pointing in this direction. Click here for the Incentives page.
If my recollection is accurate (keep in mind that I am an addled goose), the gasoline came from refineries and was, for all practical purposes, chemically the same. Skip the marketing jargon. The fuel ran commodity engines.
Is a price war in enterprise software in general and enterprise search similar? In my opinion, “No.” Information is not a product cracked at the local refinery. Vendors and the naive want software to be “one size fits all” or to sustain the analogy “one fuel for any gasoline engine”.
Information looks like a commodity to the uninformed. Information gets value from context. Context is particularized. A price war may help one company starve its competitors of revenue. The licensee may find that the low cost solution is not the one that suits that organization’s information context.
I am not sure how many companies will respond to the Microsoft drift toward a price war. This might make great business sense for Microsoft. I think it may create some sticky wickets elsewhere in the enterprise software ecosystem. Price cuts can habituate buyers to discounts. Once a lower price mentality locks in, the seller has to find other ways to pump up revenues. A misstep can destabilize the economics on which the price cut was based. The house of cards could collapse under certain conditions. I wonder if the present economic climate presents those conditions.
Stephen Arnold, March 13, 2009
Browser Drag Racing
March 13, 2009
I recall the good old days of running speed tests on the PCs I used to build. Now I just buy Macs. I would load TACH or some other tool and watch the data appear as the system opened a faux Word document, rendered graphic primitives, and wrote files to the disc, then reading them. I never figured out what made a particular computer do well on one test and poorly on another. Even when I tested machines with the same motherboard, CPUs, and memory configurations, I would find wide margins of error. On the serious tests I ran when I was trying to figure out Google’s read write speeds in one of the company’s early technical papers, I identified weird differences on my identical IBM NetFinity 5500 quad processor, four gig, EXP 10 drive SCSI III storage devices, and the six Seagate Cheetahs I used as a Level 5 RAID boot device. Drove me crazy.
Now I read Emil Protalinkski’s “Microsoft’s Own Speed Tests Show IE Beating Chrome, Firefox” and have a flash back. You can find the useful write up here. He has reported on some interesting tests, including a useful table that shows IE 8. as the speed champ. For me, the most interesting point in his article was:
Microsoft chooses approximately 25 websites for daily testing, and tens of thousands on a monthly basis. If you’re going to do your own tests, Microsoft emphasizes that “any list of websites to be used for benchmarking must contain a variety of websites, including international websites, to help ensure a complete picture of performance as users would experience on the Internet.”
In my opinion, this comment does not go far enough. The tests have to be conducted in a rigorous manner in order to deal with latency. I also identified other variables that can affect speed tests:
- Is the test machine or test machines running the benchmarks at the same operating temperature?
- Is each machine running the same set of processes and tasks at the time the tests are conducted?
- Are the sites being tested static pages or composite applications?
- Is the test machine or machines operating with flushed caches, defragged drives, etc. when the tests are run?
Small frictional points can add up over time. Some of the variances in the Microsoft table included in Mr. Protalinkski’s article are modest in my opinion. Even with baseline systems the variances can be significant. In my opinion, the speed tests are helpful but not definitive.
The same issues apply to testing search systems. It’s easy to crank out a remarkable indexing benchmark until the real world content flow brings the weaknesses of the systems to center stage. I quit benchmark testing long ago, but I still find the data somewhat interesting.
Stephen Arnold, March 13, 2009
Google: Pope Pumps Google as HR Tool
March 13, 2009
Step away from the hoo hah about Google’s addition of communication functions to its services. Expected and old news. A more interesting twist in terms of search was the CNN story “Pope: We Should Have Googled Holocaust Bishop” here. The angle for the story was, according to CNN:
The Pope has admitted making mistakes over the lifting of the excommunication of a Holocaust-denying bishop, saying the church will make much greater use of the Internet in the future to help avoid such controversies… “I have been told that consulting the information available on the Internet would have made it possible to perceive the problem early on.”
Why’s this important? Information in the Google data management systems makes it possible to perform a crude, but useful, type of reputation analysis. Now envision a world in which voice to text, email, and Web content can be queried. The Pope understands that aggregated data is more useful than what one might hear from a single source or two. Why? Data have value when there are numerous points to analyze.
Will traditional Web search systems deliver what’s needed? No. Google has invested in technology that can add two new types of queries to its arsenal of tricks. I don’t know if Google will make these publicly available, but with Google gathering data from multiple input nodes, it is more important to move beyond the simple keyword and concept search. Not even semantics can do the job. Google has invested in queries that deliver a certainty score (how likely a data point is to be accurate) and lineage (where a data point comes from). Add these two much needed types of queries to Google’s arsenal of information and methods and you have human resources research tool that leapfrogs other systems’ capabilities.
The Pope gets it. I wonder how many others can look beyond obvious extensions of Google’s as is technology to the new frontiers. Kudos to the Pope. Not so much praise for the recycling of the Grand Central and other comms functions.
Stephen Arnold, March 12, 2009
Dead Trees Outfits Try Digital Dugouts
March 13, 2009
I found the article “10 Ways Newspapers are Using Social Media to Save the Industry” pretty darned amazing. If you like newspapers in the morning, you will want to read the original here. Woody Lewis presents a list of 10 uses of social media that will save the newspaper industry. I did not know if this was serious or more like the stuff the addled goose writes. In my opinion, the dead tree crowd, newspaper and tabloid variety, are in a world of hurt. When papers publish a few times a week and nuke talented journalists, you don’t have to be much of an MBA type to figure out there is trouble in journalism land. Social media is an extension of analog communication. Improved communication is generally a positive; however, I have yet to see solid evidence that social media can reverse the problems of the newspaper industry in general or a single paper like the Louisville Courier Journal. The author Woody Lewis is to be commended for making lemon whip from a bumper crop of lemons. My mother made lemon whip: sugar, egg whites, one tiny lemon, and quite a bit of elbow grease. Hated the stuff, didn’t you? In my opinion, a newspaper finding financial salvation in social media is like hunting for a sunken ship off the coast of Albania when the treasure seekers work out of a traditional library, have no boat, and lack the expertise to find Albania on a Google Map.
Do you know how I know? Check out the 27 publishers who are going to shove supersized banners in my face. Now that’s traditional publishing embracing the spirit of online in 2009. Link here.
Stephen Arnold, March 13, 2009
Dotmatics
March 12, 2009
Visualization was a topic at a client meeting yesterday. I find that visualization is essential when trying to close a deal with senior executive types. Rows of numbers are the steak; a nifty visual presentation of the key points is the sizzle. Dotmatics, founded in 2005, as a spin-out from a multinational pharmaceutical company. The company was established to address the information needs of scientists in the biotech/pharma space.
This is a Dotmatics composite display showing data, structure, and scatter diagram plotting.
I learned today that the company has opened a US office in San Diego, California. The company’s products include browser based system, security provisions, cartridge to query chemical database content, and a tool to make it easy to suck in bio data to an Oracle system. The hot feature of the Dotmatics’ system is its scientific visualization. MBAs need not trouble themselves with this type of tool. MBAs do Excel charts. Scientists need tools to manipulate large datasets and use display tools that have more horsepower than a couple of pie slices and a bar of baloney. You can take a look at the Vortex chart basics here. A feature list for the basic visualization options is here. Worth a look unless you are an MBA. MBAs know everything already in my opinion, especially risk analysis and NINJA borrowers.
Stephen Arnold, March 12, 2009
FDA: An Argument for Pervasive Monitoring
March 12, 2009
Lost amidst the noise about Apple netbooks and communication functions in Google services was this write up in Natural News: “FDA Scientists Accuse Agency of Corruption, Intimidation”. You can read the story here. When I reviewed the article, I was not concerned about who shot John. The point for me was that the information flowing into, around, and out of a US government entity seemed to be subjective to an extraordinary amount of massaging and filtering. I can understand the need for these actions in police and intelligence areas. I am a little puzzled about the same effort or lack of effort applied in areas where public health may be an issue. Read the story. Make up your own mind. My thoughts were after thinking about David Gutierrez’s write up were:
- Pervasive monitoring may make it easier to identify anomalies or unusual information activities
- A single search system would make it easier for authorized users to pinpoint topics and anomalies
- A standard for US government information objects would be helpful.
The article has a somewhat troublesome series of assertions about the agency in question. Maybe the equivalent of traffic cameras are needed to police some agencies? I don’t have a solid opinion yet. Just a concern.
Stephen Arnold, March 12, 2009
Semantics in the Enterprise: Partial Business Case
March 12, 2009
If you struggle to justify spending money for semantic technology, you may want to take a look at “Is It Time for the Use of Semantic Technologies in the Enterprise?” by Javier Carbonell here. When I read the article, I sensed that Mr. Carbonell was involved in or privy to a business case for spending money on semantic technology. Mr. Carbonell does not define “semantics”, and I was forced to assume he was referencing software that can figure out what a “document” or other information object is about. The idea is to get beyond keyword indexing which is quite yesterday in my opinion. He acknowledged that the challenges range from staff expertise to technology. The core of the article, in my opinion, is the real problem today: justifying the expense for a technology or suite of technologies that may not be well understood or may not be easy to implement within a rigid timeline or budget. He breaks down his view of costs. You may find the review of methods useful. Keep in mind that the key to the type of analysis Mr. Carbonell recommends is the validity of the assumptions used to “fill in the blanks” where unknowns exist. Guessing does not work too well as the recent financial trouble suggests. Use of a method with faulty assumptions will trigger a host of interesting consequences. When I sense that those developing budgets for semantic projects don’t have the data needed to generate cost analysis that match my experience in the real world, I walk away from the project. A semantics project that goes off the rails can wreck havoc on a budget and on the project manager’s career. When those upsides slide into red ink, the stain may take some time to disappear.
Stephen Arnold, March 12, 2009
Standards and eGovernment
March 12, 2009
The Obama administration seems to be shifting from topical silo portals to a single point of access; that is, Recovery.gov. Most people don’t care. The implications of this shift hit some government managers and quite a few contractors. If you are interested in eGovernment or eGov, you may want to scan this XBRL Blog Magazine article “Free the Data: eGov and Open Standards” here. “XBRL” stands for Extensible business Report Language. No, I am not sure what that embraces either. Nevertheless, the write up on march 12, 2009, struck me as thought provoking. The hook for the write up is the Obama technology officer, Vivek Kundra, and his support for “open” approaches. Most government contractors are not too keen on open anything. Washington, DC, was not built on openness and for some, the idea is anathemic. For me, the most interesting comment in the write up was:
The key to the success of this plan is to ensure that there is some agreement across all federal agencies that defines a shared common ‘open’ data standard and identifies how deeply they are willing to push the tagging of data gathered into the collection processes for Recovery Act funding applications and into the financial reporting between the federal, state, and local agencies who are to be the recipients of the Recovery Act funds. Currently, the plan is to only go one level deep — the federal agency will require recipient reporting only from the primary agency receiving the funds.
The problem is not promulgating guidelines. The problem is that it can take months, if not years, for an executive order or OMB mandates to reach the rank and file in an Executive Branch agency and then gain traction. When I was working in Washington, I heard that one term presidents could not make much of an impact because the process of disseminating and implementing a change took more than four years. Without two terms, Federal agencies just keep on doing what each has been doing for decades–preventing staff cuts and budget reductions, expanding programs, and protecting turf.
Making substantive change to break some of the commercial – government agency information connections, adopting standards, and moving from walled gardens to gardens with unlocked gates is a fine idea. I just don’t think change will take place quickly. It is easier to write about change than create it, particularly in governmental agencies engaged in silo construction and preservation.
Stephen Arnold, March 12, 2009
Torrents of Money
March 12, 2009
Check out the meager revenues from some of the dead tree crowds’ online services. What about Twitter revenue? Not much there. Now click here to read the Ars Technica story “Torrent Search Engine Mininova Earning €1 Million a Year.” You may be able to locate a link to Mininova with a Google search. I am not comfortable putting a link to the site on the addled goose’s blog. What is evident that users of torrent sites will pay money to locate data indexed by a torrents’ system. No big surprise. For me, the most interesting comment in the article was:
Even a casual glance at the site will confirm that a huge percentage of the .torrent files it hosts (Mininova, like The Pirate Bay, does not host actual content on its own servers) infringe copyright, but Mininova isn’t quite The Pirate Bay. While the Bay used to delight in posting—and then ridiculing—takedown requests from copyright owners, Mininova claims to comply with all such requests and has a prominent page on its Web site providing information on the takedown process.
I liked the Ars Technica write up. My hunch is that as legal eagles get more knowledge about torrents, the number of legal challenges will increase. Mininova may have the dough to fight today’s battles, but repeated, contentious, and prolonged legal battles will kill the company. Interesting challenges for the parties to the matter. Older folks have difficulty explaining why torrents may be problematic. The children of these individuals have zero problem understanding the benefits of a torrent site, finding them, and using them. Not much chance of a quick change in this pattern in my opinion. Search is a gateway to information. A link delivers the information object. The children of legal eagles may ask their parents, “What’s the big deal?” No quick or easy answer yet.
Stephen Arnold, March 12, 2009
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