IBM Goes the Toaster Route
May 20, 2009
I had to slap my beak two times after reading “IBM Rolls Out the ‘Smart Cube’ with App Market: Think Enterprise iPod-iTunes Combo” here. The news story by Larry Dignan appeared in a ZDNet Web log here. The article explained that IBM has taken one of its expensive servers, preloaded business software on the gizmo, and created an online store to sell lucky owners of a Smart Cube more software. Mr. Dignan explained that I should think of the Smart Cube and its $8,000 starting price as a variant of the iTunes iPod play from Apple.
That’s a pretty good analogy.
When I visited the Smart Cube online app store here, I ran a query for enterprise search using the Smart Market search system. What did I find? I saw four hits that included the word enterprise and search but none of the hits provided a link to a search and retrieval system.
With search an important service, I was surprised that none of IBM’s many partners in enterprise search made it to the Smart Market store. Even more interesting was that I could find zero references to the Yahoo IBM free version of Lucene that I have running on one of my NetFinity servers.
My thoughts:
- Search is simply not perceived as a serious enterprise application by the innovators who created the Smart Cube and Smart Market. In my opinion, this makes the Smart Cube somewhat dumb. Your mileage may vary.
- The search system for the Smart Market itself defaults to an OR, not an AND. This yields the four false drops in my result set here.
- IBM has not made substantial progress in [a] either its own packaging of must-have enterprise functions or [b] the search system for its own Web sites.
For this addled goose, this is a dumb move for both the Smart Cube and the Smart Market. At least my iTunes offers a search function which is lame in my view, but it does offer the service unlike the Smart Cube.
Stephen Arnold, May 20, 2009
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