Google Goes for the Microsoft Crown Jewels
August 4, 2009
The world of online commentary has a busy vacation day. Leave those kiddies at the beach. Write about Google’s billboards. You can see examples at PCWorld in a story titled “Google Billboard Ads Gun for Microsoft and Promote Google Apps”. My newsreader overflows with analyses of Google’s direct and quick response to the Microsoft Yahoo tie up.
The only problem is that most of the Columbia and Missouri journalism school graduates have not told me how long it took Google to get “going” with its new campaign.
Remember Google’s response to eBay’s purchase of StumbleUpon? That was quick as well and made clear that Google can move quickly or it plans ahead and stockpiles digital marketing armaments. When the need arises, the keys are turned in Google’s command center and the launch is underway.
A better question is, “What other marketing gear has Google sitting in its warehouse?” Or, “How will Google escalate if Microsoft repels the attack?” Speculation along the lines of “what if” or military games is interesting but, in my opinion, not too useful.
Google has had Microsoft as a target for a long time, based on my research. Google’s engineers and marketers have been laboring away for the day when the Redmond giant crossed the digital Rubicon. That step was taken with the Microsoft Yahoo tie up for Web search and advertising. Caesar had a good thing going until his best pals killed him.
Microsoft and Google represent two different business models. Which will win? My money is on the outfit that delivers the best bang for the buck. The best technology may not be the deciding factor. The smartest engineers may not be the key to success. My hunch is that the war will be decided by economic factors.
An army marches on its stomach. In the digital squabble that has officially escalated, the winner will be the company with the ability to slash prices, offer free services, and a way out of the financial rat holes many organizations now find themselves in.
Check our Postini’s deals for email archiving. That is one indication of how Google will play the game. Then ask about Microsoft SharePoint deals that include enterprise search. Microsoft bundles offer an insight into how that company will operate.
The winners in this battle, in my opinion, will be the customers who can shake free of some of the price brutalization that characterizes enterprise software. If this scenario is correct, the collateral damage will be extensive, affecting some of the present leaders in enterprise software. Dawn or dusk in software? Pick one and reduce your costs.
Stephen Arnold, August 4, 2009
Wave Ripples
August 3, 2009
Ars Technica recently reported that Google revealed a couple sets of source code from Wave, the company’s new collaborative messaging platform (Check out the code at http://code.google.com/p/wave-protocol/wiki/Installation). The article is at http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/07/google-releases-wave-protocol-implementation-source-code.ars. While the code manipulation concepts are all very tehcnical, to the layman like me, Wave looks like a souped-up version of Google Docs where changes from multiple users apply visibly in real time. The code is available by Apache license, so third-party developers will be able to adapt Wave to new products. If the GOOG continues its course, it could become a major supplier of open source code, even further solidifying its dominant presence online. With Wave starting to roil the open source waters, Google may be looking to expands its reach into new oceans of data manipulation that could prove very useful to businesses and individuals alike.
Jessica Bratcher, August 3, 2009
Google Relationship Map
August 3, 2009
A happy quack to the reader who sent me a link to Muckety.com and its relationship map of Google. Same Googlers and former Googler whom I track appear on the map; for example, Anna Patterson (University of Illinois Ph.D., developer of Xift, Google inventor, one of the founders of Cuil.com) and the Digg-hyped Marissa Mayer(keeper of the user interface and authority on Internet anonymity).
But there are some omissions. You can click around as I did, and you may be able to nail down Steve Lawrence or Sanjay Ghemawat. Perfect? Nope. Useful. I think it is suggestive in light of IBM’s alleged “invention” of relationship maps discovered by processing data.
For the purposes of comparison, here’s the Cluuz.com map of Ms. Mayer:
I assume IBM’s relationship maps put these two free systems to shame.
Stephen Arnold, August 3, 2009
Semantic Sig.ma
August 3, 2009
We’ve found a tool that offers results from multiple and varied (and sometimes unrelated) Web sites by using semantic analysis of embedded site data. It’s called Sig.ma, http://sig.ma/. What it returns is a mashup, a bulk treatment of data that may or may not help you. As the site explains: “It might be noisy but you can spot gems, e.g. interesting description differences in different sources.” Sig.ma can be a data browser, a widget to paste into e-mail or HTML, or a semantic API.
Sig.ma is also interactive and capable of learning; if you delete an item it will process that info to exclude that data next time. The catch right now is that only pages exposing RDF, RDFa or Microformats will appear. So while Google spiders the web like crazy, Sig.ma is delving into more specific caches of information. Does this mean Google is lagging behind Sig.ma’s services: Sindice, Kkam, and Boss? We’ll see what the future holds for semantic search.
Jessica Bratcher, August 3, 2009
Generational Data Conflicts Loom
August 3, 2009
Governments are making data available. A good example is Data.gov. Not perfect, but interesting. On the other side are the commercial database publishers. Examples include the dinosaur-like Thomson Reuters, LexisNexis, and Cambridge Scientific. Each of these commercial enterprises charge money for data. The fees are high because each of these companies tries to deliver Google-type services without Google’s advertising business model. This means that the person wanting the data has to pay a great deal even to learn if the commercial database has information of use to the customer. Libraries, once the cash cow for some commercial database publishers, have fallen on hard times.
Where’s the conflict?
In my opinion, the Digital Beat story “Open Data Is the Future of Web Discovery” makes the potential problem easy to grasp. The story contains this interesting passage:
For now, we need one of Google, Microsoft and Yahoo to make toolbar data available to see if there’d be massive advances by third-party developers. The first company to do this will open a new market, so who will be the first, and why? These big companies could find a way – like Facebook has – to build a vibrant developer community using their data and distribution. Perhaps the data provider can participate in the value created by charging for accessing and using the data. Or maybe Facebook, Twitter (or Twitter developers) will be the first to share click and other usage data. No longer would you have to build a multi billion dollar company to get access to data that could be used to make significant advances for users. All these companies would need to feel comfortable that users’ privacy is protected. Googlers tell me it’s highly unlikely Google would release toolbar data because the data is too valuable, privacy concerns and users might be surprised to see how much Google knows about them. Maybe the data is too important to Google so the company must hold it close to maintain its competitive advantage, but perhaps Yahoo and Microsoft would be willing to share data with select partners while tightly protecting user privacy for a chance to increase their competitiveness with Google. Or maybe these companies will try to build discovery services themselves. In the meantime, those potential advances in search, discovery and more are being stifled. Developers using Twitter, Yahoo and Microsoft search APIs could make better services for users with more data from those companies as well as Google, Facebook, Mozilla and others like data analytics companies. The chance these companies will share more data with developers aside, it’s worth figuring what would be possible if they did.
The warring factions will be:
- Governments who make data available for all and permit commercial entities to repurpose government crated information into commercial products
- Social and real time system that offer free data and make it possible for commercial entities to create new products and services so that monetization models emerge
- Commercial database companies who want to preserve their proprietary content and create new, high value products using traditional business models
- Individuals who write Web log posts that become fodder for aggregation and often play the role of “information farmers” raising wheat that food companies process into high value products.
My thought is that these forces may split along generational lines and engage in quite interesting interactions.
Stephen Arnold, August 2, 2009
Magazines on Slippery Slope
August 3, 2009
I fielded a question about magazine publishing on Monday, July 27, 2009. A small publisher with a handful of titles wanted me to offer some new ideas for generating revenue. Magazine publishing has been a challenging business since the implosion of Life Magazine. I have seen interesting business school case studies about the impact of shifting consumer preferences for news and information upon the weekly that provided many Americans with news and visual information. You can now explore in a clunky and limited way some of the Life Magaazine pictures on Google. The service is free, which baffles me, but I am an addled goose and not able to keep pace with the really swift and smart bicoastals who make decisoins about high-value informatoin.
Like newspapers, magazines have some brutal economics with which to wrestle. Paper, ink, distribution, and other must have lubricants for the business are expensive. Forget what the White House says about inflation. The costs for these traditional publishing essentials continue to climb. Printing is a money pit as well. Digital technology helps by eliminating the centuries old multi-step plate process. But direct-to-press requires expensive hardware and software. Printing remains expensive. Finally, there is the cost for human brain power, even if those brains are contractors and 22 year olds from fancy universities. Try as publishers might, it is tough to create a newspaper or a magazine without people to write stories, make ad deals, and place the phone calls to suppliers.
Long a niche business, magazines find themselves on the wrong end of a pointy stick from Web sites such as Alltop.com. I can create a magazine with a few clicks. If Alltop does not suit you, try Congoo. There are quite a few choices created by people who don’t have the same fondness for flipping through Mechanix Illustrated or the Saturday Evening Post that I had when young.
$17 dollars worth of hard copy magazines from big gun publishers.
In short, magazines on paper are finding their corner of the publishing world under the same pressure as people who make wooden shoes or spin wool by hand. Even niche magazines for fanatics of a particular activity such as crafts or kit airplanes are going to have to come up with some new ideas.
In my conversation, I had to say, “Let me think about some ideas.” This blog post is my preliminary thinking about what is likely to be the next zero point in publishing. Let me run down the thoughts that I am pushing around.
The Traditional Product
I went to Barnes & Noble, a recently remodeled store. The magazines are still upfront but the selection has been culled. The new layout not far from my goose pond pushes book lights, book ends, and Moleskine products. The books are pushed to the rear of the store, and the computer book section has been eliminated. The free WiFi was not working but Barnes and Noble is a bricks and mortar business which is now jumping into electronic books. That will be interesting to track.
The magazines occupy four wooden bays. Crafts and kit airplane titles were not to be found. I could not locate the specialist magazines for those interested in archaeology. I noticed that the magazines devoted to watches and luxury goods were few and far between as well. When I did find a specialist magazine like Hemmings Motor News, there were three copies on the shelf. Maybe Hemmings is a big seller at this Barnes and Noble?
I bought two magazines with the idea that I would look at the hard copies and review my subscription copy of the recent New Yorker Magazine. The total cover price for the three magazines discussed below was about $17, excluding tax. Three magazines for about $20. Hmmm. I remember the commutes between New York and San Francisco when I bought four of five magazines on every flight. Not any more. I have info on my iTouch.
Car and Driver
My recollection is that Bill Ziff was into car magazines before he hopped on the computer magazine trend. Automobile fanatics are ideal for niches. I don’t pay much attention to automobiles or automobile magazines. I live in truck and gun-rack country. Car and Driver reviews vehicles that work well in Palm Springs but don’t have much to offer to a person who drives on dirt roads. I flipped through the magazine with the cover date September 2009 and in tiny, tiny type the $4.99 price. (I wonder if the small type communicates modest value?) The feature in this issue was new cars. I may have missed something but three points hit my knee like the weird door design on my 1973 Pontiac Grandville convertible:
First, where were the Hondas? I like Hondas. These are vehicles I can buy over the Internet, sight unseen. I drive them 100,000 miles and then get another. Odd omission in 140 page magazine. Honda is one of the top selling vehicles in the US. I wondered if the news hole was too small to slug in some Honda information or if the Honda vehicles were no longer interesting to Car and Driver readers. Ah, well, editorial decision. Honda information is available online.
Second, some vehicles rated data tables and others did not. I wondered why there was no Web link to the Car and Driver Web site for additional information about each automobile. I solved the problem with a quick visit to The Auto Channel. That outfit has data about the new cars.
Third, the writing was not crunchy. This means that if Bing.com or Google.com indexes an article, false drops are likely to pepper the search results. Let me give you one example. Writing about the Jaguar, Car and Driver used this phrase “evinced a strong whiff of femininity”. I hope Car and Driver has a great search engine optimization program because this type of writing will get the article in a list of results about women’s fashion. Maybe that’s the Car and Driver audience?
Google May Get More Deeply Personal
August 2, 2009
Google has a number of clever innovations in its personalization systems. The New York Times has discovered that YouTube.com can create a personalized television station. That’s just the tip of the personalization iceberg at Google. This iceberg, however, broke off quite a while ago and just now has collided with those lovable Titanics of mainstream media. Here are three patent patent applications that indicate the depth of the Google’s “for you, right now, no human editors needed” approach to personalization of network-centric information.
Many people worked on these. The USPTO, prompt as always, published three patent applications with the handiwork of Ashutosh Garg evident. Dr. Garg was, according to an interview in a Beckman Institute online publication:
At Google, I was the architect of the largest online personalization system.—Ashutosh Garg
Dr. Garg has left Google to pursue other interests. The purpose of this post is to capture the moving parts of Google’s potential in personalization of search and other services. The patent documents cited below provide an indication of the work that Microsoft and Yahoo will have to do to match Google’s “tailoring” capability. Killing Google will take more than media coverage, a 10 year deal, and assuming Yahoo’s punishing search cost burden.
Google has been working in this field for several years. You can find some historical color here.
20090192986, “Providing Content Using Stored Query Information”
This document was filed in January 2008. This system and method cranks through a user’s search history
and makes decisions about what to display.
The abstract said:
Among other disclosed subject matter, a computer-implemented method relating to providing content on a page includes receiving information for providing content for an access device in response to a navigation from a first page to a second page. The content is to be included in the second page. The method includes accessing query information stored on the access device, the query information based on a first query that was submitted from the access device to a search provider before navigating to the first page. The method includes providing the content for inclusion in the second page, the content selected using at least the received information and the accessed query information. A computer-implemented method can include recording search query information for a user; retrieving the search query information; and using the search query information to determine content for display to the user.
20090192888, “Targeted Ads Based On User Purchases”
The system and method is applied to a user’s purchase history. The idea is to suggest what other goodies the Google user will crave:
The present invention relates to systems and methods for providing advertisements on websites. In an embodiment, a method for providing an advertisement on a website includes obtaining purchase information submitted by a user making a purchase on the website, determining at least one advertisement for a product or service related to the purchase but of a different type than the purchase, and displaying the at least one advertisement on the website when the purchase is completed. In another embodiment, a system for providing an advertisement on a website includes a purchase server, an advertisement source, an analyzer, and an advertisement server.
This patent application was also filed in January 2008.
20090192705, “Adaptive and Personalized Navigation System”
This patent application was filed in March 2009, but seems to be conceptually related to the other two patent applications mentioned in this document. The abstract said:
Adaptive navigation techniques are disclosed that allow navigation systems to learn from a user’s personal driving history. As a user drives, models are developed and maintained to learn or otherwise capture the driver’s personal driving habits and preferences. Example models include road speed, hazard, favored route, and disfavored route models. Other attributes can be used as well, whether based on the user’s personal driving data or driving data aggregated from a number of users. The models can be learned under explicit conditions (e.g., time of day/week, driver ID) and/or under implicit conditions (e.g., weather, drivers urgency, as inferred from sensor data). Thus, models for a plurality of attributes can be learned, as well as one or more models for each attribute under a plurality of conditions. Attributes can be weighted according to user preference. The attribute weights and/or models can be used in selecting a best route for user.
Observations
These inventions embed adaptive personalization in the Google data centers and global computing fabric. The notion of personalization is that the system will figure out what a user wants and needs. The approach is reasonably clever. Based on my research into Google’s technology, the appearance of several related patent applications may indicate that there will be more personalization functionality available at any time.
Stephen Arnold, August 3, 2009
Social Media Analytics Round Up
August 2, 2009
Social media is the hot buzz phrase right now. People who already joined Facebook (networking) and delicious (bookmarking) are jumping on the Twitter wagon, as well as joining Digg, Stumbleupon, and about a hundred other function sites, all in the name of making connections. So if your company is tapping social media, what now? You need to be able to quantify the return on investment. This article at http://mashable.com/2009/04/19/social-media-analytics/ gives a rundown on available analytics such as Google or Omniture and what other add-ins are available. For example, if you need to shorten a URL to use in Twitter, you could choose the Bit.ly service, which also tracks information like number of clicks, traffic sources, and even at what time clicks occur. So spending some time selecting your tools will pay off in data aggregation in the end. Determining the payback of spending time on social media is still not perfect, but progress is being made.
Jessica Bratcher, August 2, 2009
Microsoft Yahoo Search Staff Shake Up
August 2, 2009
SFGate’s “Yahoo Searches for a New Start” contained an comment about the pending tie up of Microsoft and Yahoo in Web search. I found this comment insightful:
Many Yahoo employees will lose their jobs or have to move over to Microsoft. In a conference call this week, Bartz acknowledged the impact: “Yes, there are certainly many Yahoo search employees that will be asked to take jobs at Microsoft as they integrate the technology. … And then unfortunately there will be some redundancies in Yahoo. … There will be redundancies; it just is in the future.” She added that nothing will change until the two companies get regulatory approval for the partnership, which won’t happen until 2010 at the earliest. Then there’s a “transition” period, which will last for two years after that. But if we were Yahoo search employees, we’d start polishing those resumes now.
SFGate then added, without much factual underpinning in my opinion:
There should still be a place for them in Silicon Valley. Yahoo’s always had a fraught relationship with search – even in the early days, company founders Jerry Yang and David Filo never wanted to spend too much of Yahoo’s money building infrastructure – but it was healthy for Silicon Valley to have the two major search companies in competition right here. What would be healthiest would be for someone – perhaps one of those spurned Yahoo search employees – to launch a new company, perhaps to compete with Google. There should be room for all.
Search is on its way to becoming what the US government calls a donut hole. There is some action at both ends of the search spectrum, but in the middle you are without much coverage. On the consumer side, Google has sewed up search and is well on its way to make more headway in online advertising. The YouTube.com monetization is beginning to roll. DoubleClick holds promise. The Google is not sitting on its tail waiting to see what Microsoft and Yahoo will be doing if their deal is approved.
On the other end of the search spectrum are the specialized search vendors. You can say what you want about the 350 companies in this space. Right now, the giants are Autonomy, Coveo, Endeca, Exalead, Fast Search (installed base), and maybe a couple of others. Hugely influential are open source distributions and IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle who just bundle search in with other software to make big sales. Search is a commodity or give away. Google is a growing presence in this sector. If Google can gain share with some Fortune 50 companies, the enterprise search landscape will be realigned.
The Google has an on going need for wizards. Start ups need technical talent as well. But if Yahoo dumps lots of engineers in search and content processing, I am not so sure that these folks will find jobs right away. More likely is that the Google will snag the gems and the others will have to fight tooth and nail to find work in a Silicon Valley that is sitting in a physician’s waiting room. Just my opinion.
Stephen Arnold, August 2, 2009
Yahoo Search Wizard Identifies Real Time Search as Hot
August 2, 2009
The ink is not yet dry on the proposed tie up between Microsoft and Yahoo. Yahoo’s top management exited the search business, dumping the costs to a willing and eager Microsoft. Reuters reported that one of Yahoo’s senior wizards sees real time search as an opportunity. “Yahoo Labs Chief Sees Real time Search Opportunity” reported:
Yahoo’s Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo Labs, said that the company could potentially “mine” messages from Twitter, the popular microblogging service, to offer Web surfers search results beyond those offered by Microsoft’s Bing.
What I find interesting is that real time search is not all that new. What also struck me is that Yahoo seems to be taking a conceptual lead in this search niche. I wonder what Microsoft’s take on this Yahoo notion is? If the deal between Microsoft and Yahoo is approved, will Googlers take the hint and accelerate their efforts in real time search? Interesting.
Stephen Arnold, August 2, 2009
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