Wall Street Journal Spamming Again
October 1, 2009
I have to give the Wall Street Journal a big thanks. What a wonderful example of how newspapers who want to charge for their content, sustain their untenable business model, and anger paying customers. If I were teaching, I would profile the witless activities of this company. First, it muffed the online service. Then it created the crazy regional papers making bibliographic citations exciting for folks everywhere. Now it is spamming paying customers again. I have called the company. What a joke that was. I have written email and hard copy letters. Into file 13 for sure. And I have been writing to my two or three readers that WSJ is spamming me, a paying customer, to subscribe to the newspaper. For a case example of ineptitude, may I suggest that we look no further than the WSJ’s “please, subscribe” emails to paying customers. Silly. Indicative of a train with a faulty locomotive. Maybe this is a WSJ contractor? Quite a third party rep in my view. Nice work. Colorful. Clown-like too.
Stephen Arnold, September 30, 2009
Oracle Chases Business Intelligence
October 1, 2009
A happy quack to my colleague in Israel. Another useful heads up. This time about Oracle.
Life has been getting tough for the companies hawking old-style relational database management systems. The vendors have been moving into verticals, chasing applications, and pumping up licensing fees. I am surprised to see database appliances poking their noses from corporate research labs. Instead of breaking new ground, these DB appliances are tackling performance problems by throwing hardware at the inherent weaknesses of the row and column systems that once were state of the art. Not any more. New approaches from outfits like Google and clever start ups like Aster Data have shifted the game from checkers to data management chess. One can argue that technology like MarkLogic’s may contribute to the data management revolution. I was not surprised to learn that Oracle has bought an Israeli business intelligence company. The idea seems to be that business intelligence is a hot sector and, probably more important, relies on data stored in RDBMS tables. You can read the Oracle statement here. Globes reported in “Oracle Buys Israeli Business Intelligence Company HyperRoll”:
Last night, Oracle reported that it had acquired HyperRoll Inc., which develops what are known as financial reporting acceleration solutions, that is software that enables an enterprise to gather data for financial reporting faster and thus produce financial statements in a shorter time. Oracle did not disclose financial details of the transaction, which is expected to close in the next few months. HyperRoll was founded in 2000. It has its corporate headquarters in Mountain View, California, and its development center in Omer. Its field is business intelligence (BI), more specifically data warehouse performance acceleration software.
For me the key word is “acceleration”. Oracle is having to find ways around the inherent performance problems petascale data management imposes on dear Dr. Codd’s decades old invention. In my opinion, the Oracle approach is a stop gap measure. Newer approaches are in the market already and it is just a matter of time before the bottom falls out of the RDBMS market. Costs and performance will be the spikes that kill these agility vampires in my view. I wonder if Oracle will make more of a success in business intelligence than it has with its enterprise search initiative. Hot a couple of years ago, the Oracle search system has dropped outside the range of my radar.
Stephen Arnold, October 1, 2009
HP Analysis Urges Mainframe Rip and Replace
October 1, 2009
I read “Staying on Legacy Systems Ends Up Costing IT More” absolutely fascinating. The article appeared on the Ziff Davis Web site. There is a link to a podcast (latency and audio made this tough for me given my age, lousy hearing, and general impatience with serial info streams) and a series of excerpts from the “Briefings Direct” podcast discussion. The sponsor of the podcast was, according to the Web site, is Hewlett Packard. HP is on my radar because the company just merged its personal computer and printer business. I suppose that will make it untenable for me to describe HP as “the printer cartridge company”. I really liked that description, but now HP is a consulting firm and a PC company. Much better I suppose.
I abandoned the audio show and jumped to the transcript which you can obtain by clicking http://interarborsolutions.books.officelive.com/Documents/DoingNothing901.pdf.
The premise of the podcast, in my interpretation, is that smart companies will want to dump legacy hardware and systems for the hot, new hardware and systems available from HP. I understand this type of message. I use them myself. The idea sounds good. The notion of progress is based on the idea that what’s new is better than what came before. I won’t drag out the Jacques Ellul argument that technology creates more technology and more, unexpected problems. I will also ignore the studies of progress such as Gregg Easterbrook’s The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse, originally published in December 2003, five years before the economic dominos starting falling in April 2008. I won’t point out that “legacy” is not defined in a way that helped me understand the premise of the discussion. And, I won’t beat too forcefully on the fuzziness of word “cost” as the industry experts use the term. But costs are the core of the podcast, so I will have to make a quick dash through the thicket of accounting methods but not yet.
HP red ink as metaphor for the cost problems of a mainframe to next generation platform solution.
The first idea that snagged me was “cost hasn’t changed”. What changed was the amount of cash available to organizations. I don’t buy this. First, it is not clear what is included in the data to support the generalization. Without an indication of direct and indirects, capital, services, and any other costs that are associated with a legacy system, I can’t let the generalization into the argument. Without this premise in place, the rest of the assertions are on think ice, at least for me.
Second, consider this assertion by one of the HP “transformation” experts:
What’s still there, and is changing today, is the ability to look at a legacy source code application. We have the tools now to look at the code and visualize it in ways that are very compelling. That’s typically one of the biggest obstacles. If you look at a legacy application and the number of lines of code and number of people that are maintaining it, it’s usually obvious that large portions of the application haven’t really changed much. There’s a lot of library code and that sort of thing
My view is that “obvious” is a word that can be used to create a cloud of unknowing. Mainframe apps, if stable, and doing a good enough job may be useful because the application has not changed. As one of my neighbors here in Harrods Creek said, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” In my experience, that applies to mainframe apps that are working. If a mainframe app is broken, then an analysis is required to track down direct and indirect costs, opportunity costs, and fuzzy to be sure, but important going-forward costs. Not much is obvious once one gets rolling down the path of the rip-and-replace approach. In my experience, the reason mainframe apps continue to chug along in insurance companies, certain travel sectors, and some manufacturing firms is because they are predictable, known, and stable. Jumping into a whizzy new world may be fun, but such a step may not be prudent within the context of the business. But HP and its wizards aren’t known for their own rock solid business decisions. I am thinking of the ball drop with AltaVista.com and the most recent mash up of the printer and the PC industry. Ink revenue will make HP’s PC revenues soar, but it won’t change the nature of that low margin business.
Wave Rolls Ashore
September 30, 2009
Google Wave rolls into a town of about 100,000 developers. There are dozens of stories that explain Wave. I think that most of them state the obvious. A good example is the Computer World write up “Google Wave: A New Kind of Mega-Application.”
For me, an interesting observation in the Computer World story was:
As for businesses, companies desperately need a technology like Wave to help their employees collaborate in a more streamlined way. Unfortunately, most enterprises remain years away from switching to this type of information stream, due to their current technology infrastructures.
What I noticed is that Wave is being explained in terms of existing technologies and well known services. I think such comparisons are helpful. In my opinion, however, those comparisons are incorrect and potentially misleading. Wave is not familiar nor old. Functions within Wave appear to be the familiar services. The environment in which these services exist is quite new. Google is not doing a variant of SharePoint. Google is not putting email on steroids.
Wave is one of the first, although primitive, dataspace applications. Until that concept gets traction, competitors may see Wave and its applications as something familiar given a new coat of paint or some lipstick. That is the type of thinking that created the mental wheel spinning in the telecommunications and publishing sectors when Google was dismissed as a Web search and ad vendor.
There’s a simplified description of dataspaces in Google: The Digital Gutenberg and an IDC report which Sue Feldman and I wrote on the subject in September 2008. If you are an IDC client, request report 213562 or snag a copy of my new monograph from Infonortics.
Stephen Arnold, September 30, 2009
Google Books Explained by Japanese News Service
September 30, 2009
I am puzzled by Google Books. To try and grasp the project, I try to look at and read many of the write ups. One of the more interesting explanations appeared in The Mainichi Daily News in the story “Why the Controversy over Google Books and How Does It Work?” The link is to the English version of the write up. The article is in question and answer form, brief, and to the point. The most interesting comment in the article in my opinion was this question and answer:
Q: If Google Books goes into full swing in the future, books wouldn’t sell any more, would they?
A: Google has pledged to only include a commercial service on out of print books. However, “out of print” isn’t clearly defined, and in any case, we should avoid a situation where the demand for free books destroys mankind’s publishing culture.
I quite like the phrase “avoid a situation where the demand for free books destroys mankind’s publishing culture.” The hitch is that many publishers are struggling to stay afloat. Libraries are strapped for cash. Commercial database companies have not rushed to build competitive services. Governments, at least in the US, have not had much of an appetite for scanning, OCRing, and making searchable book content. Short write ups are good, but Google Books is a complicated beastie which I don’t understand despite my best efforts.
Stephen Arnold, September 29, 2009
dtSearch Desktop 7.63
September 30, 2009
A happy quack to the reader who sent me a link to the description of the new version of dtSearch 7.63. This low-profile company continues to crank out products. Information about the new version can be located using the company’s site search function. The direct link to information is here. The system is Windows centric. Most of the changes improve functionality with Microsoft software. Worth a test drive.
Stephen Arnold, September 29, 2009
Sucking Content from SharePoint
September 30, 2009
A happy quack to the reader who sent me a link to a Slashdot story “Cracking Open the SharePoint Fortress”. This Slashdot item pointed to Computer World in the UK. You can find that original story on the UK Computer World Web site. The articles point out that SharePoint has been a bit of a one way street. Licensees – about 100 million of them I have heard – can put content into SharePoint. Getting that information out is a bit more work. The solution for this “fortress” is Microsoft’s pal Google. The idea is that Google’s Sites’s API can Hoover the info without much hassle. My son’s company Adhere Solutions has had a number of ways to neuter the wild boar SharePoint. The Sites’s API just makes the job easier, faster, and cheaper. Yes, you can have the three attributes courtesy of Google’s wizards. What’s Microsoft’s reaction? I don’t know because I don’t track the dust ups between these two companies. My hunch is that Microsoft will seethe inwardly and then respond in an appropriate way. Microsoft is not likely to let this sharp probe go unanswered.
Stephen Arnold, September 30, 2009
Google Base on Death Row?
September 30, 2009
Garrett Rogers’ “Google Base No Longer for Products” reported that changes are underway for a Google service that few people know about. He said:
It’s hard to tell if Google is actually thinking of pulling the plug on Google Base or not — I’m thinking they are going to let it die a slow death. The reason I think that is because they are actually replacing their Google Base Blog with the Google Merchant Blog.
Google Base has been an interesting beta. If you have not explored the service, you may want to hurry. If Mr. Rogers is correct, the employment ads, the mixed bag of content, and the real estate listings may be removed from the service.
In my opinion, Google Base made clear some interesting Google functions; for example, ability to ingest content and place it into one of Google’s data management systems. Some of the features of Google Base struck me as providing test beds for specific data processing functions. The user was not the focal point of Google Base.
My view is that Google Base might be on death row, but its underlying technology is alive and changing to fit into the rapidly evolving dataspace functionality the Google has been working on since the company made a strategic acquisition in 2006. I can hear now, “All you base are belong to us.” Do you?
Stephen Arnold, September 30, 2009
XML May Get Marginalized
September 29, 2009
I found the write up by Jack Vaughan interesting and thought provoking. XML (a wonderful acronym for Extensible Markup Language), a child of CALS and SGML, two fine parents in my opinion, may have its salad days behind it. You can read “XML on the Wane? Say It Isn’t So, Jack” and make up your own mind. Let’s assume that XML is a bum and no longer the lunch guest of big name executives. What happens? First, the Google methods are what I would call “quasi XML”; that is, XML in but Googley once processed by the firm’s proprietary recipes. My view is that Google gets an advantage because its internal data management methods, disclosed to some extent in its open source technical documents, remains above the fray. Second, if XML goes the way of the dodo, then the outfit with the optimal transformation tools can act like one of those infomercial slicers and dicers—for a fee, of course. Finally, the publishers who have invested in XML face yet another expense. More costs will probably thin the herd. In a quest for more revenue, XML junkies may be forced to boost their prices which will further narrow their customer base. In short, if XML gets the bum’s rush, Google may get a boost and others get a dent in the pocketbook.
Stephen Arnold, September 29, 2009
SchemaLogic Pumps Up Financing
September 29, 2009
SchemaLogic, according to Northwest Innovation, has raised $1.0 in debt financing. SchemaLogic is a specialist in software and systems that allow an organization to keep its metadata in one repository. The idea is that any enterprise system in the organization can tap into the SchemaLogic repository and, therefore, metadata inconsistency is eliminated or greatly reduced. The firm’s backers, according to the article, include “Artis Capital, Goldman Sachs Group, and Madrona Venture Group.” Total funding is more than $13 million.
Stephen Arnold, September 29, 2009
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
