How Does Google Android Strategy Illuminate IBM and Its Open Source Plays
April 5, 2011
I read an interesting article with the title “Why Open Code Is Irrelevant to Android’s Success.” The author included a disclaimer. I usually ignore these, but in this instance I noted this statement: “Follow me on Twitter at Savio Rodrigues. I should state: “The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies, or opinions.”
The write up explained that open Android does not have to be open to be a hit. That got me thinking, not about Google but IBM. The main point of the article seemed to me to be:
Google is attempting to “take any layer that lives between themselves and the consumer and make it free (or even less than free).” This is incredibly important to handset vendors and carriers who have an incentive to use and promote Android over alternatives. The fact that Google shares mobile search revenue with its handset partners makes Android not just free, but a profit center, which is hard for a vendor to ignore regardless of the openness of the platform itself. As mobile handset alliance members, these vendors have access to Android source code well ahead of third-party developers. As such, the openness of Android is a distant secondary issue, if at all. These vendors are concerned, however, with developers building applications for the platform and end-user adoption. Application developers may care about Android’s openness, but establishing and maintaining a large user base and the ease with which the platform enables developers to deliver applications, and pay for directly or indirectly, are much larger concerns. Android’s ever growing vendor support and Google’s investments to close the feature/function gap to Apple iOS are the key to developer success on the platform, making openness an afterthought.
Let’s set aside Google and consider this argument in the context of IBM’s open source activities. If the argument in the InfoWorld article is spot on, then IBM or other companies playing an open source card are using open source to further their proprietary products. Assume that these companies embraced open source as a hedge. If open source were a viable option for users or organizations, the company embracing open source would be in the midst of the battle. Situational decisions would allow the open source newcomer to adapt. However, open source now has some history behind it and the write up makes clear that this history points to proprietary software. If Google remains proprietary, won’t IBM remain proprietary?
What happens to open source when these big companies cash in their open source hand? Will open source be marginalized or thrive? If Google wins with a closed Android (once positioned as open), open source software may be at risk.
Stephen E Arnold, April 3, 2011
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Quote to Note: One Googler about the Top Googler
April 4, 2011
Quote to note: I don’t have much to add to this wonderful quote, allegedly by Dave Girouard, Google’s big dog in the enterprise sector. I will have one, tiny, possibly irrelevant question though. Like a bunny navigate to “Google’s Page Presages Bolder Era; Some Uneasy.” Time is of the essence because giant media – medical investigation companies can remove content quicker than I can say hip hop. Here’s the quote:
“I always say to my team, you can never outflank Larry,” Dave Girouard, head of Google’s enterprise business, told Reuters shortly after the announcement of the CEO change. “As much as you think you’re going to go in and blow him away with something cool, he’s going to say: ‘Well, why are you just doing it for three-quarters of the world?'”
Great insight and okay PR.
Now the question, “Is the other 25 percent the China market Google has blown off?”
Stephen E Arnold, April 4, 2011
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Big Data, Big Hassles
April 4, 2011
InfoWorld warns, “Big Data runs afoul of big lawyers.” They emphasize that increasingly popular “Big Data” can be inexpensive- until the attorneys get involved.
Big Data has come to refer to large datasets and the tools used to analyze them, a combination which can yield important information if used correctly. It can also be inexpensive.
However, you might want to bring in your council before going too far. The article tells the story of Pete Warden, who:
“. . .Described how he spent just $100 to scrape 500 million Web pages, including 220 million Facebook public profiles, using his own Web crawler and a 100-machine cluster running on Amazon EC2. He was able to analyze the information to match Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook accounts with the email accounts of users of his email tool.
“Then, just for fun, he created interactive maps showing how various countries, U.S. states, and cities connect with each other over social media and what types of fan pages they frequent.”
Neat, huh? Facebook didn’t think so. Their legal department cost him over 30 times the money he spent on the adventure.
So, venture forth, but be careful as you explore this new arena.
Cynthia Murrell, April 4, 2011
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Hands Off My Honeycomb, Mr. Open Source!
April 4, 2011
If you were looking forward to developing nifty Android tablet apps, you’ll have to wait. ZDNet reports in “Google Android 3.0 ‘Honeycomb’: Open source no more.”
Does this foreshadow the future of open source?
Our view: “Winning is Google’s way. Open source is a convenience and may not take precedence over money, control, and other key business drivers.”
Google seems to want it both ways. The fact that Android is open source is a big selling point, but they’re making an exception for Honeycomb, the Android platform designed for tablets:
“Version 3.0 of Android, which many have called a fork of the mobile OS (and now it looks like they were right), is now closed source, with access only going to OEMs and specific developers. While Google claims that they don’t want people experimenting with the OS on smartphones for which it wasn’t designed, one has to wonder if there aren’t other motivations for the move.”
Software is either open source or closed source. It doesn’t seem like there’s much of a gray area in that.
Google’s stated aim is to avoid bad user experiences, but maybe that’s unnecessary when a simple disclaimer would do? Really, we would take a few imperfect apps over this restriction. Software is open source or it is not. Both ways works at Dairy Queen, not in our software pond.
Cynthia Murrell, April 4, 2011
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Why SEO Is in a Bind?
April 4, 2011
In New York City, I gave a breezy 15 minute lecture about “content with intent.” The main point was that traditional search engine optimization methods are now under attack. On one hand, the Web indexing systems have had to admit that SEO distorts results lists. Examples range from links to auto generated placeholder pages such as the one at www.usseek.com or links to sites not related to the user’s query.
Google has made significant changes to its method of relevance ranking. You can read about the infamous Panda update to the PageRank algorithm in these articles:
- Google Panda Update: Say Goodbye to Low Quality Link Building
- Google’s Panda Update Changed The Playing Field
- Google Panda Update Survival Guide.
Blekko.com’s approach has been more direct. The company introduced filtering of sites. For more information about the Blekko method, read “Blekko Banning Some Content Farm Sites.”
The larger problem can be seen by running a free comparison on www.compete.com. Enter the urls for Bing, Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Yahoo in the search box on this page. If the traffic from Facebook and Twitter are combined, the traffic winners will not be a traditional Web search engine in the future. Keep in mind that Compete.com’s data may be different from the data your Web analytics system uses.
SEO experts and service providers may find themselves hemmed in by changes such as Google’s Panda algorithm tweak.
The real problem for traditional search engine optimization service providers comes from a combination of factors, not a single factor. This means that Google’s Panda update has disrupted some Web sites’ traffic, there are a number of other forces altering the shape of SEO. These include:
- A social system which allows a user to recommend a good source of information is performing a spontaneous and in most cases no cost editorial function or a curation activity. A human has filtered sources of information and is flagging a particular source with a value judgment. The individual judgment may be flawed but over time, the social method will provide a useful pool of information sources. Delicious.com was an early example of how this type of system worked.
- The demographics of users is changing. As younger people enter the datasphere, these individuals are likely to embrace different types of information retrieval methods. Traditional Web search is similar to running a query on a library’s online public access catalog. The new demographic uses mobile devices and often has a different view of the utility of a search box.
- The SEO methods have interacted with outfits that generate content tailored to what users look for. When Lady Gaga is hot, content farms produce information about Lady Gaga. Over the last five years, producing content that tracks what people are searching for has altered search results. The content may be fine, but the search engines’ relevance ranking methods often skew the results making a user spend more time digging through a results list.
- Google, as well as other online search systems, is essentially addicted to online advertising revenue. Despite the robust growth on online advertising, Google has to find a way to generate the revenue it needs to support its brute force Web indexing and search system AND keep its stakeholders happy. With search results getting less relevant, advertisers may think twice about betting on Google’s PageRank and Oingo-based Adwords system.
Protected: SharePoint Cloud Intiative
April 4, 2011
Google and Microsoft Food Fight
April 4, 2011
Tensions between Google and Microsoft are rising. The Microsoft assertions that Google is exploiting its search dominance notwithstanding, a more serious battle is on the barbie.
A recent posting on eWeek.com titled “Google Recipe View Offers Search Tool for Foodies” provides an interesting opportunity to compare and contrast two recent additions to the arsenals of the increasingly feuding behemoths. While it seems Microsoft may have thrown the first volley last year, Google’s Recipe View has been impressing the spectators. Beyond Search is no stranger to the topic, as you can read here.
The eWeek posting offers a summary of the facets of Recipe View:
…users choose the right recipe from search results by not only offering ratings and pictures, but providing filters for ingredients, cooking time and calorie count for health-conscious chefs.
You can open the search dramatically by using even broader language, specifying dates or names of individuals.
What of the Microsoft answer to a growing demand from users everywhere? Recipe Search, introduced on Bing in January 2010, failed to light any burners. There seems to be little in the way of methods with which to streamline your query. This was an issue raised in the eWeek posting:
However, it’s important to note the instantiation is different. Do the same … search on Bing and while you’ll see recipe suggestions on the left, there are no ways to slice and dice results the way Google does by ingredients, cooking time and calorie count.
Perhaps the insatiable demand for recipes is due to the recession; more people looking to stretch a dollar are staying home and cooking for themselves? Obviously the attraction to a precise engine which can return highly specialized results is difficult to argue. If that is in fact true, then Google seems well stocked to win this battle of the bulges.
But I am still left wondering if this recipe face-off is just for the sake of competition. Google vs. Bing is becoming a recurring theme these days, no reason to keep it out of the kitchen. After perusing both sites, not to mention the multitude of other tools available to search for recipes, this looks to me to be just another chapter of recycling an idea over and over and over. Kind of like shrimp and grits.
Sarah Rogers, April 4, 2011
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Android Microsoft: Strange Mobile Extremes
April 3, 2011
The birds are singing. The sap is running. And the pundits are feeling their digital oats. Navigate to “Android Is Destroying Everyone, Especially RIM — iPhone Dead In Water.” What’s remarkable about this write up is that it, in a way, is as wild and crazy as the mid tier consulting firms’ prognostications that Microsoft’s Windows phone will dominate the mobile market. For a representative look at this assertion, point your browser at “ABI Research: Android will have 45% of the Smartphone market share by 2016.” I find the extremes fascinating not because the predictions are probably incorrect but for the motives that trigger such statements.
Here’s a snippet from the dead in water write up:
The Android gains matter because technology platform markets tend to standardize around a single dominant platform (see Windows in PCs, Facebook in social, Google in search). And the more dominant the platform becomes, the more valuable it becomes and the harder it becomes to dislodge. The network effect kicks in, and developers building products designed to work with the platform devote more and more of their energy to the platform. The reward for building and working with other platforms, meanwhile, drops, and gradually developers stop developing for them.
The thought that galloped through my mind was that Google is about search. Android is a vector for search. The only hitch in the git along is Google management. In a perfect world, Google’s management would deftly steer Android forward, avoiding the telco reefs and regulatory riptides, ducking below deck to avoid the hail of Android’s fragmenting platform, and cashing in on the applications marketplace.
Google versus Microsoft fighting in the open. What happens if there is a sniper with a clear shot at the combatants? Source: http://www.defensive-solutions.com/hand_to_hand.asp
For Microsoft and Nokia, the challenge is similar. There is the management “thing”, the software update “thing”, and the execution “thing.”
With Android a winner in one pundit’s view and Microsoft the victor in another consultant’s view, what could go wrong? Good question and one that is ignored for purposes of generating clicks and reputation enhancement via online methods.
My short list of challenges for both Google and Microsoft includes:
- Proving that both companies can succeed without coming apart at the seams. What do I mean? Neither Google nor Microsoft has its management ducks in a row. Both companies are quite similar and appear to have difficulty focusing resources and making money outside their quite different money making workhorses: ads for Google and desktop applications for Microsoft. The stress of creating another winner that generates substantial revenue is likely to break fragile management methods at both companies. Internecine warfare may be underway at both firms. The management shift at Google and the calls for the ouster of Mr. Ballmer are not to be ignored.
- Apple and RIM may be marginalized, but I am not sure that these companies are down for the count. Apple seems to be chugging along. RIM, despite its stand up comic reputation, has some enterprise adherents. A third party, not on the pundits’ radar, could swoop in and cut a deal or enter into some other agreement. In the aftermath of a third party move, Google and Microsoft might face a competitor for which neither firm has prepared. What type of firm might make such a play? Candidates range from investment banks, foreign owned entities, or even a player which now seems to be on the periphery of the mobile phone business. Surprise can be a disruptor.
SEO Experts Under the Microscope
April 3, 2011
Search engine optimization is an interesting service business. People with Web sites usually get low traffic. The notion of “build it and they will come” works in Hollywood. Not so much in the real world I assert. In order to get traffic, individuals poke around documentation and experiment to find ways to make a lousy site get traffic. With Google in the dominant position in Web search, SEO means spoofing the Google.
The tricks are clumsy; for example, describing a site with index terms unrelated to the focus of the site. Even big outfits find ways to outfox Google. I once used a German auto manufacturer’s tricks in my talks. Sigh. Bush league tricks. Yep, SEO.
So what? I just read “Is SEO Going to be Costlier in Coming Years?” There was a large amount of information in the write up. I wanted to pull out one quote that struck me as particularly interesting:
SEO as an industry is going to earn a distinguished place in IT service domain. It will earn much recognition and respect.
Oh, yeah. After more than a decade of excellence, respect is just around the corner.
Stephen E Arnold, April 3, 2011
No April fool either.
Big Brother Operates Via Wireless Companies
April 3, 2011
Digital Trends proclaims “Wireless companies ‘track your every move.’ “ I knew it!
The New York Times reports that cell phone companies keep track of customers’ global coordinates. They know where you, or at least your phone, were when. The secret was revealed during a German lawsuit against Deutsche Telekom, who owns T-Mobile USA. And it isn’t just them. And what other information are they caching?
“In the United States, even less is known about what level of surveillance wireless companies are conducting on their customers because these companies are not required to divulge what information they collect. According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, however, that information is extensive, and is only getting more so.”
Furthermore, unlike tracking by Web site cookie, it’s very hard to opt out of cell phone surveillance.
I can’t say I’m surprised by these revelations. Are you?
Cynthia Murrell, April 3, 2011
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