Google+: How Does One Measure Success?
July 10, 2011
I keep trying to avoid the Google+ “thing.” I focus on a different slice of the online world, but my newsreader and Overflight system overfloweth with baloney about a service that is in trial, less than two weeks old, and pretty much a knock off of Facebook. This “me too” stuff is becoming the focus on innovation, and I am not too interested in learning how to use a wheel or light a fire, thank you.
How does one measure success? Tweets, revenue, number of products and services offered customers? Source: http://goo.gl/9yBS9
I did notice two items this morning. The first was a report about the number of short messages mentioning Google+. Yep, let’s get on the Tweeter thing. I find the data illustrative of the spike nature of information. Where’s that Fukushima thing? Long gone for today news consumers, but the aftermath of the event is good for a couple thousand years.
The second item was my favorite techno-management guru, Eric Schimdt. The view that caught my eye appeared in “Eric Schmidt on Gauging Google+’s Success.” There is a great deal of information in the write up and the embedded video. Here’s the passage that caught my attention:
When asked by reporters whether Google planned eventually to fill out Google+ with other products, Schmidt answered, “Yeah, and there’s a lot coming,” saying that business accounts and ads are expected, assuming Google+ continues to grow. ”We test stuff and when it works we put a lot more emphasis on it,” he said.
Okay, “a lot” and “test stuff”. Let’s reflect.
Google is juggling a large number of balls, just like IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle. What’s interesting to me is that the company’s principal—dare I say, “only”—revenue stream is advertising. The purpose of Google+, Android, and the other major initiatives is generating advertising revenue.
I urge Google to move forward and generate ad revenue from these services. The reason is that once again I talked with a number of companies and heard one message, “We need traffic. Something’s changed at Google, and we don’t know what to do.”
My response was, “Adapt.”
Google has shifted its attention from the brute force AltaVista.com approach to information to a new, compound model. The focus of that model is not delivering better results. The focus is producing revenue. And the company needs the new sources. With Web traffic shifting from desktop access to mobile access, Google has to find a way to sustain revenue and then grow significant new streams. Generating new revenue streams is not easy. The case example? Google itself. After 11 or 12 years in business, Google has a giant footprint but it is now good at one thing: selling ads.
I think there are companies with better products in search. Example: Yandex.com. I think there are companies with better social network services: Facebook.com. I think there are companies with better mobile devices: Apple. I think there are companies with better online shopping: Amazon.com. In short, unlike the early days, Google has competition in packaging, technology, and innovation.
So, the buzz about Google+ tells me three things:
- Google excites significant interest, particularly among a certain sector of the online community. That indeed is a marketing advantage. Marketing now has to turn into revenue. Where’s that $100 billion a year company now? About $70 billion to go.
- Google faces significant competition across a wide range of business facets. I suppose Alexander the Great could handle a multi front war, but he died at an early age, and his empire fizzled. I won’t press the metaphor, however.
- The legal opponents Google faces are likely to see the sprawl of Google as an indication of the company’s ambitions. At a time when issues of monopoly and certain business practices is increasing, Google demonstrates that it can pretty much do what it wants, dismissing questions with remarks like “a lot” and “test stuff”.
The upcoming hearings in Washington, DC, will be interesting. I wonder if there will be a Google+ service for those involved? I hope so. That might be a way to measure success just not in terms of revenue.
Stephen E Arnold, July 10, 2011
You can read more about enterprise search and retrieval in The New Landscape of Enterprise Search, published by Pandia in Oslo, Norway, in June 2011.
Why Patents Are the Tech Homecoming King and Queen
July 9, 2011
Patents are king because they are content. Patents are queen because they have value. Put the two together and you have a high stakes game between Oracle and Google. I just read “Oracle Win Would Strain Android Growth.” I agree.
Android is an interesting business because it is decidedly non-Googley. Following in the path worn by Treo and Apple is not too tough conceptually. I knew how to get from my home to my grade school without much mental effort. So we have a me-too play.
The article adds some spice to my view with this passage:
If Oracle wins the lawsuit that it brought against the software giant, the consequences for Google and the entire Android market could be dire, analysts say. Oracle likely won’t settle for a lump payment but instead will want a cut of each phone sold. That added cost changes the economics for handset makers such that many will take a second look at their commitments to the Android platform. While manufacturers are unlikely to abandon Android for a couple dollars per handset, they might begin to find other platforms, like Windows Phone, more attractive and begin to reduce the number of Android phones they make in favor of other platforms.
So a free mobile OS adds some costs. Let’s assume that the Oracle Google legal hassle fizzles out and neither side gets what it wants. Then what?
First, Oracle is not likely to give up. So Google is going to be looking at more slogging through the courts as Oracle grinds through every patent in its portfolio to find the garlic ball that drives away the Mountain View vampire.
Second, Microsoft is going to keep finding ways to slap fees on anyone using an Android device. This way of making money has to be more satisfying that punching out Zune MP3 players and Microsoft home wireless hardware that doesn’t work very well.
Third, Google is going to have to find a way to cope with the margins that Apple is managing to squeeze from its gizmos. Apple may not sell many units, but it sure does get a lot of dough from what it does sell.
Fourth, with open source Android in the clammy R&D facilities in far off places, I think there will be some “partners” who go Android without involving the Google. Whatever fragmentation exists in the Google “an Android in every pocket” approach will look like a sheet of Inconel 235 compared to off the reservation Android devices.
So what’s the deal with patents? The battle for the next MS DOS and Windows type franchise is going to be fought over intellectual property. Bottom line: If you want to double date to the mobile prom, go with the king and queen: Patents.
Here’s the dilemma that Google must resolve:
However, Oracle may not be alone in asking OEMs to pay to use technology in Android. Microsoft, which also says it has technology used in Android, has announced licensing deals for technology in Android devices with HTC and a few other smaller names. It is also reportedly asking Samsung for $15 per handset for Android phones. While Microsoft could find a healthy revenue stream from Android, it most likely would instead prefer success of its own Windows Phone platform, which offers more potential for revenue from services. That means Microsoft doesn’t have the incentive Oracle does to keep the Android licensing fee affordable for OEMs.
The Android OS is free from Google which needs the “advertising tax.” But companies like Oracle and Microsoft will work to get dough from each Android gizmo sold, which may make the free Android OS too expensive for some. With a free and semi open source OS floating around, variants may emerge, producing a fragmented mess for customers. How will Google manage this situation? Maybe controlled chaos will be the only Googley attribute of a business sector that is definitely not algorithmic in nature?
Stephen E Arnold, July 9, 2011
I had hoped to get this write up sponsored by the world’s leader in agile and scalable patent research, ArticleOnePartners.com. I find the firm’s service quite useful for patent research.
VMS Bulks Up via LexisNexis and Attensity Tie Ups
July 9, 2011
Content monitoring company, VMS www.vmsinfo.com, recently added some bulk behind their industry muscle. As reported by Sys-Con Media “VMS Adds Premium Content Offerings from LexisNexis.”
This is a huge coup for the integrated media intelligence company. LexisNexis provides VMS clients with more than 23,000 publications and data sources. The article reported:
[t]he addition of LexisNexis content to VMS’s media monitoring and analytics offerings provides VMS clients with more robust and comprehensive print data options through VMS’s InSight http://www.vmsinfo.com/PR-Solutions/VMS-InSight-3-1.page portal, Executive News Briefings and other monitoring solutions.
And if that wasn’t enough, last October VMS also teamed up with Attensity, a data mining company that monitors 75 million blogs, as well as social media outlets, forums, message boards and micro-blogs. This collaboration has certainly fortified the VMS online monitoring presence.
VMS seem to be the media monitoring equivalent of the average man who gets serious, hits the gym seven days-a-week and becomes a Greek Adonis. By teaming up with LexisNexis (and their massive amounts of published sources) and Attensity (with its remarkable amounts of online data), they have bulked up Rocky Balboa-style.
Both LexisNexis and Attensity are enterprise centric outfits. With the LexisNexis and Attensity tie up, one can say that VMS has done its client-base a service. However, for companies like LexisNexis to license its third party content to what is a service-on-content company, one wonders why LexisNexis did not move into this business sector itself. Attensity has repositioned itself as a “voice of the customer” operation, so the push into content and analytics provision via VMS raises the same question, “Why not go it alone, Attensity?”
Jennifer Wensink July 1, 2011
You can read more about enterprise search and retrieval in The New Landscape of Enterprise Search, published by Pandia in Oslo, Norway, in June 2011.
Twitter Ad Pricing
July 9, 2011
Google and Twitter fell out of contract love. I don’t pay much attention to either company because I am poking around Yandex.com. A threat looms say I. Ads are the name of the game in the US. I was surprised at how much Twitter ads cost.
The cost of advertising on Twitter seems to be skyrocketing faster than a bottle rocket on the Fourth of July. As reported by CNET news, the “Daily Cost of a ‘Promoted Trend’ on Twitter: $120,000”, little “tweets” translate to big bucks.
According to Twitter director of revenue, Adam Bain, the price tag on their “promoted trends” is about five times as much as it was just over a year ago which priced at about $25,000-$30,000 per day. With this growth, services have been added and advertisers expectations have increased. We learned:
Twitter also offers promoted account and promoted tweets, but those are sold through an auction system, and – in the past at least – use a pay-per-click or pay-per-follow system. Recently, Bain says, Twitter has started asking for advertisers to spend a minimum of $15,000 over a three-month period.
It seems that Twitter advertising is no longer for the little guy. Their advertising core is now made up of HBO and Samsung. Twitter is certainly making an insane amount of money, as is their top-tiered advertisers, but no middle-of-the-road business could afford to go to such costly lengths. It sure is interesting since this whole social media phenomenon started with little more than a tweet and a prayer. Can the Twitter outfit survive a break up with Google? High ad rates are okay as long as their are buyers.
Jennifer Wensink, July 9, 2011
You can read more about enterprise search and retrieval in The New Landscape of Enterprise Search, published by Pandia in Oslo, Norway, in June 2011.
Google Voice Search is Here
July 8, 2011
First reading fell to audio and video. Now typing may give way to talking a search query. In the roar about Google +1, we can’t overlook Google voice search. As Kelly Clay at LockerGnome’s News and Views declares, “Google’s Voice Search Opens the Door to New Possibilities.” Naturally, the ability to search without typing is the main draw. We learned:
“Google’s Voice Search is a fun new way for Google Chrome users to search for just about anything using voice commands. . . . The Google Voice Search feature works by simply clicking the microphone next to the text input box on Google.com (which only appears in Chrome at the moment) and speaking your search.”
A long-awaited tool, and useful– as long as one is in a setting where talking is okay.
Clay seems most excited, though, about the developers who are running with this advance in new directions. For example, BreakfastNewYork has built The Verbalizer, an open source dev board that allows one to introduce a physical component to the voice searches. It looks like lots of fun—see the video embedded in the article or at the Verbalizer page. I don’t yet see much in the way of practical application with such experiments, but maybe someone will prove me wrong.
Cynthia Murrell July 8, 2011
You can read more about enterprise search and retrieval in The New Landscape of Enterprise Search, published by Pandia in Oslo, Norway, in June 2011.
Lucene/Solr Progress Reported
July 8, 2011
We have been immersed in commercial search and content processing for several months. We were delighted to learn from H Open that “Apache Lucene/Solr 3.3 Released.” This comes on the heels of the 3.2 release just a month ago. We’re semi- excited; the list of enhancements is solid, but we still have found some grousing about complexity, performance, and faceting.
On a related note, we were concerned as we read InfoWorld’s “No Need to Worry as Open Source Contributions Decline.” Apparently, open source has been discovered by organizations who want the developers but don’t want the community. We also have a hypothesis that the recent spike in patent related matters among very large companies signals the beginning of intellectual property wars. Open source may find itself marginalized as organizations rush to patent or acquire patents in the event of a major dispute.
Writer Savio Rodrigues insists that the reduction in open source benefactors is no cause for alarm:
“Over time, user contribution declines, but the project is sustained by the funds made available through corporate purchasers of the product. In a sense, as projects mature, user contribution of time is inversely proportional to customer contribution of money.”
Our take? The contribution of money won’t help projects such as Lucene/Solr if the small cadre of experts who work on quite specific open source projects go to work for a commercial company. Open source may become more of a marketing angle than a way to escape from the clutches of vendors who market proprietary software.
Stephen E Arnold, July 8, 2011
You can read more about enterprise search and retrieval in The New Landscape of Enterprise Search, published by Pandia in Oslo, Norway, in June 2011.
Baidu-Bing Partnership in China
July 8, 2011
Here’s one consequence of Google‘s China policy: Microsoft now has a China policy. EWeek.com’s Nathan Eddy announces discussed this interesting consequence of Google’s decision to step away from China in his article “Microsoft, Baidu Partner on Search in China.” There is an equally interesting discussion in the Inquirer’s article “Baidu Picks Bing to Power its English Search in China.”
Baidu is the leading Chinese search provider, and historically acquiesces with government censorship demands. As searches for English terms increase in China, Baidu needs some help keeping up. That’s where Microsoft’s Bing comes in. Lawrence Latif at the Inquirer comments:
The deal means that all English-language queries entered into Baidu will automatically be served up by Bing, though they will be displayed on Baidu’s web site. Given that Google has all but given up on the Chinese search engine market following last year’s very public spat with local authorities over censorship, the deal gives Microsoft a good chance to build its presence in what will soon become the world’s largest economy.
Google retains 20 percent of the market for search in China, but only about 30 percent of the burgeoning Chinese population has found its way onto the Web so far. Bing may be poised to capture the majority of the population as they come online. At least, their English searches.
Looks like Google’s principled stance will cost them in China. Who cares? It is just one country. With 1.5 billion people. We also want to point out that the Chinese government has smiled upon Jike.com, which may become a more significant player in the Chinese market. Also, Jike indexes Beyond Search quickly.
Cynthia Murrell July 8, 2011
You can read more about enterprise search and retrieval in The New Landscape of Enterprise Search, published by Pandia in Oslo, Norway, in June 2011.
Hadoop, Search, and Business
July 8, 2011
We have had a theory that the NoSQL data management systems were poised to make search a component of their systems. There was the repositioning of MarkLogic’s XML server as a search engine. But MarkLogic is not an open source centric company in my opinion.
However, we noted an interesting perspective on the Open Source data analytics tool Hadoop. eWeek.com’s article “Linux, Open Source & Ubuntu: Hadoop Data Analytics: 10 Reasons Why It’s Important for Business” was thought provoking.
Created by Apache Chairman Doug Cutting, Hadoop has since resided at Yahoo! Now, it plans move to the startup Hortonworks, which is funded by Yahoo! and Benchmark Capital. Writer Chris Preimesberger remarks,
Apache Hadoop is an open-source software framework built in Java that works with distributed data-intensive applications. It enables applications to scale securely in order to handle thousands of nodes and petabytes of data. More and more businesses are finding out that they need to analyze their stored data to help them make better business decisions. A number of Hadoop distributions are now available.
He presents his ten reasons in slideshow format. They include such persuasive points as “Hadoop Is No Longer a Science Experiment,” “Hadoop Was a Key Part of IBM’s Watson,” and “Hadoop Knows It Still Needs to Improve.” Do see the article for the complete list.
We agree, but we think that there is a larger movement taking place. The companies which are cloud centric, based on open source technologies like Hadoop, and providing access to structured and unstructured data may pose a challenge to traditional enterprise search and business intelligence vendors relying on relational data management systems.
The mini trend is an interest in reducing costs and complexity. The cloud may not be an ideal solution, but when data management, findability, and reduced headcount become available, we think quite a few organizations will shift their approach to search.
Oracle and other data management outfits may need to consider these reasons and take action. Open source search vendors may find themselves squeezed by open source vendors once considered partners or benign organizations. Now we think the landscape is shifting.
Cynthia Murrell July 8, 2011
You can read more about enterprise search and retrieval in The New Landscape of Enterprise Search, published by Pandia in Oslo, Norway, in June 2011.
Protected: Huge Boost in SharePoint Market Predicted
July 8, 2011
Yellow Pages Trying to Find a Future
July 7, 2011
Search Engine Watch reports, “Search Secures Recognition as Local Business Info Provider.” The article examines information from studies performed by research companies Burke and eMarketer. Each has compiled data on usage for a variety of local-business-information resources. The Yellow Pages performs well when its paper and online ventures are combined, but separately each was roundly beaten by search engines.
Not surprisingly, add revenues for printed Yellow Pages are expected to dwindle into nothingness:
In the long haul, predicted figures decline to the point of near eclipse. By 2015, the predicted ad investment for print directories is just $5 billion. Meanwhile, search investments continue to rise, with the predicted figures for search ad spending increasing by more than 50 percent to $21.5 billion by 2015.
This must inevitably lead to the extinction of printed phone books. Good news if you’re a tree.
Still, how will the Yellow Pages fare in the long run? Depends on how nimble they are with their business model. The print sector is going to be under increasing cost pressure when print and ink are involved.
Cynthia Murrell, July 7, 2011
The addled goose is the author of The New Landscape of Enterprise Search
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