Quote to Note: Manage the Decline

July 23, 2012

I snipped a quotation from the Wall Street Journal, dead tree edition, this morning (July 23, 2012). On page B-6 the “Idol Auditions New Judges” write up included this gem:

American Idol is a juggernaut franchise that still has many season left but once a program starts to fall from its pear, you are working to minimize the decline, said Kris Magel, director of national broadcast at Initiative, a media buying firm…

I highlighted the phrase which I think is a keeper. I want to use this idea to characterize a number of search and content processing vendors’ actions in the closing months of 2012. With the shift to open source technologies beginning to gain momentum, many information retrieval companies, regardless of the spin in their marketing collateral, are likely to be working to maintain revenues. Growth may be tough. With funds in short supply for some firms, the white knight notion of an acquisition to get talented people (an acq-hire) may be galloping into the sunset. Trigger words for me now include predictive anything (analytics, tagging, coding, what have you), customer support or customer relationship management, and big data. Words do not equate with revenue in the tough months ahead.

Love that phrase, “minimize the decline.”

Stephen E Arnold, July 23, 2012

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.