Microsoft Azure Price Cuts? Maybe More Bad News for Search Vendors
September 26, 2014
The race for commodity pricing in cloud computing is underway. I read an article, which I assume is semi-accurate, called “Microsoft Azure Sees Big Price Reductions: Competition Is Good.” “Good” is a often a relative term.
For those looking for low cost cloud computing that delivers Azure functions, lower prices mean that Amazon- and Google-type prices may be too high.
For a vendor trying to pitch an information retrieval system to a Microsoft centric outfit, the falling prices may mean that Azure Search is not just good enough. It is a deal. The only systems that can be less expensive are those one downloads from an open source repository or one that a hard worker codes herself.
The write up states:
Microsoft has announced, in a blog post, that it will be slashing the cost of some of its Azure cloud services from October 1st….customers buying through Enterprise agreements will enjoy even lower prices. The rate card currently shows 63 services being reduced by up to about 40%.
For enterprise search vendors chasing SharePoint licensees with promises of better, faster, and cheaper—the move by Microsoft is likely to be of interest.
I anticipate that search vendors will scramble even harder than ever. Furthermore, I look forward to even more outrageous assertions about the value of content processing. As an example, check out this set of assertions about an open source based system that has been scrambling for purchase on the sales mountain for six or seven years.
Stephen E Arnold, September 26, 2014
Search Vendors Under Siege: The AI Aiyaiiii Revolution
September 26, 2014
Science is a marvelous manifestation of human curiosity. I read “Five Ways the Superintelligence Revolution Might Happen.” Note the “could” as in “woulda, coulda, shoulda.” These terms shingle protectively many backsides.
The write up lists the options for “superintelligence”, which is a variant of artificial intelligence with a dash up the Googler’s singularity stirred in for good measure. These scientists remember some of the basic methods of chemistry. List the constituents and mix ‘em up. See what happens.
Here are the five ways technological nirvana will arrive:
- Make intelligence out of software. Essential humans will code a brain. Great idea for a research project. Probably won’t work particularly well for a while.
- Just use math. This is the approach my uncle and his both would have favored. You remember Kolmogorov and Arnold, don’t you? Also, Googlers and Xooglers are into this approach.
- Brute force. This is the technological equivalent of using surplus military equipment to check out a noisy fraternity party. In terms of smart software, the article is into using von Neumann systems to crack P=NP problems. Yep, that’s a good idea.
- Plagiarizing nature. This idea is that one emulates in software biological processes. Think how ants find a ham sandwich at your picnic. I was on the board of a company that puttered around organic algorithms in 2001. For some problems attacked via well managed methods, the results are interesting. Maybe IBM’s new chip or quantum computing will help out, but it is a subset of the math and brute force approach. Messy categorization I conclude.
- Use humans plus any other methods that seems to work. There you go. This is the state of the art. I have discussed the approach in my analysis of Google’s nowcasting model here. Only hitch? Well, it is not right when it counts: Ebola threat, ISIS/ISIL, horse racing.
Net net: Not much in the breakthrough arena. Looks like we’re into incremental improvements. This method will work, but it won’t arrive quickly enough to keep some of the venture firms funding the wild and crazy AI Aiyaiii world.
The outfits that will be directly affected by this AI craziness are the search and content processing vendors. Many of the companies in this sector will assert that their systems are “intelligent,” “able to comprehend human utterance,” and “predict” user needs. The problem is that delivering on inflated expecations is more difficult than doing a PowerPoint about the magic of information access.
Stephen E Arnold, September 26, 2014
Quote to Note: From the SEO World about Google and News Corp.
September 26, 2014
I tucked this paragraph in my keepers’ file:
Yes, there’s plenty Google does that raises concerns. The growth in showing direct answers taken from other sites, the inability for people to understand if they were hit by an automatic penalty, the failure to update some of its automatic filtering systems in a timely manner are some of these. And Google deserves criticism over them. But News Corp has a long history of lashing out at Google in ways that exaggerate some concerns way beyond reality. For a media giant that could take a real leadership role, its latest more-of-the-same letter is a disappointment.
The source is “Dear News Corp & Google: An Open Letter On Their Open Letters To Each Other Over Competition.” I find this fascinating for three reasons:
First, I chuckled with the notion that search engine optimization helps explain the actions of two hyper capitalist operations. (SEO is one business focused squarely on manipulating precision and recall when one runs a search. Hey, this is the brave new world of search. The customer’s information need is secondary to sizzle and ad revenue.)
Second, the squabbling of actual / would be monopolists is a reprise of the Vanderbilt – Gould dust ups. Does anyone remember what happened? The fellows teamed up. Could this happen again?
Third, both companies take a dim view of nation states’ strictures unless it is to their advantage. The approach is, it seems, situational. However, when a government can disadvantage another operation, the law is truth and beauty.
Stephen E Arnold, September 26, 2014
AI, Aiyaiiii: The Howling Gets Louder
September 26, 2014
I found another artificial intelligence write up in my in box this morning. (Believe me, it was more useful than the whining from Lucid Works’ PR firm Launchsquad).
The AI article is “Inside Baidu’s Plan to Beat Google by Taking Search Out of the Text Era.” I love it when folks younger than I are ever so excited about the “end of text.”
The write up focuses on a former Xoogler, Andrew Ng. Obviously like the departures of Babak Parviz (aka Amirparviz, Parvis, and Amir Parviz) and the wonderfully named Sebastian Thrun (no akas in my files, alas), Xoogler Ng is moving on to greener pastures. Well, at least less interpersonally conflicted acreage I assume. No suicide attempts and six month stays in the Stanford Hospital, please.)
The write up focuses on smart software. Now in case you have been living in a country without Internet access, “AI” means artificial intelligence. Smart software used to be the optimal way to eliminate some of the drudgery associated with many tasks. For better or worse, we are back in an era when software is wrapping itself in “artificial intelligence.” When I was in college, I identified several individuals with artificial intelligence. In our bubblicious era, AI means software that thinks, understands, decides, and—wait for it—can figure out what pictures mean. Well, sort of.
Xoogler Ng has joined Baidu, one of Google’s competitors. I assume this does not thrill Messrs. Brin and Page, who want to think about Loon Balloons and Amazon getting into the Parviz-Amir-Parvis business.
Xoogler Ng was working on the Google Brain. Think smart software to generate ad revenue. Xoogler Ng says:
“With the Google Brain project we made the decision to build deep learning processes on top of Google’s existing infrastructure,” he says. “What we’re doing at Baidu is seizing the opportunity to build the next generation of deep learning infrastructure. This time we’re building everything from the ground up using a 2014-base GPU infrastructure.”
Yep, this is a nice way to explain that Google’s ageing architecture is not likely to change soon. This is a tough factoid to swallow because Google is just so darned wonderful. Sort of.
Xoogler Ng also says what few self appointed experts wish to state; to wit:
“Deep learning is a very capital-intensive area, and it’s rare to find a company with both the necessary resources and a company structure where things can get done without having to pass through too many channels and committee meetings. That’s essential for an immature technology like this.”
Yep, immature. It took printing 300 years to shake off its baby crib behaviors. I am not sure if smart software will move too much more rapidly.
Xoogler Ng observes:
Most of these users [folks who rely on mobile devices] haven’t organically learned how to use text-based search as it’s evolved from Ask Jeeves to DuckDuckGo over the past several years. That presents an opportunity to re-think basic assumptions about search, and it extends beyond developing markets. “Text input is certainly useful, but images and speech are a much more natural way for humans to express their queries,” Ng says. “Infants learn to see and speak well before they learn to type. The same is true of human evolution–we’ve had spoken language for a long time, compared to written language, which is a relatively recent development.”
Oh, oh. Another bad news factoid for Google. Text-based ads generate more than 90 percent of the firm’s revenues.
Xoogler Ng adds:
In many cases, text-based search is not ideal for finding information. For instance, if you’re out shopping and spot a handbag you might like, it is far better to take a picture than to try and describe it in words. The same is often true if you see a flower or animal species that you would like to identify.
Given the limitations of von Neumann computing, what can Baidu do? Well, it appears that monitoring of user behavior and image recognition will be one of the first smart things Baidu will explore. After images, then it will be speech. My thought is that speech recognition may be more doable than image recognition, but I am dumb wetware equipped, not smart software equipped.
Xoogler Ng seems to be reasonably confident in deep representation learning. One hopes that his bosses at Baidu are patient.
Stephen E Arnold, September 26, 2014
Google-News Corp. Marvelous, He Said, She Said
September 26, 2014
I don’t have a dog in this hunt. I think both Google and News Corp. are wonderful. Weaknesses, none. Both companies just have strengths. Google has its Washington, DC lobbying effort and News Corp. has Fox News. Google has its ups and downs with the privacy issue (except at Stanford University). News Corp. has that alleged telephone tapping matter. Google has legions of users in Europe. News Corp. has fingers clutching newspapers, eyeballs watching television, and some Web users.
One big difference. Google is a 15 year old adolescent. News Corp. is an aged information company.
The two, like a May December romance gone sour will face nothing but irreconcilable differences. Need an example? Check out this blog post from the Google charmingly labeled “Dear Rupert.” See, Google does have a sense of humor.
I don’t have the energy to walk through the arguments and counter arguments. I do want to highlight one point and comment about it. News Corp. leaves a door open with its comment: “Google’s “power” makes it hard for people to “access information independently and meaningfully.” Google is “willing to exploit [its] dominant market position to stifle competition.”
The Google response is wonderful. I believe that Commodore Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, John D. Rockefeller (oops sorry. He’s apoplectic about his descendants’ dumping holdings in fossil fuels), and JP Morgan (you remember: the fellow whose portrait makes it appear he is holding a knife as he starts to push himself from a chair) could not have collectively inked a better response:
With the Internet, people enjoy greater choice than ever before — and because the competition is just one click away online, barriers to switching are very, very low.
Well, I sort of enjoy the one click notion, but the reality for online users is that once a habit is formed, users have a tough time breaking it. Google is a habit with a market share only a drug lord can seek: 95% of users in Denmark, 66% of users in the US, 95 percent of users in France (gasp, France, home of Exalead, the former Quaero brain trust centroid, and numerous search vendors), etc. For more data see http://bit.ly/1nwgGrw.
Add to the monopoly position Google search controls, competition is few and far between. Bing.com is just not able to gain significant market share from the GOOG. The hot ticket search engines according to search “experts” are Ixquick.com and DuckDuckGo.com. Er, there are metasearch engines and need access to other vendors’ indexes. As metasearch vendors, as search vendors doing primary indexing bite the dust, these outfits face some tough choices if they want to stay in business. The little known Exalead search, which is almost unknown, offers a tiny fraction of the GOOG’s coverage. And Yandex? Well, Mr. Putin may make it difficult for that outfit to remain in business without picking up and heading to a new campground.
One click? Nope. As users shift to mobile devices, the information access mode shifts to applications or apps. Maybe News Corp. can tackle Google in this new space. I am not sure, however, if those who know how to do intercepts focus much on cutting Google off at the knees with an appealing online ad platform.
You can work through the rest of the arguments. Remember, you are one click away from finding a new search engine.
Stephen E Arnold, September 26, 2014
Watson Solves Recipes Moves On To Cancer Research
September 26, 2014
People say that a diverse set of skills is beneficial for career success, but it seems that humans cannot compete with Watson as he segways from being a professional chef to taking his hand a the medical field. According to EWeek, “IBM, Mayo Clinic Tap Watson To Boost Cancer Trial Research.” The Mayo Clinic will use Watson’s cognitive computing system to match cancer patients with clinical trials appropriate to their individual needs. After the trial in cancer is complete, Watson will then move onto to her illnesses and assign patients proper clinical trials for that as well.
IBM says that assigning patients to clinical trials is one the hardest parts of the clinical research. The task used to be done manually, but the Mayo Clinic has over 8,000 trials going on at once and it can be overwhelming to guarantee positive results. Watson’s computing algorithms will sift through patient data and assign appropriate trials with better accuracy and consistency.
“ “In an area like cancer, where time is of the essence, the speed and accuracy that Watson offers will allow us to develop an individualized treatment plan more efficiently so we can deliver exactly the care that the patient needs,’ said Dr. Steven Alberts, chair of medical oncology at Mayo Clinic, in a statement. Researchers hope the increased speed will also speed new discoveries.”
This version of Watson was specifically designed for the Mayo Clinic. The hope is that Watson’s abilities will enroll more patients in clinical trials, which surprisingly many go unfilled or incomplete. Mayo Clinic only has a 5 percent enrollment rate, while nationally the clinical trial enrollment rate is 3 percent.
Go Watson go! Don’t take away jobs, but enhance them to make life easier, better, and longer for people.
Whitney Grace, September 26, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Spy Tools for Investors
September 26, 2014
Never let it be said that financiers don’t leverage all the useful technology they can find. The Silicon Valley Business Journal reports that “Addepar’s Palantir Veterans Use Spy Tools to Map Investment Risk.” Hmm, I wonder whether the company will want to work the phrase “spy tools” into its advertising. Writer Jason McCormick, citing a New York Times article, summarizes:
“Addepar’s software, which launched five years ago, maps investors’ holdings to determine risk and portfolio sustainability. The company, whose leadership did turns at Palantir Technologies, last year raised significant capital to bring its big-data platform to market.
The company was founded by Palantir veteran Jason Mirra and Joe Lonsdale, who was a co-founder at Palantir. Addepar’s current CEO, Eric Poirier, also worked at Palantir.
The Times reported that Addepar’s users include family offices, banks and wealth managers, such as Iconiq Capital, which oversees a part of Mark Zuckerberg’s portfolio.”
McCormick goes on to point out that Addepar’s services can run from $50,000 to “well over” $1 million, depending on the amount of data involved. These companies must be pretty convinced of Addepar’s abilities.
Much is (rightly) made of Addepar’s roots in Palantir, an outfit we’ve been following with interest (though I’d like to add to the description above the fact that CEO Poirier also spent time at the financial powerhouse Lehman Brothers.) I think it interesting, though, that the team pulled in a former Oracle executive, who happens to have experience leading a private equity firm’s software investing team, to be COO: Karen White. So far, that seems to have been a wise choice.
Cynthia Murrell, September 26, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
AI, Yai AI: Memory Prediction Framework
September 25, 2014
Believe me, I am not looking for artificial intelligence information. For some reason the information finds me. I suppose smart software with a dunce cap is perpetrating this flood of content marketing objects.
I did read “The Gigaom Interview: Jeff Hawkins on Why His Approach to AI Will Become the Approach to AI.” The headline, I finally figured out, means that Jeff Hawkins has the answer to smart software problems.
In the interview, Mr. Hawkins, who “invented the Palm Pilot,” according to Wikipedia, is running Numenta. He’s a Cornell University graduate. After getting out of the handheld business, he founded a research institute and is now working to commercialize his algorithmic frameworks.
The interview is fascinating because it encapsulates the conceptual disputes within smart software and makes evident how expectations can be pumped up for the benefits of smart software. The challenge, in my view, is to move from figuring out how to make smart software to delivering applications that are smarter than those used to deliver smart bombs and Google ads. There may be some other noble applications of smart software, and that possibility is making artificial intelligence almost as trendy as Big Data.
In the interview, Mr. Hawkins states:
We’re very confident that by the end of the 2020s, we’re going to be settled on a dominant paradigm. It’s going to be quite different than the one we’re currently in today, where specific algorithms that excel at one task dominate. We believe it’s going to be based instead on the universal algorithms that work on many problems. They’re going to be memory-based, not mathematically based. They’re going to be based primarily on time-based patterns, and they’re going to be online learning paradigms.
For me this means that Google’s mathy approach is off track and Mr. Hawkins’ Hierarchical Temporal Memory, Fixed-sparsity Distributed Representations and Cortical Learning Algorithm are the solutions. Like Johnny Cash’s sideman said when asked why he kept using the same chords over and over: “Other are huntin’. I done found it.”
Mr. Hawkins revealed one component of his approach:
Now, to do vision correctly, you need to do sensory motor inference. We understand that and we’re in the process of building it out now. That’s been a major research effort for us, starting in January. We think we can get to a vision system that is cortical like. It will work the same way the brain does. I have faith that it will be better than other approaches, but I can’t prove that yet. I do have a path to get there. We’re currently working on that, but I can’t sit here today and say how our vision system performs compared to Google’s system or something like that.
Along with former Xoogler Ng (who now works at Baidu), Mr. Hawkins suggests that the Googlers may not be on the same information highway as Numenta.
Mr. Hawkins is firm in his conclusion that his approach is correct. He does a bit of Socratic analysis:
A year from now would we change something? I don’t know. Possibly. But I haven’t felt this good about Numenta for a long time. One, from the science point of view, the technology point of view, we’re making great progress. We’ve made big progress just the beginning of this year on the sensory motor stuff. We’ve proven the other technology works well. We’ve also had independent validation that the technology is valuable. We have people who have said, “Yup, this is really cool. We want to buy this. It’s worth a lot to us.”
I did not one factoid in the write up. Here it is:
Our approach is to stay small as long as possible because that gives us flexibility. That gives us the ability to change this. As soon as you start becoming big, then you’ve chosen a path. Then you become obsolete in a few years.
Quite true. As Johnny Cash sang:
That old highway’s calling me and free I gotta be
But I don’t know where I’m bound
Mr. Cash seems to have anticipated the direction of artificial intelligence.
Stephen E Arnold, September 25, 2014
MarkLogic Bets New Offices Equal Revenues
September 25, 2014
MarkLogic, founded more than a decade ago, is an interesting company. I heard that Google kicked its tires because Christopher Lindblad is a true wizard.
The outfit offers an Extensible Markup Language data management solution. Over the years, the company has positioned the system to slice and dice content for publishers, intelligence analysis for government entities, and enterprise search. Along the way, the company’s technology has been shaped to meet the needs of the pivoting forces in content processing. Stated another way, when one thing won’t sell at a pace to keep investors happy, try another way. In the course of its journey, the company brushed against Oracle and then found itself snarled in the confusion between JSON and XML and the sort of open proprietary extensions to the query language used to extract results from the XML store only to get buffeted by the hoo hah about Hadoop and assorted open source alternatives to Codd databases. Wow.
I read a content marketing / public relations story called “MarkLogic Expands Global Reach with New Offices in Chicago.” Check the source quickly because some BusinessWire content can disappear or become available to those who fork over dough to the “news” service. The write up asserted:
“The opening of these new offices is well-timed for the growing number of global customers who need the enterprise grade NoSQL solutions we are delivering to US-based customers,” said David Ponzini, senior vice president of corporate development, MarkLogic. “We are in an advantageous position to make an immediate impact in Europe and Southeast Asia. We continue broadening the market awareness for MarkLogic throughout the world.”
The trick, of course, will be to blast through the financial goals for the company set by the investors years ago. A failure to produce more than $60 million in revenues a several years ago led to the departure of one president. A couple of more senior executives have spun through the revolving door not too far from Google Island with its quirky dinosaur skeleton. Does that skeleton stand as a metaphor to proprietary software solutions?
In my view, the business thinking at work is more sales offices equals more sales. I once had an office in Manhattan even though I worked in Illinois. The cost was about $20 per month. I had an address on Park Avenue, south unfortunately and a 212 phone number. I made a sale or two to an organization run by John Suhler, but I quickly figured out that the key to making sales was my being in and around midtown.
I thought I read that outfits like IBM are going to a “no office” approach. Maybe MarkLogic has identified a solution to the overhead associated with full time equivalents and physical space? That begs another question, “What does MarkLogic know that IBM does not know?”
Some vendors have found that more sales offices increase costs without generating sufficient revenue to cover the overhead, miscellaneous costs and in country marketing expenses. I can name several Paris, France based content processing companies who learned first hand that additional offices are a very, very expensive proposition. Other companies leverage partners for revenues. In one of my industry reports, I pointed out that prior to the sale of Autonomy to HP, Autonomy figured out a hybrid sales model that seemed to work as long as Dr. Lynch was cracking the whip. Remove the management, the partnering model can go off the rails.
Don’t get me wrong. XML is a wonderful solution to certain types of information challenges. Thomson Reuters can produce hundreds of for fee publications using XQuery and XSLT with proprietary extensions. A quick look at Thomson Reuters financial results suggest that more may be needed by this company than a foundation and an XML data store.
How quickly will MarkLogic deliver a five or ten X return on the $70 million investors have pumped in. In today’s market, cranking out $300 to $700 million in revenues from content processing technology that competes with open source alternatives is a tall order.
Maybe more sales offices will do it? My hunch is that more closed deals is the evidence some stakeholders seek.
Stephen E Arnold, September 25, 2014
Useful Knowledge Visualization
September 25, 2014
I find visualization endlessly entertaining. I read “A Visual Data Mining Framework for Convenient Identification of Useful Knowledge.” The authors of the paper are Kaidi Zhao and Bing Liu (University of Illinois, Chicago) and Thomas M. Tirpak and Weimin Xiao (Motorola Labs). The paper illustrates the effort going in to making sense of available data. What struck me was the illustration on page 6 of the PDF.
I hope that progress is rapid with their approach. Useful knowledge is helpful particularly when the visualization method is crystal clear. When I look closely at a magnified view of page 6’s diagram, I can spot “values.” In Column C, Row 6, there are three unexplained values.
Stephen E Arnold, September 25, 2014
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