Cable and Enterprise Search: The Problem of “Peak”

March 22, 2015

I read “Peak Cable.” More people think about television than enterprise search in Harrod’s Creek, Kentucky. After reading this write up, I scanned the passages I highlighted in pale pink. Here’s a favorite:

Disruption theory suggests that once a product over-serves on meaningful bases of value creation (and underserves on value) it opens the door to disruption.

Lucene/Solr have become the go to search systems for many companies. IBM, for example, gussies up Lucene and hypes Watson. Next generation information access vendors use Lucene as a “good enough” keyword search system. And start ups find that open source search, data management, and analytics are suitable for their purposes. Spare money is used for slick interfaces and, truth be told, Uber rides.

Here’s another passage I found interesting:

The same phenomenon occurred with mobile vs. fixed telephony. For several years it seemed that mobile was sustaining to fixed or that fixed was immune due to lock-ins. The fixed telephone incumbents insisted that the data was inconclusive. Then the trickle of abandonment turned into a deluge. The quality of service for mobile kept increasing and, with data, it became clear that the mobile devices could unleash unfathomable functionality and value. And so it goes. A business dies first slowly then quickly. The exact timing is tricky because of the non-linearity of the phenomenon. It’s also hard to declare end-of-life since business zombies are very common. What is clear however is that the economics will change dramatically and the alliances between talent and distribution will shift to entrants and away from incumbents.

Has enterprise search passed its “peak”? If so, cable providers in the US might look at the enterprise search market for a glimpse of its future.

Stephen E Arnold, March 22, 2015

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