A Revolution in Management: Efficiency Redefined?
April 14, 2020
I read “How COVID-19 Made Old-School Management Irrelevant: No More Pointless Micro-Management.” I think a more suitable subtitle would have been “A Millennial’s Howl for Me-Ness.”
The essay is interesting for three reasons.
First, it predicts the future. Predictions are easy, but as “now” yields to the future, most are sort of correct. Management changes may be a tough discipline to change. Why? The notion of organizing tasks and orchestrating the completion of those tasks requires responsibility. That’s an old fashioned concept, but remote control may lack some of the intangibles that traditional management principles rely upon.
Second, the notion of irrelevance is a mostly a point of view issue. Who determines relevance? Perhaps shifting from externally imposed obligations or expectations to an individual determining if those obligations or expectations are “relevant.” Reliability, particularly among many colleagues, is a slippery topics. Without reliability, tasks may be difficult to complete. Relevant or irrelevant issue? The answer depends on whom one asks.
Third, the idea of micro management annoys some people. On the other hand, there are individuals who do their best work within structures and expectations about behavior. One can make generalizations about direct interaction in person. The number of exceptions can undermine what one wants to be true. In fact, the generalization may be an attempt to impose what an individuals wants and needs upon others. Arrogance, stupidity, or a certain blindness?
Now the write up. The article asserts:
The need for a manager who “checks on you” has suddenly evaporated.
Interesting but the emergence of new methods for monitoring seem to be a growth industry: Mobile phone surveillance, Slack, and even Zoom meetings are monitoring, control, and directive devices in some ways.
Here’s another interesting mental construct:
In this new world of “work-from-home”, creatives feel free from antagonisms of the old, and the creators of new. Getting people to perform competitively in environments where remote work relies on individual resourcefulness, the in-your-face old school management has died.
The phrase “in your face” reminds me of a bright sprout deeply offended by a grade school teacher’s statement, “Pay attention to the assignment.” The reaction of some people to being told to deliver is rebellion. That’s not a reason to discard some management methods. In fact, I term this type of anti-management behavior as high school science club management methods or HSSCMM. The idea is that a few smart people gather and know what’s better, faster, and cheaper. Does this sound like some of the Silicon bro ethos? It should because this world view has created some interesting challenges; namely, employees who don’t do what’s expected. Employees who protest, leak, strike, and submarine work so it has more flaws than normal.
The write up identifies what has changed since the global pandemic modified some established patterns; for example:
- Work from home will become more common
- We are in a cultural tsunami
- Social distancing is “demolishing age old officer hierarchies”.
These sound ominous or life affirming depending upon one’s point of view. The flows of digital information undermine hierarchies. I addressed this subject in my Eagleton Lecture (sponsored by ASIS and Bell Labs) in the late 1980s. As digital information zips around, the “old” patterns are weakened and some collapse; for example, knowing about a company’s legal problems once easily concealed until ubiquitous “publishing.” The cultural tsunami picked up steam in developed countries as newer technologies and tools became widely available. Change does not speed along when certain capabilities are classified and available to a comparatively small number of individuals. Diffusion of tools accelerates diffusion of behaviors. New ideas flourish in such an environment. The datasphere is a hot house. The work from home or WFH is definitely becoming more common, just not for everyone. It is difficult to create certain products from home. It is difficult to reach some decisions from home when a golf outing, lunch, and one to one sizing up is necessary.
I grant that change is taking place, some good, some bad. I agree that in some sectors, the 19th century approach to business will not be successful. I support the idea that a 9 to 5 workplace of the “organization man” will be the only or best way to build an organization.
However, if one takes even a cursory look at different cultures at different points in the past, interesting commonalities emerge. Examples range from a group’s appointing a leader to provide guidance seem widespread. Specialists perform certain tasks, often working alone or in concert to deliver an artifact that cannot be crafted alone in a different location.
Several observations:
- WFH or work from home is not right for everyone. Multiple methods are needed. Picking the most suitable method to achieve the goal is the job of management. I think a manager from a Roman engineering brigade would agree in part. A stone cutter working in a quarry is of zero value to team in trans Alpine Gaul.
- Management evolves. Take a flip through Peter Drucker’s management books. The ideas seem both in tune and out of step. Why? Individuals organizing resources to achieve a goal have to adapt to the cultural environment. A failure to adapt is the ultimate failure of an enterprise.
- Some people need the structure of an organization and a routine which may involve a commute, annoyances like a cube in a bigger space, and people making noise, suggestions, and waves.
Net net: Generalizations which are focused on a narrow slice of those who need to work are interesting but self centered, not objective, and wishful thinking. Parts of life will be like grade school. Suck it up. Deliver something of value.
Stephen E Arnold, April 14, 2020
DarkCyber for April 14, 2020, Now Available
April 14, 2020
This week’s DarkCyber program contains three news stories and one feature. The program is available via Vimeo and YouTube.
Geospark Analytics is the subject of a DarkCyber profile. The company has a new president, a new partner, and a public podcast. What makes these announcements interesting is that most firms engaged in geolocation analysis maintain a low profile. DarkCyber points out the downside of attracting too much attention. Geospark Analytics, a start up, is likely to become a disruptor in what is a little known sector of the law enforcement and intelligence markets. The technology is directly germane to recent announcements about tracking individuals of interest.
DarkCyber reports that bad actors are going to great lengths to make credit card theft easy. The story explains the principal features of a new point-and-click way to obtain names, credit card data, and the codes printed on each card. Also, this type of “skimming crime” is going to be further automated. After paying a fee, the developer of the skimming system will automate the theft for the customer. How much does the service cost? About $1000 but if a customer does not have the cash a revenue split is available.
A 2014 report produced by the US Department of Justice suggests that predictive analytics may not be as reliable as some experts assert The original document was not available to the public, but it was obtained via a Freedom of Information request by a watch dog group this year. The 2014 report reveals information about the somewhat dismal performance of predictive analytics systems. The outputs of these systems from well-known vendors were not helpful to enforcement and legal officials. The DarkCyber story includes a link to the full report as well as a link to a recent analysis of predictive analytics systems efficacy in identifying life outcomes for young people. The results of both studies appear to call into question the reliability of some predictive software.
DarkCyber’s program concludes with a reminder that virtual private networks may not be private. An online news service identified a number of comparatively high-profile VPNs that are not particularly secure. A link to the source document and the name of three suspect services are provided.
DarkCyber is a production of Stephen E Arnold. Programs are released twice a month and provide news, analysis, interviews, and commentary about the Dark Web, cyber crime, and lesser known Internet services.
Programs are available on Vimeo and YouTube. For the current program, you are welcome to navigate to www.arnoldit.com/wordpress.
Kenny Toth, April 14, 2020
Online Pricing: Analysis Misses the Door to the Bank
April 13, 2020
I spotted a discussion about online pricing written in 2018. The focus was Google. “Would Google Search Make More Money If They Charged 1 Cent per Search?” contains some interesting information. In fact, the write up underscores how those wearing blindfolds outside the online sector wake up in the dark only to discover they have been swallowed by a whale. (How did that work out for Jonah?)
The write up contains an analysis by Jasper who does “a little back of the napkin calculation.” The results are that Google could charge for each search and possibly generate more than it generates from online advertising.
Rop-ke, another participant in the discussion, points out:
But to tell you the truth, people would search a lot less if they were charged money per search.
In fact, Rop-ke pointed out that “Google will die.”
Alenda made clear that the free Craigslist killed newspapers. (Well, not quite, but Craigslist added to the hurt.)
The most recent comment about this article appeared on April 12, 2020. I quote:
They would until someone replaced them with a free service.
Several observations may be warranted:
- There are times when people will pay for online information. The most common is a “must have” situation. What would you pay for an online search for an antidote to save your child from death by poisoning? What would a person like Harvey Weinstein pay for an online LexisNexis search as part of his effort to avoid further prosecution in Los Angeles? The idea is that “must have” information will cause people to pay.
- Asking people to pay for online information splits the user base into two groups: Those who will pay to use the service and to have access if the service is needed. In general, only a small number of online information services can stay generate enough revenue to make the online service into a sustainable business.
- The modes of online access have shifted dramatically in the last 30 years. In 1980, one needed a separate device like a Texas Instruments Silent 700; today one can do a search talking to a smart television set. Most of those searching are not aware that their actions are an online search. The lack of awareness creates a clueless mass which can be converted to revenue.
How do online companies make money today? Let me highlight a few of the more popular approaches:
- Selling data either directly or indirectly. The user’s actions are the bits that matter. Even cash strapped enforcement agencies will pay for data when the investigation warrants.
- Online is a stepping stone to other businesses. Example? Online sales. The Amazon model is built upon search. Want a cloud service? Do a free search of the AWS documentation. The motivation is gratification like buying an eBook or shifting to the cloud so pesky information technology staff can be riffed.
- Online search facilitates a new type of revenue stream. If you want to make a fortune in digital currency, you need to find a digital wallet. Then you need to find a “how to.” For those providing that information, the payoff comes from getting their hands around money churn.
The problem with selling online information is that it is difficult to generate sustainable revenue, cover the infrastructure and other costs, and spin a profit. But when online provides options for other streams of revenue, the digital bits can be like gold dust.
Will Google charge for search? Maybe, but the company is charging to use its search infrastructure. The company offers a Microsoft Office killer for a fee. Google sells phones, mostly not so good, but like the Loon balloons, the company is trying. One can also rent the Google plumbing for cloud computing.
I am fond of pointing out that Google has one business model, a model it obtained in a moment of inspiration from Yahoo. Google was more clever than Yahoo’s management. Google has been more clever than many companies.
Will that cleverness come to an end when a better search engine comes along? Not likely. For now, online search seems easy to do and monetize. Every human construct winds down. But with Google’s seemingly free services rolling along, the firm has momentum. Its tie up with Apple suggests that no quick changes will occur.
What does persist? Some misunderstandings about the costs of offering online information in either free or for fee mode. I remarked decades ago that online is a fairly tricky business to make pay even for criminals selling contraband on the Dark Web.
Imagine how difficult it is for LexisNexis to pay for the technological debt it has strapped to its back. Most online companies are in the same slog. The New York Times talks about its rapidly growing online business. What the NYT doesn’t say is that the cost of its missteps in online which began when Jeff Pemberton’s in house online system was terminated with extreme prejudice. Yeah, I know the current crop of NYT managers will ask, “Technical debt. Who’s Jeff Pemberton?”
The cloud of unknowing about online continues to swell just like the ad revenues from search at Amazon, Facebook, and Google. These are not habits; they are addiction. There’s money in serving addicts: Perceived must havism.
Stephen E Arnold, April 13, 2020
Stephen E
Why Search Sucks: The MVP Approach Maybe?
April 13, 2020
I read what seems to be a modern management write up. The implicit idea is that when developing an app or other software, people get excited. The coder or the team thinks of the many nifty things the new gizmo can deliver. What happens? There are Windows 10 and Apple OSX updates that brick a user’s computer? There are services like Quibi which fall over on Day One because scaling didn’t happen. There are other examples ranging from Google’s wild and crazy Zoom killers to Zoom’s encryption which wasn’t and still may not be… encrypted.
“Why We Are Hardwired to Focus on the Wrong Parts of our Product” seeks to explain why flawed apps and software are the norm. Remember? That’s the big hump in the middle of standard distribution. The challenge today is producing software that sort of works; that is, good enough for today’s often clueless user.
The write up asserts:
Iterative product development achieves its speed through a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) approach. MVP means taking the possible feature set that could be included in a product, or the possible functionality a specific feature could deliver, and cutting it down to the minimum needed to bring value to the end-user.
The consequence of MVP: The bell curve of failure.
The MVP process primes us to want to regain the value we believe we’ve lost. As soon as the product is live, we fall into a weakness-based, additive strategy, where we are compelled to add new functionality in order to win back our lost value (real or imagined).
This weakness-based mindset gets further reinforced when we start analyzing data and feedback. Because loss aversion causes us to focus on losses more than gains, we are more likely to gloss over positive signals and areas of strength and focus instead on the areas of the product that “aren’t working.”
What’s the fix? Here you go:
Analyze what works
Move from addition to subtraction
Understand your strengths.
Sound too good to be true? Well, the approach may be good enough. I am waiting for a book called Thinking Wronger: A Basic Guide.
Stephen E Arnold, April 13, 2020
Enterprise Search: Not Exactly Crazy but Close
April 13, 2020
I think I started writing the first of three editions of the Enterprise Search Report in 2003. I had been through the Great Search Procurement competition for the US government’s search system. The original name for the service was FirstGov.gov (the idea was that the service was the “first” place to look for public facing government information. The second name was USA.gov, and it was different from FirstGov because the search results were pulled from an ad supported Web index.
The highlight of the competition was Google’s losing the contract to Fast Search & Transfer. (Note: The first index exposed to the public was the work of Inktomi, a company mostly lost in the purple mists of Yahoo and time.) Google was miffed because Fast Search & Transfer had teamed with AT&T and replied to the SOW with some of the old fervor that characterized the company before Judge Green changed the game. I recall one sticking point: Truncation. In fact, one of the Google founders argued with me about truncation at a search conference. I pointed out that Google had to do truncation whether the founders wanted to or not. My hunch is that you don’t know much about truncation and what it contributes. I won’t get into the weeds, but the function is important. Think stemming, inflections, etc.
I examined more than 60 “enterprise” search systems, including the chemical structure search systems, the not-so-useful search tools in engineering design systems like AutoCAD, and a number of search systems now long forgotten like Delphis and Entopia, among others.
I have also written “The New Landscape of Search” published by Pandia and “Successful Enterprise Search Management” with Martin White, who is still chugging along with his brand of search expertise. Of course, I follow search and retrieval even though I have narrowed my focus to what I call intelware and policeware. These are next-generation systems which address the numerous short coming of the oversold, over-hyped, and misunderstood software allowing a commercial enterprise to locate specific items of interest from their hotchpotch of content.
In this blog, Beyond Search/DarkCyber I write about some enterprise search systems. In general, I remain very critical of the technologies and the mostly unfounded assertions about what a search-and-retrieval system can deliver to an organization.
With this background, I reacted to “Enterprise Search Software Comparison” with sadness. I was not annoyed by the tone or desire to compare some solutions to enterprise content finding. My response was based on my realization about how far behind understanding of enterprise search’s upsides and downsides, the gap between next-generation information retrieval systems and the “brand” names, and the somewhat shallow understanding of the challenges enterprise search poses for licensees, vendors, and users.
The write up “compares” these systems as listed in the order each is discussed in the source article cited above:
- IBM Watson Discovery
- Salesforce Einstein Search
- Microsoft Search
- Google Cloud Search
- Amazon Kendra
- Lucidworks
- AlphaSense.
Each of these system merits a couple of paragraphs. For comparison, the discussion of systems in the Enterprise Search report typically required 15 or more pages. In CyberOSINT, I needed four pages for each system described. I had to cut the detail to meet the page limit for the book. A paragraph may be perfect for the thumb typing crowd, but detail does matter. The reason is that a misstep in selecting enterprise software can cost time and money and jobs. The people usually fired are those serving on the enterprise search system procurement team. Why? CFOs get very angry when triage to make a system work costs more than the original budget for the system. Users get angry when the system is slow (try 120 seconds to find a document in a content management system and then learn the document has not been indexed), stakeholders (the investment in search cannot be recovered without tricks, often illegal), and similar serious issues.
Let’s look at each of these systems described in the write up. I am going to move forward in alphabetical order. The listing in the source implies best to worst, and I want to avoid that. Also, at the end of this post, I will identify a few other systems which anyone seeking an enterprise search system may want to learn about. I post free profiles at www.xenky.com/vendor-profiles. The newer profiles cost money, and you can contact me at benkent2020 at yahoo dot com. No, I won’t give you a free copy. The free stuff is on my Xenky.com Web site.
AlphaSense. This is a venture backed company focused on making search the sharp end of a business intelligence initiative. The company is influenced by Eric Schmidt, the controversial Xoogler. The firm has raised about $100 million. The idea is to process disparate information and allow users to identify gems of information. AlphaSense competes with next-generation information services like DataWalk, Voyager Labs, and dozens of other forward looking firms. Will AlphaSense handle video, audio, time series data, and information stored on a remote workers’ laptop? Yeah. To sum up: Not an enterprise search solution; it is a variant of intelware. That’s no problem. AlphaSense is a me too of a different category of software.
Amazon Kendra. Amazon has a number of search solutions. This is Lucene. Yes, Lucene can deliver enterprise search; however, the system requires a commitment. Amazon’s approach is to put enterprise search into AWS. There’s nothing quite like the security of AWS in the hands of individuals who have not been “trained” in the ways of Amazon and Lucene.
Google Cloud Search. This is the spirit of the ill fated Google Search Appliance. The problems of GSA are ameliorated by putting content into the Google Cloud. What’s Google’s principal business? Yep, advertising. Those Googlers are trustworthy: Infidelity among senior managers raises this question, “Can we trust you to keep your body parts out of our private data?” You have to answer that question for yourself. (Sorry. Can’t say. Legal eagles monitor me still.)
IBM Watson Discovery. Okay, this is Lucene, home brew, and acquired technology like Vivisimo. Does it work? Why not ask Watson. IBM does have robust next-generation search, but that technology like IBM CyberTap is not available to the author of the article or to most commercial organizations. So IBM has training wheels search which requires oodles of IBM billable hours. Plus the company has next-generation information access. Which is it? Why not ask Watson? (If you used ITRC in the 1980s, you experienced my contribution to Big Blue. Plus I took money. None of that J5 stuff either.)
Salesforce Einstein Search. If a company puts its sales letter and contacts into this system, one can find the prospect and the email a salesperson sent that individual. Why do company’s want Salesforce search? When a salesperson quits, the company wants to make sure it has the leads, the sales story, etc. There are alternatives to Salesforce’s search system. Why? Maybe there are sufficient numbers of Salesforce customers who want to control what’s indexed and what employees can see? Just a thought.
Microsoft Search. I would like to write about Microsoft Search. (Yep, did a small thing for this outfit.) I would like to identify the acquisitions Microsoft completed to “improve” search. I would like to point out that Microsoft is changing Windows 10 search again. But that’s the story. One flavor of Microsoft Search is Fast Search & Transfer. It is so wonderful that a competitive solution is available from outfits like Surfray, EPI Server, and even Coveo (yep, the customer support and kitchen sink vendor). Why? Microsoft Search is very similar to the Google search: Young people fooling around in order to justify their salaries and sense of self worth. The result? I particularly like the racist chat bot and the fact that Microsoft bought Fast Search & Transfer as the criminal case for financial fraud was winding through Norway’s court system. Yep, criminal behavior. Why? Check out my previous write ups about Fast Search & Transfer.
Lucidworks. Okay, I did some small work for this outfit when it was called Lucid Imagination. Then the revolving door started to spin. The Lucene/Solr system collected many, many millions and started its journey to … wait for it… digital commerce and just about anything that could be slapped on open source software. Can one “do” enterprise search with Solr? Sure. Just make sure you have money and time. Lucidworks’ future is not exactly one that will thrill its funding sources. But there is hope for an acquisition or maybe an IPO. Is Lucidworks a way to get “faceted search” like Endeca offered in 1998? Sure, but why not license Endeca from Oracle? Endeca has some issues, of course, but I wanted to put a time mark in this essay so the “age” of Lucidworks’ newest ideas are anchored with a me-too peg.
What vendors are not mentioned who can implement enterprise search?
I will highlight three briefly, just to make clear the distortion of the enterprise market that this article presents to a thumb typing millennial procurement professional:
- Exalead spawned a number of interesting content companies. One of them is Algolia. It works and has some Exalead DNA.
- SearchIT is an outfit in Europe. It delivers what I consider a basic enterprise search system.
- Maxxcat produces a search appliance which is arguably a bit more modern than the Thunderstone appliance.
- Elastic Elasticsearch. This is the better Compass. How many outfits use Elasticsearch? Lots. There’s a free version and for-fee help when fans of Shay Bannon get stuck. Check out this how to.
There are others, of course, but my point is that mixing apples and oranges gives one a peculiar view of what is in the enterprise search orchard. It is better to categorize, compare and contrast systems that perform “enterprise search” functions. What are these? It took me 400 pages to explain what users expect, what systems can deliver, and the cost/engineering assumptions required to deliver a solution that is actually useful.
Search is hard. The next-generation systems point the way forward. Enterprise search has, in my opinion, not advanced very far beyond the original Smart system or IBM STAIRS III.
PS. Notice I did not use the jargon natural language processing, semantics, text analytics, and similar hoo haa. Why? Search has a different meaning for each worker in quite distinct business units. Do you expect a chemical engineer looking for Hexamethylene triperoxide diamine to use a word or a chemical structure? What about a marketing person seeking a video of a sales VP’s presentation at a client meeting yesterday? What about that intern’s Instagram post of a not-yet-released product prototype? What about the information on that sales VP’s laptop as he returns to his home office after a news story appeared about his or her talk? What about those human resource personnel data files? What about the eDiscovery material occupying the company’s legal team? What about the tweet a contractor sent to a big client about the cost of a fix to a factory robot that trashed a day’s production? What about the emails between an executive and a sex worker related to heroin? (A real need at a certain vendor of enterprise search!) Yeah! Enterprise search.
Stephen E Arnold, April 13, 2014
The Heritage of Jeff Bezos: An Assertion from an Outfit Called Really Grateful
April 13, 2020
DarkCyber knows zero about an outfit called From the Trenches. If you navigate to “Who Was Jeff Bezos before Amazon?”, you can view a somewhat peculiar approach to questioning an accomplished business professional. True, the video includes a statement which did not mesh smoothly with DarkCyber’s understanding; specifically, the narrator of the video says:
Darpa is the basis of the modern Internet.
Well, sort of.
But the most interesting allegedly true factoid in the video is:
Mr. Bezos’ “real father was a circus performer.”
Maybe that’s the key to success? Real news or fake? Amusing either way.
Stephen E Arnold, April 13, 2020
Palantir Technologies: Evidence That Making Big Money Comes from a Financial Play, Not a Product
April 12, 2020
DarkCyber spotted an interesting item of information in “Palantir Eyes $1B in Revenue and a Break-Even Year, Setting the Stage for IPO.” Palantir has ingested more than a billion dollars since it was founded in 2003. (That seems to be 17 years!) The article points out that Palantir “will have its first break even year in 2020.” The message is that it takes time and significant investment to generate $1 billion in revenue and break even.
With dozens and dozens of companies chasing the intelware and policeware markets, what’s the likelihood that a start up will be able to generate enough revenue to:
- Fund customer support
- Invest in new features and technologies
- Attract and retain staff
- Market to sectors that are expensive, time consuming, and difficult to reach?
The answer is that Palantir is an excellent example of how a useful idea can struggle to generate sustainable revenue among customers under severe budget pressure and aware that the “next big thing” can be obtained either on a trial basis or at a low price.
DarkCyber gives Palantir credit for its perseverance, although its methods of obtaining some traction can be considered more than interesting. In fact, in its dealings with the Analyst Notebook file format, interesting does not quite capture the somewhat unusual techniques the firm found appropriate.
When Palantir goes public, will those patient investors reap massive paydays? The investors hope so. The employees hope so. But the lawyers and accountants know they will be paid.
What about the users of the system? DarkCyber does not know. Perhaps the seeing stone will reveal the answer?
Stephen E Arnold, April 12, 2020
Google: Rolling Over?
April 11, 2020
DarkCyber spotted this headline: “BRIEF-Google France: Will Comply with Latest French FCA Regulatory Verdict.” Most publishers want to be paid for anything, including a link to the original story and for modern taxi meter functions like Web traffic.
Implications:
- This will be interesting for commercial database publishers. These outfits index OPC or other people’s content.
- Publishers in other countries will use their quarantine time to get the monetization show on the road as soon as possible.
- Non profit outfits like the IEEE will maybe stop charging members $10 for a three page summary article of OPC. (Nah, never happen, gentle reader.)
Exciting times ahead. Depending on the money available to sue, any outfit which points to a story could become the lucky recipient of an invoice.
And libraries? Yeah, what about libraries? My goodness what about high school students writing papers based on secondary research? Well, pay up. There is no free lunch for “real” information.
Google once again plays the role of the Great Disruptor. Good work because disruption creates opportunities.
Stephen E Arnold, April 11, 2020
A Rose by Any Other Name Is Google Meet or Google Chat or Google What?
April 11, 2020
Slashgear published “Google Meet Is Hangouts Meet’s New Name, Everything Else Is the Same.” I don’t use any of the Google “talk” services. I don’t want to talk, chat, receive text messages, or get phone calls. Why? If something is important, a person will send me a letter or maybe a FedEx. Anyone remember those?
But many folks younger than 76 are into chat et al. The write up states:
It is perhaps a running joke by now that Google just can’t settle on a single messaging app or service for long. It has gone through quite a number of them, enough to confuse even the most ardent of Google’s followers. That has happened yet again now that Hangouts Meet, G Suite’s video conferencing product, has officially been rebranded to Google Meet, perhaps with the ironic goal of making things less confusing.
This is no joke. The organizational approach at Google is based on high school science club management methods. This obvious guiding principle is overlooked by many, including the Google Board of Directors, most Googlers, most pundits, and, of course, those seeking Google’s mouse pads, LED pins, T shirts, and other assorted tangible evidence that proximity with the GOOG took place.
The write up states:
The Meet part of the Hangouts brand is being renamed to a more identifiable Google Meet. The logo, however, remains the same and Hangouts Chat remains untouched.
Yeah, okay.
If these services worked, why was it necessary for Google’s HSSCMM team to forbid Zoom on Google laptops?
Perhaps the answer is, “Zoom sort of worked.”
How does this relate to the name confusion, the multiple ways to exchange information, and the incredible confusion of numerous products and services which function like a 1960’s Bell labs TV phone?
Gentle reader, may I submit that Google does one thing well: Relax the precision of search results in order to burn through ad inventory. Google is not making much headway in its non ad businesses. Google is ads.
HSSCMM are now on display. Perhaps everyone can try to join a Hangout, do a chat, or send an email to Google customer service?
One last question, “Are there ads on the Loon balloons?”
Stephen E Arnold, April 11, 2020
The Spirit of HP Management Exists: Quibi Hears an Eko
April 10, 2020
Anyone remember HP’s greatest moments? Paying really, really close attention to some Board of Directors? Buying Autonomy without reading an expert group’s report? Stumbling into the abyss with Alta Vista? Possibly the influence of Meg Whitman and that HP management experience has now challenged the practioners of the high school science club management methods for excellence, judgment, and logical thinking?
I am thinking about HP because I read “Quibi’s Turnstyle Tech Battle Sees Eko Score Accelerated Hearing Date For Preliminary Injunction – Update.” If the write up is accurate, the HP way has found itself into the mechanics of Quibi. Quibi is apparently a short form video service. None of that sitting in one’s pajamas talking about Animal Crossing. These are allegedly pro-grade videos, better than the outputs of TV stars forced to manage their own lighting and audio.
The write up states:
In reality, Eko owns the technology and promptly asked Quibi to cease and desist,” an accompanying flourish filled memorandum of points (read it here) from Eko’s parent company says of the slow-burn confrontation between the parties over the past few months. “In response, Quibi sent an untruthful letter and then filed a declaratory judgment action,” according to the 30-page paperwork submitted to U.S. District Court in California.
I think this means that the HP way allegedly has appropriated a system and method from another firm. That other firm is going to try to obtain justice. Interesting, right. Justice.
The article states that Quibi is free for now. Will the footsteps of Eko’s lawyers echo in the minds of those embracing the sounds of a possible HP anthem “Oh, I’ve Got Hair Oil On My Ears And My Glasses Are Slipping Down, But Baby I Can See Through You.”
Stephen E Arnold, April 10, 2020
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