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Computerworld: Google’s Not Hot

The Computerworld story surprised me. Preston Gralla, a really big name in tech journalism, wrote an opinion piece called “Why Google Has Lost Its Mojo — And Why You Should Care”. You can read the full text of this important essay here. The most important point in Mr. Gralla’s write up is the title. It says it clear: Google has no spice, zing, magic, and voodoo. In Gulla, Google’s medicine men have lost “it”.

Consider this statement:

So why do I think it’s lost its mojo? Let’s start with the way it treats its employees. Google’s largesse has been legendary — free food, liberal maternity and parental leave, on-site massages, fitness classes and even oil changes. But according to a recent New York Times article, those days may be gone.

Once employees sense a downshift, human resources professionals have to scramble.

I posted an innocuous story about the Amtrak passenger service selecting Autonomy. The outfit fighting for this project was Google. Google lost this high profile account. Google has other challenges as well, including legal hassles. Some big and some small. But these take time to address. Google’s technology is showing some flaws. Ads still works, but other functions are buggy. Google has started an investment branch; its foundation is pushing “green” technology. Former employees are not surfing on Google. Some like Cuil.com are competing. The fact that those Xooglers rolled out a tasty confection before it was complete does little to polish the reputation of Google and its Xooglers. For me, the fact that Computerworld is souring on Google is news. Amazing turn of events for Googzilla.

Stephen Arnold, August 26, 2008

nGenera Bakes in Autonomy Search

Just when Microsoft makes search “free”, along comes Autonomy and proves that licensing deals are alive and well. According to CRM Buyer, nGenera inked an original equipment manufacturing deal with Autonomy. What’s interesting is that it’s not “search”. The deal is for Web 2.0 technology for search. The application is not finding. The application is knowledge management. I have to be up front and admit that I don’t know what knowledge is. Absent that understanding, I’m baffled at how to manage what I don’t grasp. Nevertheless, the deal is done.

Let’s sort out who is who in this deal. Talisma, according to CRM Buyer, “OEM’ed the Autonomy search engine.” An Autonomy reseller told me that Autonomy’s search engine no longer needs training, and it now shares many features with “appliance like” search systems from Google and Thunderstone, among others. You can get more information about Talisma here. The Talisma catchphrase is “Software that enables an exceptional online customer experience.”

nGenera bought Talisma in May 2008. nGenera’s Steve Papermaster is reported as having said at the time of the deal:

The future of innovation is customer co-creation: talking directly to customers, listening to them, learning from them. We’re taking content and processes from customer interaction software and mashing that with Web 2.0 collaboration tools to help companies discover brilliant new product ideas inspired by their own customers. Source: Paul Greenberg.

nGenera now has its own customer support product line to complement its other management consulting type software offerings. nGenera is a cloud computing - Web 2.0 services firm. The company has a remarkable “manifesto” here that sets forth its vision for organizational operations. One idea in the manifest is that organizations must move from knowledge management” to what the company calls “content collaboration and collective intelligence”. Since I don’t know what “knowledge management” means, I am in the dark about information operations that reach beyond.  The manifesto also advocates moving from “traditional information technology” to “a next generation enterprise platform.”  Again my experience is not much help to me in figuring out what nGenera’s services will deliver. The company has its fingers in many different pies. Each pie is stuffed with Web 2.0 goodness and goodies like “leveraging institutional memory,” “mass collaboration”, “business analytics”, and “transformational change”. These notions are too sophisticated for this addled goose.

The Talisma Knowledgebase which may now incorporate Autonomy technology.

The purchase of Talisma adds what nGenera describes here as:

The leading Customer Interaction Management (CIM) software solution provider enabling organizations globally to deliver an exceptional online customer experience while dramatically increasing their efficiency and effectiveness.  Talisma’s customers include Aetna, AOL, Canon, Citibank, Comcast, Dell, Ford, University of Notre Dame, Microsoft, Pitney Bowes, Siemens, Sony, and Sprint.  Talisma is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington, and has offices located across Asia-Pacific, Europe, and North America.

To sum up, nGenera bought Talisma in May 2008. Talisma inked a deal for Autonomy’s search and content processing technology. Autonomy, therefore, “snaps in” to the broader range of nGenera’s Web 2.0 services. Autonomy joins Atlassian Confluence as a technology provider to nGenera.  I must admit these names leave my head spinning.

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Punching Google in the Snoot

The San Jose Mercury News, Google’s home town newspaper, points out lousy decisions at the Mountain View firm. Chris O’Brien wrote “Google’s Ventures Outside Search Fail to Pay Dividends”. The sub title is even more direct, “Google to face first real test of its leadership as ventures outside search fail to show dividends.” You must read Mr. O’Brien’s story here.

For me, the most interesting point in the write up was this statement:

all those high-profile ventures the company has launched, and the acquisitions it’s made, have yet to contribute much to the bottom line. In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company noted that revenue from services such as YouTube, Google Checkout and a host of others ‘were not material.’

Material is a code word for worthless. Even more galling is that this story puts some wood behind a remark I recall hearing about Google from a Microsoft professional: “Google’s a one trick pony.”

That trick continues to spin money, but Google is now officially fallible, a charge that must be galling to the Googlers.

My research suggests that Google’s short term flops cannot be interpreted as the longer term trajectory of the company. Here are three points from my 2007 Google Version 2.0 study for Infonortics, an outfit located near Oxford, England:

1. Google focused on search, built a good system by leveraging indifference from competitors and the good fortune of having AltaVista.com engineers available due to Hewlett Packard’s cluelessness about online
2. Google discovered that by solving some problems in search, the resulting infrastructure could do other functions quite well. The first big other function was a running a rework of the GoTo.com/Overture.com ad engine
3. Google’s infrastructure is an application platform which can be repurposed without too much effort if you are a Google class brain.

The net net is that Google only has to get traction in one or two tangential business sectors to generate new revenue. My research indicates that a “blast off” will generate a fraction of the core business revenue, but if the area is mobile services or enterprise applications, these markets are sufficiently big to make the revenue contribution sufficient for Wall Street’s greed appetite.

I agree with Mr. O’Brien’s analysis in general. But I’m not sure I want to count Google out just yet. Google is one tiny step from becoming a commercial publisher and a video production company. The company has mow through other business sectors quickly and only put effort into those where money begins to flow. That’s what makes Google a threat in the short term and for the longer term as well.

Stephen Arnold, August 25, 2008

Today’s Wild Business Idea: Dump Your Traditional Data Center

Dion Hinchcliffe’s “Are We Ready to Declare the “Time of Death” for the Enterprise Data Center” here. Mr. Hinchcliffe uses the Amazon Elastic Block Store service as  hook for this question that stopped me in my tracks. I just submitted my KMWorld column on this subject, and I wanted to see if my analysis matched the ZDNet take on cloud computing. The question is, “Can you trust cloud computing with your enterprise data?” Mr. Hinchcliffe includes a nifty illustration which I am reluctant to reproduce. The diagram shows the difference between the traditional data center and the cloud services. It also provides some bullet points to help you recognize the difference between a server sitting in your server room or at your service provider and a service that is not sitting in one of those locations. I usually tell by the heat and noise, however.

The most interesting section in this write up includes the statement:

But it’s fairly clear that the classical multi-hundred thousand square foot proprietary data center is a dinosaur of another age, like mainframes are for most organizations today.

You will have to work hard to find a better statement of the received wisdom on this point.

My column takes a different line of attack. Like the addled goose I am, I pick out what I consider the weak links in the argument and probe that point. I can’t reproduce the column; otherwise, my publisher will not mail me the really big check that I get for my golden prose. I can identify the a simple check list to help you decide if cloud computing is for you.

First, if you have little to lose, cloud computing makes sense. If the pictures or other ephemera disappear , it’s a heart ache, but you have lost memories, not your money, your freedom, or your business one hopes.

Second, if you are operating on a leash with one end around your throat and the other in the hands of a venture capital firm, law enforcement, or  a client with a penchant for crushing worms who fumble a project, you will use cloud computing under carefully controlled circumstances.

Third, you want to experiment and don’t place much value on the test set, go for it.

Fourth, it’s a school project, a research exercise, or a competitive analysis, cloud computing is ideal.

Fifth, you don’t know about security, reliability, service level agreements, etc., sign up now. You may not get bitten, and you will learn a great deal.

My knock against cloud computing is focused on risk. If the risk is acceptable, cloud computing may be the greatest thing since sliced bread. If you are risk averse, you will want to engineer a solution so there can be some fuzzy cloudiness involved, but there’s a great deal of other engineering to match the dream with the risk inherent in a cloudy environment. Everybody may be doing it, but some situations are not for “everybody”.

Stephen Arnold, August 24, 2008

Amazon’s Storage Rain Forest: Google Lost in a Jungle

Amazon is behaving more like a hungry group of jungle foragers than a company selling books online. In the last couple of years, Amazon has evolved with some zigs and zags into a store front with a services business. Most surprising to me is that Amazon doesn’t spend Google- or Microsoft-sized billions on its infrastructure if the company’s financials have been interpreted correctly by me. Last year, I recall figuring out that Amazon squeezed by on hundreds of millions for plumbing, research and development, and engineering. Amazon’s spending was interesting to me because Google and Microsoft reported spending billions on these essential activities. My original hunch was that Amazon had some magic blend of herbs and spices that gave its Amazonians super powers. I even explored clever techniques for getting more mileage from every technical potion that Jeff Bezos (arguably the smartest man in the world by some Amazonians’ accounts) and Dr. Werner Vogels (the second smartest man in the world by some of those same cheerleaders) assembled. I found tantalizing hints that graduate students from Europe were engineering on Amazon’s behalf, then sent back to the flatlands of the Netherlands to work outside the spotlights directed at Amazon. One person suggested that Microsoft and Amazon are “collaborating” but a question to me from a well placed Microsoft executive suggested that Microsoft is as curious about Amazon as some Wall Street mavens are.

The Amazon Lightning Stike

Once again, Amazon has sent electrical strikes through cloud computing. The company has introduced what amounts to a low cost Storage Area Network running on Amazon’s servers. An SAN makes it easy to set up a storage space and then forget it. In a sense, a user of this new service gets unlimited storage without the headaches of alternative methods.

A number of technical writers are enthusiastic about this new service. I want you to enjoy the fan raves yourself. Here are several of my favorite write ups that deliver PR manna for the Amazon tech gurus, Messrs. Bezos and Vogels:

• Amazon’s own write up, stuffed full of juicy quotes about fault tolerance, engineering wizardry, and business pragmatics Amazon style.
• Rightscale’s explanation, including useful diagram here. I suggest you snag the images and add them to your cloud storage clipbook. The pricing information is extremely useful too. The “availability zone” is a bit murky to me, but you may find it right for what ails your cloud needs.
• GigaOM’s business analysis here. The key idea is that traditional data centers should be worried. Very worried. This well crafted article could have been crafted by a New York consultant carrying a Harvard MBA and a ThinkPad. As a former consultant, this is unusual in the world of “free” Web logs.

I have a different take on this announcement. Keep in mind that I am offering my opinion based on my research. If you want to read a slightly different take on Amazon’s jungle warfare prowess, stop reading. Proceed at your own risk.

My Take

In my forthcoming KMWorld column, I argue that cloud computing is useful in certain situations, but it is not yet appropriate for most enterprise applications. building a start up on an Amazon service is okay with me. A larger outfit can experiment with any Amazon service, and I will say, “No problem.” Ask me to put a mission-critical, regulated company’s applications and data on these services, and I will say, “Not me, sorry.” The problems are too frequent; the risks insufficiently documented for me. You may have a different view of walking barefoot through the foliage on the banks of the Amazon River. I’ve been there, and I am not going for a stroll no matter how innocuous and inviting the Amazon rain forest looks. My tutor in 1958 did this, and he ended up dead in a week. Reports of the death said, “No apparent cause.” That’s the Amazon rain forest in my view–risks you can’t see.

I have three other concerns as well. Let me mention them and ask you to read my KMWorld column when it appears in a few weeks:

1. Stability. Anyone using MobileMe?
2. Uptime. Anyone recall the Amazon Xbox ordering glitch or the mysterious all day outage this summer?
3. Similarity. Anyone wonder why other vendors with arguably more infrastructure and more technical resources than Amazon have not offered this type of storage service?

For me, a company like Google should be in this business. Google is not. Is it because Google lacks the resources? Is it because Google doesn’t believe in the cloud computing revolution? Is it because Google doesn’t know how to offer this type of simple storage?

The answer to each of these questions is, “No.” Google itself makes use of these functions for its own services now, and it has for a number of years, based on my analysis of the company’s technical papers and patent documents.

Why?

This begs the question, “Why?”

My thought is that Amazon, like Microsoft, is in a hurry to out-Google Google. The path selected by Amazon seems to be to look at what Google is doing for its services and then offering a similar service to the developer world *before* Google takes action. Amazon stays “ahead” of Google. Amazon makes the GOOG look like a sluggish, overly conservative company facing increasing friction when it comes to innovation.

My hunch is that Microsoft is doing more than sitting on the sidelines and cheering Amazon on. Microsoft is learning and getting valuable assistance in the task of making Googzilla lame. I’m looking for more information on this cheerleading now.

Amazon is pointing the way to the way applications and other functions will work in a pervasive computing environment. My concern is that Amazon in its race to be first may find itself vulnerable when larger, better resourced organizations move into this sector as well.

The world’s smartest people at Amazon are confident they can win. I’m not so sure. I will avoid exploring the jungle without making sure of where I’m going and what I will confront. Agree? Disagree? Let me know.

Stephen Arnold, August 21 2008

Silverlight Analysis: Not Quite Gold, Not too Light

In my keynote at Information Today’s eContent conference in April 2008, I referenced Silverlight’s importance to Microsoft. Since most organizations rely on Windows desktop operating systems and applications, Silverlight becomes a good fit for some organizations. I also suggested that Silverlight would play a much larger role in online rich media. I was not able at the time to reference the role Silverlight would play in the Beijing Olympics. Most in the audience of about 150 big time media executives were not familiar with the technology, nor did those in attendance see much relevance between their traditional media operations and Silverlight. Now that the Olympics have been deemed a success for both Microsoft and NBC, I hope that some of the big media mavens understand that rich media may be important to the survival of many information organizations. I’m all for printed books and journals, but the future beckons video and other types of TV-type material.

Tim Anderson’s excellent analysis of Silverlight is available in The Register, one of my favorite news services. The analysis is “Microsoft Silverlight: 10 Reasons to Love It, 10 Reasons to Hate It”, and you should read it here. Unlike most of the top 10 lists that are increasingly common on Web logs, Mr. Anderson’s analysis is based on a solid understanding of what Silverlight does and how it goes about its business. The write up provides the advertised 10 items of strengths and weaknesses, but he supports each point with a useful technical comment.

Let me illustrate just one of his 20 points, and then you can navigate to The Register for the other 19 items. For example, consider item five in the plus column is that Silverlight interprets XAML–Microsoft’s extensible application mark up language–is interpreted directly by Silverlight “whereas Adobe’s XML GUI language, MXML, gets converted to SWF at compiling time. In fact, XAML pages are included as resources in the compiled .XAP binary used for deploying Silverlight applications.”

Mr. Anderson also includes one of those wonderful Microsoft diagrams that show how Microsoft’s various moving parts fit together. I download these immediately because they come in handy when explaining why it costs an arm and a leg to troubleshoot some Microsoft enterprise applications. This version of the chart about Silverlight requires that you install Silverlight. Now you get the idea about Microsoft’s technique for getting its proprietary technology on your PC.

A happy quack to Tim Anderson for a useful analysis.

Stephen Arnold, August 19, 2008

GraphOn Vs Google

Patents are complicated. Software patents are even more complicated. GraphOn, a publicly traded company with the motto “Fast and Secure Application Access”, asserts that Google has infringed on GraphOn patents. Forbes’ Magazine has a good summary here. GraphOn’s technology includes systems and methods for cloud-based services. One bone of contention pertains to data management.

The GraphOn organization has pressed claims against Juniper Networks, AutoTrader.com, and other high profile outfits. Some of Google’s highest profile services may be affected, including Google Base and Google AdWords. Google has a number of patents for its systems and methods. A partial list of these is available at ArnoldIT.com here. Some of the information from my study of selected Google inventions may be located by navigating here and entering the phrase Google patents in the search box. I do maintain a relatively complete listing of Google’s patent documents, but this information is available to my clients. If you are interested in accessing these data, write me at seaky2000 at yahoo dot com for more information. My Google Version 2.0 reviews a number of Google’s patent documents, including some references to Google’s approach to data management, publishing, and a number of innovation drivers; that is, inventions in which Sergey Brin or Larry Page play a role. Keep in mind that I am not a legal eagle. My discussion of these inventions is intended to share my findings about how certain Google innovations enable certain applications. As Google’s influence grows, legal charges are likely to increase as well. Google has a number of legal matters underway, some involving data management systems and methods. Patent litigation is slow and expensive. Information will dribble out which it difficult to know exactly what’s happening. What’s clear is that GraphOn believes it has a strong case based on its patents:

• 6,324,538, Automated on-line information service and directory, particularly for the world wide web
• 6,850,940, Automated on-line information service and directory, particularly for the world wide web
• 7,028,034, Method and apparatus for providing a dynamically-updating pay-for-service web site,
• 7,269,591, Method and apparatus for providing a pay-for-service web site

You can get more information about each of these from the search system at the US Patent & Trademark Office. Remember to check your query syntax. It must match the sample searches in order to get goodies from the USPTO’s wonderful system. I am making no warranties or guaranties about these references. You will need to verify these numbers and titles yourself.

The ZDNet discussion of this issue is here.

Stephen Arnold, August 18, 2008

Email or Search: Which Wins the Gold

My son (Erik Arnold) runs a nifty services firm called Adhere Solutions. He’s hooked up with Google, and he views the world through Googley eyes. I (Stephen Arnold) run the addled goose outfit ArnoldIT. Google does not know I exist, and if Googzilla did, the Mountain View giant would make a duvet from my tail feathers.

The setting. We’re sitting in a cafeteria. The subject turns to which is the killer application for today’s 20 something. Is it email (the Brett Favre of online) or is it search (the Michael Phelps of cloud services). My son and I play this argument MP3 file frequently, and our wives have set down specific rules for these talks. First, we have to be by ourselves. Two, we have to knock off the debate after 30 minutes or so. Erik and I can extend analytic discussions of digital theory over years, and we have marching orders to knock that off.

Here’s the argument. Erik asserts that search is the new killer app. I agree, but I tell him I want to make a case for email as long as I can extend it to SMS and newer services under the category Twitterish. He agrees.

My Argument: Messaging

Messaging is communications. Search is finding and discovering. Therefore, the need to communicate is higher on the digital needs scale than simple finding. With services that allow me to call, text, create mini blogs, and broadcast brief Tweets, I am outputting and receiving messages that are known to be:

• Important. I don’t text a client to tell her what I had for lunch is the wonderful cafeteria. Grilled cheese as it turns out. Important to me, but to no one else. I send important messages that have an instrumentality.
• Timely. I control the time delivery, matching urgency with medium. I sent a fax last week. What a hassle, but the message warranted a fungible copy, not urgent delivery. I want to dial in the “time” function, not leave it to chance or to some other authority.
• Content rich. I write baloney, but I wouldn’t write baloney unless it was important to me and to the recipient of one of my messages, articles, or 350 page studies.

In conclusion, messaging–particularly electronically implemented messaging–is the killer app. Search is useful, just not one to one, one to many, many to one, or many to many communications. By definition, search is not timely, of uncertain importance, and often not content rich due to format, editorial policy or the vapidity of the data.

My Son’s Argument

Messaging is not necessarily digital. Though crucial, when we talk about an online killer app, it’s not email. The killer app must deliver a function that we can’t duplicate in the analogue world. For that reason search is the killer application for the 21st century. Here’s why:

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Microsoft Cloud Economics

Richi Jennings is an independent consultant and writer, specializing in email, spam, blogging, and Linux. His article “On Microsoft Online Services” is worth reading. You can find it here. His assertion is that Microsoft’s pricing for its online services will weaken the service. Mr. Jennings identifies information technology managers’ lack of knowledge about the cost of running machines and software on premises. He notes:

vendors would tell potential purchasers that they [the vendors] could provide the service for less money than it was currently costing to run it in-house, but when it came time to actually quote for the service, most IT managers simply didn’t believe it cost them that much.

The point is that basic knowledge of what enterprise software costs may be a factor in the success or failure of cloud services. He contrasts Microsoft’s online service pricing with Google’s. Google is less expensive. A happy quack to Mr. Jennings for this analysis.

Stephen Arnold, August 17, 2008

Android: More Than Mobile

Venture Beat has an interesting article “Android Wants to Be on Any Device, Not Just Your Phone.” The premise of the write up is that Android may be a cog in a larger operating system initiative. For me, the most interesting statement in this write up by Eric Eldon and Matthaus Krzykowski is

The blogosphere hasn’t treated Android well — the SDK has taken many months to get to this stage since it was announced last year. The anti-Android trend will likely continue as commentators compare the HTC and the iPhone (the iPhone is better), and also say the U.S. T-Mobile network is bad (it is).

I agree that Android is part of a larger push by Google What struck me when reading Google’s technical papers is that the company seems to be considering an approach that puts some functions in the cloud and others in devices. When the two are hooked together, a different type of computing environment becomes possible.

Stephen Arnold, August 16, 2008

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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 colleages 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.
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