Online Trail
August 6, 2009
Short honk: Here is an example of the type of online trail that one leaves. Note that the Google search history was obtained by fiddling with user name and password. The link may be removed. I verified it at 10 pm Eastern on August 6, 2009.
Stephen Arnold, August 6,2009
Flickr Thunderstorms
August 6, 2009
Right after inking a yet-to-be-approved deal with Microsoft, Yahoo rolled out enhancements to Flickr’s image search. If you have not tried the new-and-improved Flickr, click here and give the system a whirl. My test queries were modest. I need pictures of train wrecks, collapsed houses, and skiers who are doing headers into snow drifts. These illustrations amuse me and I find them useful in illustrating the business methods of some dinosaur-like organizations. The search “train wreck” worked. I received image results that were on a par with Google’s. Yahoo’s Flickr did not allow me to NOT out jpgs or narrow the query to line art. The system was fine. My query for “house collapse” was less satisfying, but the results were usable. I had to click and browse before I found a suitable image for a company that is shaken by financial upheavals and management decisions.
Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tbruce/193295658/
What surprised me about Flickr was the story “Cloud Storage Nightmare with Flickr.” Hubert Nguyen reported:
A Flickr user learned the hard way when his account got hacked and 3000 of his photos were deleted by the hacker, who also closed his account. The account owner is now campaigning against Flickr’s support. You can imagine how mad that person was, but it gets worse: Flickr cannot retrieve his data and we guess that this is because they were deleted in a seemingly “legitimate” manner (from Flickr’s point of view). We think that Flickr is built to survive some catastrophic hardware failure, but if an account is closed, the data is immediately deleted – permanently.
This strikes me as a policy issue, but it underscores the types of challenges that Microsoft may find itself trying to free itself from the thorn bush. If the revenue from the yet-to-be-approved tie up does not produce a truck load of dough, the situation could become even thornier for Microsoft.
Stephen Arnold, August 6, 2009
How to Build a Catamaran, Not an Aircraft Carrier
August 5, 2009
I have been thinking about the “aircraft carrier” metaphor I used to describe Microsoft. Aircraft carriers are good at many nautical tasks. Aircraft carriers, however, may not work in certain situations. What would I do if I were building an online service with content processing, search, and discovery functions? Part of the answer was in a link sent to me by one of my two or three readers: “Building a Data Intensive Web Application with Cloudera, Hadoop, Hive, Pig, and EC2”. The Web page is a tutorial. My only concern is that the Amazon technology is used for some of the plumbing. The Orwell incident gives me pause. High handed actions taken without the type of communications I expect would make me look for an alternative cloud solution. (Hurry, gentle Google, hurry, and release your Amazon killer). The difference between the old style aircraft carrier approach to online services and the method in this tutorial is significant. I think that Cloudera presented a useful chunk of information.
Stephen Arnold, August 6, 2009
Microsoft Embraces Scale
August 4, 2009
The year was 2002. A cash-rich, confused outfit paid me to write a report about Google’s database technology. In 2002, Google was a Web search company with some good buzz among the alleged wizards of Web search. Google did not have much to say when its executives gave talks. I recall an exchange between me and Larry Page at the Boston Search Engine Meeting in 1999. The topic? Truncation. Now that has real sizzle among the average Web surfer. I referenced an outfit called InQuire, which supported forward truncation. Mr. Page asserted that Google did not have to fool around with truncation. The arguments bored even those who were search experts at the Boston meeting.
I realized then that Google had some very specific methods, and those methods were not influenced by the received wisdom of search as practiced at Inktomi or Lycos, to name two big players in 2000. So I began my research looking for differences between what Google engineers were revealing in their research papers. I compiled a list of differences. I won’t reference my Google studies, because in today’s economic climate, few people are buying $400 studies of Google or much else for that matter.
I flipped through some of the archives I have on one of my back up devices. I did a search for the word “scale”, and I found that it was used frequently by Google engineers and also by Google managers. Scale was a big deal to Google from the days of BackRub, according to my notes. BackRub did not scale. Google, scion of BackRub, was engineered to scale.
The reason, evident to Messrs. Brin and Page in 1998, was that the problem with existing Web search systems was that the operators ran out of money for exotic hardware needed to keep pace with the two rapidly generating cells of search: traffic and new / changed content. The stroke of genius, as I have documented in my Google studies, was that Google tackled the engineering bottlenecks. Other search companies such as Lycos lived with the input output issues, the bottlenecks of hitting the disc for search results, and updating indexes by brute force methods. Not the Google.
Messrs. Brin and Page hired smart men and women whose job was “find a solution”. So engineers from Alta Vista, Bell Labs, Sun Microsystems, and other places where bright folks get jobs worked to solve these inherent problems. Without solutions, there was zero chance that Google could avoid the fate of the Excites, OpenText Web index, and dozens of other companies without a way to grow without consuming the equivalent of the gross domestic product for hardware, disc space, bandwidth, chillers, and network devices.
Google’s brilliance (yes, brilliance) was to resolve in a cost effective way the technical problems that were deal breakers for other search vendors. AltaVista was a pretty good search system but it was too costly to operate. When the Alpha computers were online, you could melt iron ore, so the air condition bill was a killer.
Keep in mind that Google has been working on resolving bottlenecks and plumbing problems for more than 11 years.
I read “Microsoft’s Point Man on Search—Satya Nadella—Speaks: It’s a Game of Scale” and I shook my head in disbelief. Google operates at scale, but scale is a consequence of Google’s solutions to getting results without choking a system with unnecessary disc reads. Scale is a consequence of using dirt cheap hardware that is mostly controlled by smart software interacting with the operating system and the demands users and processes make on the system. Scale is a consequence of figuring out how to get heat out of a rack of servers and replacing conventional uninterruptable power supplies with on motherboard batteries from Walgreen’s to reduce electrical demand, heat and cost. Scale comes from creating certain propriety bits of hardware AND software to squeeze efficiencies out of problems caused by physics of computer operation.
If you navigate to Google and poke around you will discover “Publications by Googlers”. I suggest that anyone interested in Google browse this list of publications. I have tried to read every Google paper, but as I age, I find I cannot keep up. The Googlers have increased their output of research into plumbing and other search arcana by a factor of 10 since I first began following Google’s technical innovations. Here’s one example to give you some context for my comments about Mr. Nadella’s comments, reported by All Things Digital; to wit: “Thwarting Virtual Bottlenecks in Multi-Bitrate Streaming Servers” by Bin Liu and Raju Rangaswami (academics_) and Zora Dimitrijevic (Googler). Yep, there it is in plain English—an innovation plus hard data that shows that Google’s system anticipates bottlenecks. Software makes decisions to avoid these “virtual bottlenecks.” Nice, right? The bottleneck imposed by the way computers operate and the laws of physics are identified BEFORE they take place. The Google system then changes its methods in order to eliminate the bottleneck. Think about that the next time you wait for Oracle to respond to a query across a terabyte set of data tables or you wait as SharePoint labors to generate a new index update. Google’s innovation is predictive analysis and automated intervention. This explains why it is sometimes difficult to explain why a particular Web page declined in a Google set of relevance ranked results. The system, not humans, is adapting.
I understand the frustration that many Google pundits, haters, and apologists express to me. But if you take the time to read Google’s public statements about what it is doing and how it engineers its systems, the Google is quite forthcoming. The problem, as I see it, has two parts. First, Googlers write for those who understand the world as Google does. Notice the language of the “Thwarting” paper. Have you thought about Multi-bitrate streaming servers in a YouTube.com type of environment. YouTube.com has lots of users, and streams a lot of content. The problems are that Google’s notion of clarity is show in the statement below:
Second, very few people in the search business deal with the user loads that Google experiences. Looking up the location of one video and copying it from one computer to another is trivial. Delivering videos to a couple of million people at the same time is a different class of problem. So, why read the “Thwarting” paper? The situation described does not exist for most search companies or streaming media companies. The condition at Google is, by definition, an anomaly. Anomalies are not what make most information technology companies hearts go pitter patter more quickly. Google has to solve these problems or it is not Google. A company that is not Google does not have these Google problems. Therefore, Google solves problems that are irrelevant to 99 percent of the companies in the content processing game.
Back to Mr. Nadella. This comment sums up what I call the Microsoft Yahoo search challenge:
Nadella does acknowledge in the video interview here that Microsoft has has not been able to catch up with Google and talks about how that might now be possible.
I love the “might”. The thoughts the went through my mind when I worked through this multi media article from All Things Digital were:
- Microsoft had access to similar thinking about scale in 1999. Microsoft hired former AltaVista engineers, but the Microsoft approach to data centers is a bit like the US Navy’s approach to aircraft carriers. More new stuff has been put on a design that has remained unchanged for a long time. I have written about Microsoft’s “as is” architecture in the Web log with snapshots of the approach at three points in time
- Google has been unchallenged in search for 11 years. Google has an “as is” infrastructure capable of supporting more than 2,200 queries per second as well as handling the other modest tasks such as YouTube.com, advertising, maps, and enterprise applications. In 2002, Google had not figured out how to handle high load reads and writes because Google focused on eliminating disc reads and gating writes. Google solved that problem years ago.
- Microsoft has to integrate the Yahoo craziness into the Microsoft “as is”, aircraft carrier approach to data centers. The affection for Microsoft server products is strong, but adapting to Yahoo search innovations will require some expensive, time consuming, and costly engineering.
In short, I am delighted that Mr. Nadella has embraced scale. Google is becoming more like a tortoise, but I think there was a fable about the race between the tortoise and the hare. Google’s reflexes are slowing. The company has a truck load of legal problems. New competitors like Collecta.com are running circles around Googzilla. Nevertheless, Microsoft has to figure out the Google problem before the “going Google” campaign bleeds revenue and profits from Microsoft’s pivotal business segments.
My hunch is that Microsoft will run out of cash before dealing the GOOG a disabling blow.
Stephen Arnold, August 4, 2009
Wall Street Journal Suggests Internet Is Dead
July 19, 2009
The addled goose is not certain if the story “The Internet Is Dead (As An Investment)” will be online without a charge when you click the link. Newspapers fascinate me. Some of their information is free; some transient; and some available for hard cash.
What I find useful to follow are stories that make it clear that certain business sectors are “dead”. In Heathrow on Friday, June 17, 2009, I received a free Daily Telegraph when I bought a nut and granola bar. I did not want a newspaper because my Boingo connection was alive. Even though the Daily Telegraph was a svelte bundle of paper, the news was old. Free “yesterday” was not compelling. The argument in James Altucher’s wealth column is that utilities like electricity and the Internet are linked in this way:
Electricity greatly improved our quality of life. But I’m not going to get excited about buying a basket of utility companies. Same for the Internet. Can’t live without it, but can’t live with it (in my portfolio).
I recall reading a business monograph The Mind Of The Strategist: The Art of Japanese Business by Kenichi Ohmae. Now more than a decade old, I recall the case analysis of the bulk chemical business. I wonder if that discussion of an uninteresting, commodity business holds some truths for Mr. Altucher and newspapers thinking along the same lines as the Wall Street Journal. The Daily Telegraph may benefit as well. There were many discarded Telegraphs in the lounge at Heathrow. Online economics requires a recalibration of some business yardsticks. Is Internet investment dead like the company who hit the jackpot with bulk chemicals? Glittering generalities are useful but may reveal more about the thinking of a newspaper’s editorial team beliefs, not the opportunities utilities and commodities represent.
Stephen Arnold, July 19, 2009
Digital Revision and Online
July 18, 2009
Amazon has whipped up a cloud computing thunderstorm. You can tackle this story by entering the word “Kindle” in almost any news search system. One interesting post is MG Giegler’s article for TechCrunch, “Amazon, Why Don’t You Come in Our Houses and Burn Our Books Too?” For me, the key passage was:
This remote deletion issue is an increasingly interesting one. Last year, Apple CEO Steve Jobs confirmed that the company has a remote “kill switch” to remove apps from your device if it thinks that is necessary. To the best of my knowledge, they have yet to use such functionality, and would only do so if there was a malicious app out there that was actually causing harm to iPhones. They have not even used it to kill some poor taste apps that were quickly removed from the App Store, like Baby Shaker.
The addled goose wants to remain above the fray. The core issues from his perspective are different. For instance, as online services roll up via buy outs and the failure of weaker competitive services, a “natural monopoly” emerges. One can see this in the 1980s in the growth of Dialog Information Services and LexisNexis as the big dogs in online search. Over time, options emerged and now there are a handful of “go to” services. As these big dogs respond to challenges and issues, the Amazon deletion event becomes more visible. In my opinion what’s at work is an organization that makes a situational decision and then discovers that its “natural monopoly position” creates unanticipated problems. The ability of some online services to make informed decisions increases after an event such as deleting information. The deletion may be nothing more than a pointer to an object. Metadata and its persistence are more important in some cases than the digital content itself.
The second issue is the increasing awareness users and customers have about utility type services. The customer sees the utility as benign, maybe making decisions in favor of the individual user. The Kindle deletion scenario makes clear that paying customers are not the concern of the organization. I know that the ripples from the deletion of content will not subside quickly. A single firm’s decision becomes a policy issue that is broader than the company’s business decision.
Now shift gears from digital objects that one can find on such sites as Project Gutenberg in Australia to other content. When online services consolidate, the likelihood that digital revisionism will become more widespread seems a likely outcome to me. Policy decisions in commercial entities pivot on money. The policy, therefore, does not consider an individual user.
I know that most government agencies don’t worry about me, paddling around my duck pond. The impact of a decision taken by an online organization seems to send shock waves that may not be on the radar of corporate executives.
The issue, in my opinion, is the blurring of a commercial entity’s decision made for its benefit with broader public policy issues. What happens when an online service becomes a virtual monopoly. Who will regulate the entity? Legal eagles will flock to this issue, but digital revisionism is not new. Digital revisionism now gains importance as more people rely on a commercial entity to deliver a utility service.
Stephen Arnold, July 18. 2009
Chrome: A Shiny Wrap for the Plumbing of the Google
July 8, 2009
Short honk: The other shoe has fallen. I can’t compete with the hundreds of analyses of Google’s announcement that its Chrome browser is not really a browser after all. Not much of a news flash for the goslings at Beyond Search’s headquarters in rural Kentucky. Quite a few of Google watchers were surprised, and that is encouraging because Google has other shoes to drop. A few are not even shoes. Think steel toed boots that will make a big noise in the database world when the Google decides the time is propitious to upset the well-ordered lives of IBM and Oracle.
For the moment, however, I want to point you to TechMeme’s excellent write up “Google Drops a Nuclear Bomb on Microsoft and It’s Made of Chrome”. For me, the key sentence in the article was:
What Google is doing is not recreating a new kind of OS, they’re creating the best way to not need one at all.
There you have it. An open source alternative to Microsoft’s desktop operating system. Windows Mobile never had a chance against Android. The fine Vista product gave Google time to snap together bits and pieces to create a non-operating system. Now that Windows 7 is getting press and the Wall Street SlimFast gulping wizards are salivating over the Windows 7 revenue bonanza, the Google tosses a sneaker from the math club window, and it hits on a slow news day and bounces up to give Mr. Redmond a nose bleed. Ouch.
Let me offer several addled goose observations:
- The open source angle is a nifty one. Google does the “community” a service and automatically enlists those math club members world wide in a mission to snap a chastity belt on Microsoft’s promiscuous software
- The earlier notion of Chrome as a browser wows the azure chip consultants, the Google pundits, and the legions of analysts who bought into the idea that the browser wars were back and competition among browsers was a good thing for everyone. Close but no cigar. Chrome is code shim on steroids.
- With Chrome, Google takes one step closer to the 21st century embodiment of the full service digital Swiss Army knife. Viewed from one angle, Google is a publisher. Viewed from another, Google offers an operating system, embraces and validates cloud computing, and makes it financially more difficult for a competitor or a government to duplicate the Google’s “as is” infrastructure. (The British government wants to use the Google instead of its bungled national health information service. Sure, the Microsoft Health Vault will get a piece of the action, but this is a Google centric play, not a Microsoft centric play from what I hear.
To wrap up, the Google is now officially on the march. Microsoft is just a way station on this modern day pilgrimage. What is at the end? I think Google needs a flag because it now looks more like an emerging nation than a services and software company. Chrome is an “as is” play. Dataspaces are “to be” and qualify as a steel toed boot. If you think Microsoft is the only target, you may want to step back and look at the larger universe of computing services in my opinion.
Stephen Arnold, July 8, 2009
YAGG: Google App Engine Takes a Long Lunch
July 2, 2009
Short honk: Fresh from its criticism of Microsoft’s approach to data centers, Google makes clear its engineering approach to reliability. TechCrunch reported “Google App Engine Broken For 4 Hours And Counting.” That early Google patent document about quality of service may not be in the hands of the App Engine team I surmise. YAGG is the addled goose’s acronym for “yet another Google goof.” Will Google issue another critique of the Microsoft approach today to obfuscate what seems to be a Googley way to bring some fireworks to App Engine users’ pre holiday festivities?
Stephen Arnold, July 2, 2009
SAP: Dinosaurs Resist Extinction
July 2, 2009
Kelly Fishash’s “SAP Hits On Demand SaaS Button to Avoid Extinction” here reminded me that I had in my write up pile a comment about the German software giant’s latest reflex action. Mr. Fishash wrote:
SAP, in a spectacular U-turn, has leapt on board the software-as-a-service bandwagon – the company confirmed its new selling strategy yesterday [June 10, 2009]. The German software giant, which was speaking at an On-Demand conference in Amsterdam on Wednesday, said it will launch SaaS functionality add-ons for its existing Business Suite ERP customers soon. It will wedge open the door to its Large Enterprise on-Demand product, to allow companies to bolt on SAP’s web offerings with their core, on-site or hosted ERP platforms.
I think SAP is one of those companies that merits close observation. The company is a variant of the IBM approach to software and services; that is, big, complex, expensive, and an exemplar of the “take your medicine” method. The SAP TREX search system is interesting, but I don’t see much about it. I track TREX in my Overflight service (sorry, this part of the service is not available for free at this time). I did a write up about TREX in one of the three editions of Enterprise Search Report I wrote. I did not include the system in my 2008 Beyond Search because I just wasn’t hearing much about the company. I continue to follow SAP outfit because it pumped cash into Endeca via its venture unit a year or so ago. I wondered if SAP execs recognized that Endeca required similar upfront consulting for its search and content processing system. The SAP system is front loaded in the same way, and both SAP and Endeca avoid offering bargain basement pricing on enterprise systems.
Now I learn that after a run at raising some fees, SAP is embracing SaaS or Software as a Service which is a more trendy name than timesharing.
Dennis Howlett’s “European SaaS Vendors: Not Quite Comfortabole in Their Skins” here made this point in his June 10, 2009 article:
you have John Wookey’s announcement of SAP’s saas plans. Confused or not, it speaks volumes that SAP chose to make the public announcement to the industry itself. It was greeted with muted acceptance with some muttering that it was defensive while others immediately thought ‘cost.’
I have a slightly different view; specifically:
- SAP is struggling with two financial challenges. The first is the money sucked into the SAP’ black hole of engineering. The company has to spend to keep the quite interesting collection of systems and subsystems working for today’s customers. Second, the company has to find a way to fund research that gets the SAP systems out of the dinosaur trap and into the Googzilla type of low cost engineering mode that Messrs. Brin and Page use. Even Amazon has figured out that open source and commodity hardware are a way to control costs. (Amazon reliability is another issue, however.)
- SAP’s customers are either happy because the system is up and running, business procedures are understood by licensees’ employees, and senior management just pays for engineering support and upgrades. The big invoices are behind the company. Happy days!
- Competitors like Salesforce.com and the Google are not deaf, blind, and mute to the opportunities the IBMs, Microsofts, Oracles, and SAPs create. So, SAP with its juicy client base and “intersting financial challenges” chugs along with a system creaking under complexity, almost immune to substantive change.
I think sudden shifts like the SaaS “love” are little more than signals that an era is ending. I keep watching for similar indicators from IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle. I wonder which of these three will follow in the footsteps of the SAP dinosaur?
Stephen Arnold, July 2, 2009
Oracle Salesforce Rumor: A Summer Thriller
July 1, 2009
I heard chatter at the Gilbane conference in San Francisco on June 4, 2009. I did not know the slick, 20 something who was explaining over his Pop Tart that Oracle was interested in Salesforce.com. Now the story “pops” into my feed reader with a Reuters’ logo, a byline for Jim Finkle, and the rumor elevated to the status of mainstream media “story”. You can try to locate the Reuters’ story “Sales Force CEO Downplays Chatter of Sale to Oracle” but I have had some 404s of late. These Reuters’ stories are too valuable to be left where my feed reader first pointed. Go figure. Anyway, Mr. Finkle wrote:
Salesforce.com Inc Chief Executive Marc Benioff downplayed persistent speculation that bigger rival Oracle Corp may buy his Web-based software company. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison was an early investor and one-time board member in San Francisco-based Salesforce but Benioff told Reuters on Monday [June 29, 2009]: “If he wanted to buy it, he would have.”
A couple of thoughts flapped through the addled goose’s tiny brain:
- Google has been a cheerleader for Salesforce.com for quite a while. Google, however, has not made overt moves to acquire Salesforce.com. If Oracle shows interest, might that urge Googzilla to snap up Salesforce.com along with its real sales team and its customers.
- Despite Mr. Ellison’s investment in Salesforce.com, I have sensed some cattiness about Salesforce.com’s success with its off premises, cloud based service. Even though Oracle beats at the heart of the Salesforce.com system, the model challenges Oracle’s on premises approach. A purchase might lead to some sudden changes in Salesforce.com. I think of this management approach as oncology management.
- With a great deal of cash slopping around in some investment firms’ wallets, if Salesforce.com is in play, there may be some left field buyers in the game.
Nothing like a buy out rumor to add zest to the summer financial drama. My hunch is that this thriller may have a touch of Hollywood, however. Whatever happens, I think Google benefits. That company’s search and glue code makes contributions to both Oracle and Salesforce.com. Neither company has a search system that rises above unsalted popcorn. Google may end up a winner by providing search and other services no matter how the script unfolds.
Stephen Arnold, July 1, 2009
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