Microsoft Dismissing Rumors
May 13, 2009
Investment mavens love buy out rumors. Chatter causes churn. As long as one gets a commission on buying and selling, the commission cash register rings. A number of top drawer news outfits reported that Microsoft was once again thinking about gobbling the software giant SAP. Bloomberg here reported that Microsoft is done with SAP and tossed in the observation that Microsoft was done with job cuts.
I heard a rumor about an enterprise acquisition road map. On that cartographic view of the future, Microsoft thinkers had identified a number of potential acquisitions. Some of these were in the enterprise space. I don’t have any details about the hypothetical targets, but I got the impression that Microsoft like Autonomy and Oracle is thinking about buying customers and market share in certain enterprise market sectors.
SAP is an interesting company. But there are other potential targets as well; for example, what about certain telecommunication players?
Microsoft may have to start buying and buying big. The reason? Structural changes are now taking place in enterprise applications. Even if the economy turns around, the punishing costs of on premises software may suck revenue from Microsoft’s core revenue streams. A loss of a few percentage points could ripple through the company. Rumors usually arise from a tiny crumb of fact. Acquisition thinking is in the spring breeze, but we don’t know the targets… yet.
Stephen Arnold, May 12, 2009
Brin and the Cloud
May 8, 2009
Google’s executives have become chatty Cathies. Click here to read a summary of Sergey Brin’s comments about cloud computing. Cloud computing is important to the Google. For me, the most important comment in the write up was:
“There are a number of things we could improve about these Web services,” Brin wrote. “There is less uniformity across them than there should be. For example, they can have different sharing models and chat capabilities. We are working to shift all of our applications to a common infrastructure. I believe we will achieve this soon.”
I take this to mean that Google will crank up the tweaks to Google Apps and related code components. Microsoft has a rested and ready Google to face in the autumn methinks.
Stephen Arnold, May 8, 2009
SharePoint Overview
May 6, 2009
Barb Mosher wrote “SharePoint Online (SaaS) Review – What It Is and Isn’t.” You can find the full write up published by CMS Wire here. Ms. Mosher has done a very good job of explaining the Software as a Service implementation of SharePoint. She walks through the basics and provides some screenshots. She has done what she could to make these screenshots easy to follow, but I find the steps for some basic tasks convoluted. Addled geese are not good candidates for SharePoint wisdom, I suspect. The most useful part of the article is her description and lists of what is included and what is not included. With regards to search, it seemed that only the bare bones of queries within a site are supported. I have questions about the stability of SharePoint from the cloud, which she did not address. Latency also triggers questions in my mind. Useful information to download and keep close at hand.
Stephen Arnold, May 6, 2009
Microsoft and Two Rip Tides
May 4, 2009
Jason Hiner’s “The Two Trends That Are Conspiring against Microsoft” here is a so-so title for a pretty good analysis of the rip tides sucking at Microsoft’s revenue. The two points are browser-based applications which blur the distinction between the desktop and the cloud, and mobile devices, which make the traditional desktop computer a boat anchor. The essay is hard hitting, and I think it makes some excellent points.
Stephen Arnold, May 4, 2009
Eucalyptus: Can Open Source Grow a Flammable Tree
May 4, 2009
I could not resist the reference to the Eucalyptus tree. In a forest fire, the Eucalyptus tree has the capability of exploding and igniting other plants or structures. The notion of the for fee Eucalyptus cloud computing platform setting the cloud computing sector on fire struck me as relevant. Here’s the scoop: TheStandard.com reproduced a story from Network World. You can read the story here. “Open Source Cloud Platform Is Commercialized by Its Creators” reported that
The creators of Eucalyptus, an open source platform for building private clouds, have launched a company to sell products based on the software and have landed US$5.5 million in first-round funding.
Will the business model work? Benchmark Capital and BV Capital bet $5.5 million that it will.
Stephen Arnold, May 2, 2009
Page of Google: UMich Commencement Speech
May 3, 2009
Short honk: you can read the text of Larry Page’s commencement address at the University of Michigan here. For me the most intersecting comment in the talk was this passage:
When I was here at Michigan, I had actually been taught how to make dreams real! I know it sounds funny, but that is what I learned in a summer camp converted into a training program called Leadershape. Their slogan is to have a “healthy disregard for the impossible”. That program encouraged me to pursue a crazy idea at the time: I wanted to build a personal rapid transit system on campus to replace the buses. It was a futuristic way of solving our transportation problem. I still think a lot about transportation — you never loose a dream, it just incubates as a hobby. Many things that people labor hard to do now, like cooking, cleaning, and driving will require much less human time in the future. That is, if we “have a healthy disregard for the impossible” and actually build new solutions.
The GOOG has built new solutions. No doubt.
Stephen Arnold, May 4, 2009
Web Site Search: More Confusion
May 1, 2009
Diane Sterling, e-Commerce Times, wrote a story that appeared in my newsreader as a MacNewsWorld.com story called “The Wide Open World of Web Site Search”.
. You can find the article here. The write up profiles briefly several search systems; namely:
- SLI systems here. I think of this company as providing a product that makes it easy to display items from a catalog, find indexed items, and buy a product. The company has added a number of features over the years to deliver facets, related searches, and suggestions. In my mind, the product shares some of the features of EasyAsk, Endeca, and Mercado (now owned by Omniture), among others.
- PicoSearch here is a hosted service, and I think of it as a vendor offering indexing in a way that resembles Blossom.com’s service (used on this Beyond Search Web log) or the “old” hosted service provided by Fast Search & Transfer prior to its acquisition by Microsoft. Google offers this type of search as well. Google’s Site Search makes it easy to plop a Google search box on almost any site, but the system does not handle structured content in the manner of SLI Systems, for example.
- LTU Technologies here. I first encountered LTU when it was demonstrating its image processing technology. The company has moved from its government and investigative focus to e-commerce. The company’s core competency, in my view, is image and video processing. The system can identify visual similarity. A customer looking at a red sweater will be given an opportunity to look at other jacket-type products. No human has to figure out the visual similarity.
Now the article is fine but I was baffled by the use of the phrase “Web site search”. The idea I think is to provide the user with a “finding experience” that goes beyond key word searching. On that count, SLI and LTU are good examples for e-commerce (online shopping). PicoSearch is an outlier because it offers a hosted text centric search solution.
Another issue is that the largest provider of site search is our good pal Googzilla. Google does not rate a mention, and I think that is a mistake. Not only does Google make it possible to search structured data but the company offers its Site Search service. More information about Site Search is here.
These types of round up articles, in my opinion, confuse those looking for search solutions. What’s the fix? I think the write up should have made the focus on e-commerce in the title of the article and probably early in the write up included the words “e-commerce search”. Second, I think the companies profiled should have been ones who deliver e-commerce search functions. None of the profiled companies have a big footprint in the site search world that I track. This does not mean that the companies don’t have beefy revenue or satisfied customers. I think that the selection is off by 15 degrees and a bit of a fruit salad, not a plate of carrots.
Why do I care?
There is considerable confusion about search. There are significant differences between a search system for a text centric site and a search system for a structured information site such as an e-commerce site. One could argue that Endeca is a leader in e-commerce. That’s fine but most people don’t know this side of Endeca. The omission is confusing. The result, in my experience, is that the reader is confused. The procurement team is confused. And competitors are confused. Search is tough enough without having the worlds of image, text, and structured data scrambled unnecessarily.
Stephen Arnold, May 1, 2009
USA.gov Gets Social
April 30, 2009
What a stunning announcement. Navigate to AllFacebook.com here and read the story “Facebook Signs Agreement with GSA”. At first glance, I thought “GSA” meant the Google Search Appliance. Ho hum. I have heard that the GOOG will be interested in the contract now held by other vendors when recompete time rolls around. Old news. But when I scanned the AllFacebook.com item I learned something quite remarkable. The US government has inked a deal with Facebook.com. The party to the deal is the US General Services Administration, one of the US government’s purchasing and administrative arms. These are big arms, too. Think World Wrestling Federation. The site with the Facebook.com deal is http://www.usa.gov (formerly FirstGov.gov).
Facebook.com is one of the social networking sites that boasts a pretty good retention rate. I have heard that about 65 to 70 percent of sign ups use the service. The Twitter critter retains only about 40 percent. Check my figures because I am operating on conference baloney today. Your taste in stats sandwiches may vary.
The story, written by Nick O’Neill, features a logo of USA.gov that say, “Government made easy.” Okay, how does Facebook.com fit in. The story quotes administration officials who said:
“USA.gov is breaking new ground by migrating to new media sites to provide a presence and to open up a dialog with the public. We know that many other agencies want to do the same, and having these agreements is an important first step.” Under the new administration and the leadership of a new CTO and CIO, government agencies will get access to many of the publicly available technologies that would have previously been impossible to include within projects. I know it’s silly but advertising a government job on Facebook would have taken so many hurdles previously that in the end it would not be worth it.
I don’t want to speculate on how the USA.gov site will leverage the Facebook.com service. I must go on record as honking, “The GSA is showing some teen spirit.” I do have some questions flapping around. I will capture one before it wings away: “What security provisions will be put in place to deal with the issues related to personal or sensitive information?”
Facebook.com is reasonably secure unless a careless person becomes careless with friend lists, user name and password, and what’s posted. A happy honk to Facebook.com for the deal. The security folks at the GSA will be popular in the near future I wager.
Stephen Arnold, April 30, 2009
Bandwidth Cost
April 29, 2009
A happy quack to the reader who wrote, asking me to comment on the cost of bandwidth. His point of reference was the New York Times’s article “In Developing Countries, Web Grows Without Profit” here.
“I believe in free, open communications,” Dmitry Shapiro, the company’s chief executive, said. “But these people are so hungry for this content. They sit and they watch and watch and watch. The problem is they are eating up bandwidth, and it’s very difficult to derive revenue from it.”
My views on this issue are well documented in my books and studies. Let me recap three ideas and invite feedback on these.
First, most users and content centric outfits make errors when estimating the costs of online access. Unexpected spikes in telco fees are even today in my experience greeted with surprise and indignation. I hesitate to suggest that bandwidth is assumed to be cheap, readily available, and without much technical interest. As the New York Times’s article points out, bandwidth is an issue, and it can be a deal breaker financially and technically.
Second, in theory bandwidth is unlimited. The “unlimited” comes with two trap doors. One is the money available to apply to the problem. Bandwidth, even today, is not free. Someone has to build the plumbing, pay for infrastructure, hire the technical staff, and work the back office procedures. The second trap door is time. It is possible in Kentucky to make a call and get more bandwidth. But within the last two months, we found that making this call did not result in immediate bandwidth. The vendor said, “We can reprovision you within 72 hours. Take it or leave it.” The reason the vendor made the statement I learned was a result of tightening financial noose around the vendor’s neck. The vendor in turn told me to wait.
Third, user expectations are now being shaped in a direction that makes bandwidth, infrastructure, and technical resources increasingly fragile. Here’s an example. Last night in a restaurant, a young man at a table next to mine watched a YouTube.com video on a mobile device. That young man in Boston and young people throughout the world see the Internet (wireless or wireline) as a broadcast channel. In my experience, this shift to rich media will put financial and technical pressure on infrastructure needed for this use of the Internet.
In short, I think there’s a cost problem looming. Will it arrive before the technical problem? Pick your poison.
Stephen Arnold, April 29, 2009
Google Education
April 29, 2009
In my Google: The Digital Gutenberg here, I comment about Google’s increasing utility in education. The Google Channel, available on YouTube.com, can serve as a basic course in computer science or it can be a resource for a PhD student. The Google services, when carefully filtered by a professor, can provide a full educational resource. With educational publishers under increasing financial pressure, an online alternative will emerge. Will Google emerge as the dominant player? Who knows?
If you are interested in this aspect of Google, you will find Google Apps Education: The Rise of Cloud Computing on Campus” here a useful Educom session to attend. The angle taken in the article reflects from Google Apps. For me the most interesting comment in the write up was the identification of Jeff Keltner as one of the Googlers playing a role in Google’s educational initiative. His title is Google Applications for Education.
Stephen Arnold, April 29, 2009
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