Alpha Google: When Mathematicians Collide
April 28, 2009
Google has quite a few folks who are good at math. Dr. Stephen Wolfram is good at math, and he wrote a program that some of the Googlers used when they were but wee lads learning Algebraic Combinatorics. On April 28, 2009, Wolfram Alpha was previewed before a crowd of math lovers at Harvard. Almost at the moment the Wolfram Alpha crowd was gasping at a system that provided answers, not results lists, the Google showed that it was not turning into a bunny hiding from the Wolfram.
What did the Google do?
The company rolled out a nifty search, public data, visualization, analyst cookie jar. You can read about Google Public Data in the breathless prose of the Washington Post, whose editors may be thinking about using the system to generate graphs without the graphics department. The Post’s article was “Google Unveils New Tool To Dig for Public Data” here. Google’s own description is typical Google prose – understated and entitlement tinged. You can read that official statement here.
Wolfram Alpha, according to TechCrunch, released a digital salvo after the Google disrupted the Wolfram dog and pony show. You can read about that counter attack here.
What does the addled goose think of these computational confrontations? Three things:
- You can take the kids out of the math club but you can’t get the math club behavior out of the kids. Snark, snark.
- Google made it clear that the Wolfram crowd required more direct action than any other search challenger in recent memory. As an addled goose, my memory is not too good, but I saw the counter offensive as an indication that Google sniffed napalm in the morning.
- Search is complicated. When you wheel out the math guns and they fire at one another, those azure chip consultants who played youth soccer and ate sushi after have a tough time explaining the systems and methods used by both companies to deliver ready to recycle data analysis for free. Yep, search is easy.
Stephen Arnold, April 29, 2009
Google Defines Its View of the Cloud
April 28, 2009
Rajen Sheth, Senior Product Manager, Google Apps, has posted a definition of cloud services for Google. You will want to read the full write up here. The key point stuck into me was the sweep of the Google vision. The cloud to the GOOG embraces innovation, applications, hardware plumbing, Google software and services, and combinations of these components. Some suggest that Amazon has beaten Google to the feed bag. Others suggest that it is early days for cloud computing. My view is that Google has not made many changes in the last year or so. What’s new is that Google has created a public statement and cross linked to it from its other Web logs. Googzilla lurches forward.
Stephen Arnold, April 28, 2009
Mobile Versus Netbooks as Google Goes Slow
April 27, 2009
In my Google tutorial today (April 26, 2009), I ran through some of Google’s innovations in mobile search and services. One person in the session pointed out that Android 1.5 was immature. I agreed. Nevertheless, Google is plodding forward slowly. The slow motion approach of Google is not an indication of technical ineptitude. My research suggests that Google uses slow movement as a tactic. Android 1.5 will be improved, just not quickly or as quickly as some want a giant software company to react.
I ran through my newsreader items when I returned to my hotel room and spotted an article from New Zealand with this title: “Are Kids Becoming Phone Addicts?” here. For me, the important comment in the write up was:
“There are certainly teenagers who we are seeing that have an over-reliance on their mobiles and who become anxious at the prospect of going without their phone. “They worry that they’ll run out of battery or credit and they’ll be forced to go without this way of communicating with their network of friends. It’s a big fear for them and it illustrates just how important they see the phone as being to their lives.”
I was thinking about my observation that Google was not in a particular hurry with some of its mobile initiatives. This article triggered in my mind the idea of Google’s patience. The company is improving Android and other of its mobile services fast enough. The idea is that as young mobile users grow older, Google will improve a ratchet click at a time. When today’s middle school and high school student are ready, Google’s mobile services will be ready as well.
Will the competitors see Google improving? Yes, but the incremental approach makes it difficult to discern what Google is doing on a larger scale. When the pieces click into place, the customers will be ready.
There’s a risk with this strategy of slow but sure improvement, which is different from Microsoft’s set a ship date and start the death march. The GOOG wanders forward. The approach opens the door for some competitors to move into sectors and capture them as Amazon and Twitter have done in the last six to 12 months. On the other hand, Google has the advantage of deciding what differentiators to release and when.
Will Google’s slow time strategy work? Judging from the “addiction” rate among young mobile users, the Google will have a product that will tempt younger cohorts. If Google fails, it still has mobile services to offer to users through third parties. I am not sure how much of this analysis will play out in reality, but the idea of fast cycle versus slow cycle seems ideal for Google to target specific demographics and then let the aging process carry Google into some markets where mobile will be the primary computing platform, not a netbook or other large form factor device.
Stephen Arnold, April 27, 2009
Migrating SharePoint Objects
April 27, 2009
I like the notion of federating; that is, leaving information where it is and then pulling what’s needed without crating a duplicated source store. I was interested in this Web log post “Migrating SharePoint Content between Different Site Templates and Preserving all the Necessary Metadata” because the approach ran counter to my method. Migration is sometimes necessary; for instance, a merger requires that the acquired firm’s information be placed under the control of the purchaser’s information technology department. If you need a method to migrate SharePoint, you will want to navigate to Boris Gomiunik’s article here and download the steps. There are eight steps, and I did not see a quick and easy way to automate this set of procedures. Like much in the SharePoint environment, a human must enter values and make decisions. The approach is great for the billable SharePoint consultant and makes a SharePoint administrator a must-have headcount. But for the senior manager, the costs associated with this somewhat tedious procedures are likely to be an issue. In my experience, the more manual intervention in a method, the greater the chance for mistakes. SharePoint may be a candidate for the cloud because in today’s financial climate eliminating headaches, errors, and expenses may reduce on premises software installations magnetic appeal. There was no reference to what fixes had to be made to get the SharePoint search system to rebuild its index and point to the correct instance of the migrated and potentially duplicate content. I wonder if that requires another multi step process involving lots of human fiddling?
Stephen Arnold, April 26, 2009
Google Base Tip
April 23, 2009
Google Base is not widely known among the suits who prowl up and down Madison Avenue. For those who are familiar with Google Base, the system is a portent of Googzilla’s data management capabilities. You can explore the system here. Ryan Frank’s “Optimizing Your Google Base Feeds” here provides some some useful information for those who have discovered that Google Base is a tool for Google employment ads, real estate, and other types of structured information. Mr. Frank wrote:
It is also important to note that Google Base uses the information from Base listings for more than just Google OneBox results. This data may also be displayed in Google Product Search (previously Froogle), organic search results, Google Maps, Google Image Search and more. That adds up to a variety of exposure your site could potentially receive from a single Google Base listing.
Interesting, right? Read the rest of his post for some useful information about this Google service.
Stephen Arnold, April 23, 2009
Pay As You Go Stymies Online Bad Guys
April 23, 2009
I was surprised to learn from PCWorld that “pay as you go” is a method for thwarting online pirates. You must read the story “Pay-As-You-Go a Way around Piracy, Microsoft Says” here. Owen Fletcher reported:
Microsoft could reduce losses from software piracy by expanding pay-as-you-go plans like those it has tested in developing countries, a company executive said today. Charging users as they access services, rather than in one up-front purchase fee, could “take some of the pressure off of the purely licensed model of software,” Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s research head, said in an interview.
The idea is interesting. If you don’t pay, the computer fails to run the application. To make this work, the user will need a persistent Internet connection. The hitch is that my Internet connections (two high speed broadband hook ups) are not very reliable. Even when these are working, we experience issues with Windows Genuine Advantage even thought we pay the MSDN fees, Apple iTunes which thinks I have five authorized computers not two, and various Adobe products that generate such messages as “updated failed to launch” every time I launch Adobe CS2 on a machine with Adobe CS3 installed.
Great in theory. Practice, at least in the near future, is not likely to work in my office. I am even more skeptical about getting this notion working in some of the exciting countries I have had the pleasure of visiting. Moving this notion to enterprise applications like search raises even more questions for me. Microsoft is anchored in on premises technology, so the company has some engineering hurdles to get over as well.
Stephen Arnold, April 23, 2009
Hooray the Mainframes Are Back
April 22, 2009
I recall my first computer class in 1963. Trips to the data center, actually the data center waiting room. There were three keypunch machines, one counter, and a couple of people who logged names and controlled one’s life. I figured out that working in the data center was the way to go, but that’s another story.
I loved the whole mainframe game. Clean room, crisp and chill air, and the freedom to run programs any time. None of that “drop off your cards on Wednesday before 3 pm and pick up the output and card deck on Monday at noon.” No way.
Imagine how happy I was when I read “Virtualization Is ‘the New Mainframe,’ VMware Says” here. One statement from the thinly veiled news release is a keeper:
Virtualization is the mainframe for the 21st century,” said Stephen Herrod, VMware’s CTO, at an event to launch the company’s new vSphere 4 software, an update to Virtual Infrastructure 3, at its headquarters in Palo Alto, California.
A new generation of computer science majors get to experience the thrill, the power, the control of mainframe environment. I’m glad it’s back. When I hit the retirement trail, I can moonlight on the grave yard shift in the virtual data center. I think I remember how to wield power over those hapless penitents. Run their deck first, no way.
Stephen Arnold, April 22, 2009
Next Generation Data Management
April 20, 2009
With the saber rattling between the Codd database crowd and some of the MapReduce believers, I came across a must read called “An Overview of Modern SQL-Free Databases” by Jedi here. I found the write up useful. Jedi mentioned a source or two that I had not examined. I downloaded the write up and printed out a hard copy to read whilst watching denizens of Harrod’s Creek shoot at squirrels.
The structure of the article is to provide a 100 to 150 word write up about:
- Tokyo products (Cabinet, Tyrant, Dystopia)
- Fixed length record databases (ah, a blast from the past) This Wikipedia article may be useful.
- Hash databases (a Google interest). More information is here.
- B+ Tree databases (Wikipedia information is here.)
- Table databases (Wikipedia information is here.)
- Lightcloud (Plurk open source here.)
- Redis – Supports sharding (a Google interest)
- Flare
- CouchDB and the Futon interface
- MongoDB
The comments to the article mention but do not provide much detail:
- Project Voldemort – Used by LinkedIn
- Cloudkit
Stephen Arnold, April 20, 2009
Twitter: New Whipping Boy
April 18, 2009
I never watched the whipping scenes in pirate movies when I was a kid in central Illinois. The whole pirate shtick (????) scared me. Pirate life looked awful. Small ships. Scurvy. Rats. I saw a cat-o’-nine tails in a museum when I was in college and I shuddered. The nine tails referred to what looked like leather strips with metal tips or claws. The idea of whipping is bad. Whipping with nine claws buries the need on the badness scale. Here’s what one of these corrective devices used by the British Royal Navy in the 17th century looked like.
Poor Twitter, the steroid charged child of SMS, is now a whipping boy and the pundits and mavens are using the cat-o’-nine tails to make their point. Coverage of Twitter has morphed from “What use is it anyway?” to “Twitter is evil.” The Tyra Banks’s incident in New York allegedly made use of models less than 5 feet seven inches Tweets. For more information on this remarkable tea party or flash mob, click here.
I loved the headline “Twitter Sucks” in the New York Observer where nothing is “sacred but the truth”. You must read the story here. In a nutshell, Twitter is over exposed. The “trough of disillusionment” is that Twitter is lots of short messages. Most of the messages are banal. But some of them contain surprisingly useful information. Aggregated, the Twitter stream can make interesting ideas assume a form that can be prodded and examined.
Should Twitter be whipped with a cat-o’-nine tails. Sure. That’s the way the world today works. But my view is that Twitter is an example of how real time messaging broadcast to others on the network can trigger unanticipated opportunities or challenges. Twitter may suck. Twitter may be trivial. But one thing is clear. Twitter is going to spawn quite a few real time search innovations. Twitter, like PointCast, may end up the big loser in a month or a year, who knows? But push technology did not die with PointCast and BackWeb. Twitter is an example of a service that neither telcos nor the likes of Google were able to put in a box and control.
Stephen Arnold, April 18, 2009
YAGG: Twitter Aflame with Gmail Glitch
April 17, 2009
Short honk: Google does well in a lousy economy. Google sends a signal it would work with Twitter (even with its Amazon hook). Gmail goes down… for some. The big story for me is not the money or the Twitter air kiss. The news is YAGG, yet another Google glitch. You can read Steve Shankland’s “Gmail Outage Afflicts Some Users” here. No YAGG for the CNet take on the story. Beyond Search is not quite so hesitant to honk, “YAGG, YAGG.”
Stephen Arnold, April 17, 2009
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