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
The Google: Scores a Big Win
April 15, 2009
The goslings and I have been quite busy at the goose pond today. A happy quack to the reader in the UK who alerted me to ZDNet.co.uk’s story “Virgin to Migrate Customers onto Google Mail.” You can read the story here.
Colin Barker wrote:
The company said the rollout will be one of the largest deployments to date of Google Partner Edition Apps, which lets businesses and individual customers use Google’s communication and collaboration applications under their own domain names.
I think this announcement is a big deal. First, Virgin is a high profile company and the top Virgin is an executive who gets quite a bit of attention in major companies. Second, this deal makes clear that it makes financial and technical sense for organizations to get out of the email business. Email has become complex and costly. Organizations like Virgin looked at the facts and made a decision to go with Googzilla. Smart choice. If litigation becomes necessary. The GOOG is in the archiving business too. The company doesn’t call much attention to its Postini-centric solution, but it is there and promises to slash the cost of some discovery actions.
What the Gmail deal means to this addled goose is that the Google Apps initiative is going to find increasingly attractive opportunities. Will Virgin stop at email? My hunch is that Virgin will be an interesting Google customer to watch. I give more detail about what can be done with the Google App Engine in my next column in KMWorld.
So, this is a big deal.
Stephen Arnold, April 15, 2009
SharePoint Round Up
April 13, 2009
Here in Harrod’s Creek, the annual spring festival includes bunny hunting. I am floating in the pond, listening to the rat tat tat of small arms fire. Nothing beats a rabbit hunt in the spring. I am not into pumping lead in fuzzy bunnies so I am engaging in what is now a Sunday ritual: A romp through the SharePoint information that clogs my newsreader. I prefer to write about search in SharePoint, but a number of interesting, content related items caught my attention.
The Budget Black Hole
SharePoint Reviews ran a story called “How Long Is a SharePoint Project.” You can read it here. The author said: “Of course, a SharePoint Project is never complete as it keeps growing and changing…” Ah, a never ending project. But in today’s lousy economic climate I wonder what the appetite of the CFO will be for a techie who sucks money with no end point in sight. Sort of a problem, perhaps? The author includes the 14 stages in a SharePoint project. I would insert a 15th. Seek a new job.
Azure Portal
Gunnar Peipman wrote “Azure Developer Portal: Some Screenshots” here. I find much about the Azure project confusing, but the screenshots shows two application instances which then become one application instance. This is not an error. Azure allowed Mr. Peipman was allowed one instance. Bug? Feature? Conservation of energy? The screenshots are a bit confusing and I don’t know if Azure caused the problem. I appreciated his comment: “Sorry for the mess.” I can’t wait to see how search runs from Azure in a high demand environment. Will that one instance haul the water?
Third Party Tools in SharePoint
Quite a few SharePoint clients use third party tools to find information in SharePoint. The solutions I find work pretty well include but are not limited to Coveo, Exalead, and ISYS Search Software, among others. There are some useful facts that can make life with these third party systems happier for the SharePoint administrator who wants to leave early and have free weekends. First, click here and read “Using Third Party Tools in SharePoint”. Second, save the file and keep in handy for future reference. Among the useful tips is this one: “Understand in detail what it will take to provide an evaluation & test of the third party tool(s) assuming you will set up an separate environment to do it.” Good round up of what most system pros learn in training.
Product Wackiness
Finally, I want to call your attention to “SharePoint Designer and Expression Web – Separated at Birth” here. I have seen copies of Expression Web in the local Office Depot. The SharePoint designer is a freebie. This article takes a run at explaining the “difference” between the two products. These bastard spawn of the aging FrontPage have one big difference when it comes to SharePoint. Expression Web can’t edit SharePoint sites. Pretty wacky to me. Oh, don’t forget VisualStudio. We have needed that tool to go where the SharePoint Designer fears to tread. Nice.
Microsoft Fast
A happy quack to the reader who sent me a link to a news item here pointing out that Microsoft Fast Norway wants to hire some “Live Search” type people. Must be the same manager who cooked up Expression and Designer.
Stephen Arnold, April 13, 2009
Digital Gutenberg Study Completed
April 10, 2009
Infonortics Ltd. received the manuscript for Google: The Digital Gutenberg yesterday, April 10, 2009. The monograph is the third in my series of Google analyses. The topics addressed in this new study include:
- Google’s content automation methods
- A discussions of dataspace functions, the report or dossier system, and content-that-follows system
- A description of Google’s increasing impact on education, scholarly publishing, and commercial online
The information in the study comes from open sources such as Google’s presentations, technical reports, and US government filings to the SEC and USPTO. I have revised and updated some of the information I wrote for BearStearns, Trust Company of the West, and IDC for this study as well as included completely new material that, as far as I know, has not been described in detail elsewhere. I am often asked, “Does Google cooperate with you and provide information.” The answer is, “No.” The Google ignores me, making sure my “authoritative” score is near the bottom of the barrel. I have remarked on many occasions that Google would like to see this goose’s cooked. Google professionals off the record express their surprise at what their employer is doing. Google is not into opening its technical kimono for researchers of my ilk. Compartmentalization is useful I suppose.
Why Google and Publishing
I narrowed the focus to publishing for three reasons:
First, Google finds itself in the news because some newspapers have become critical of Google’s pointing to content produced by third parties. What I have tried to do is explain that Google’s technology processes information and provides access. One of my findings is that Google has shown considerable restraint in the use of its inventions. If my research data are correct, Google could be more active as a content generator than it has chosen to be. Google, for this reason, has “potential energy”; that is, without much additional investment, the company could produce more content objects.
Second, Google’s technical infrastructure plus its software adds up to create a “digital Gutenberg”; that is, an individual could create a Knol (fact based essay on a subject), create a business listing in another Google service, and create a Web log on the Knol’s topic. The “author” or user uses Google as a giant information factory. Inputs go in and traffic “finds” the information. There are different ways to monetize this manufacturing and distribution system. Google has created its own version of Ford’s River Rouge integrated facility.
Third, Google is following what users click on. As a result, it is important to track the demographic behaviors of Google customers, advertisers, licensees, and users. The users, not Google management, help determine where Google goes and what Google does. Competitors who attempt to predict Google’s next action are likely to be off base unless those analyses are anchored in demographic and usage data. Another finding is that Google is relying on demographics to carry its “River Rouge” and “digital Gutenberg” capabilities into different markets.
Google did not open its kimono to me. The open source intelligence methods yielded that data in this study. You can see one of my tools here.
Differences in Digital Gutenberg
In my first two studies, I explained in detail Google’s systems and methods. I include a couple of Google equations in this new study. I make brief references to patent documents and technical papers, but my editor and I have worked to make this study more accessible to the general business reader. I lack the capacity to write a “Sergey and Larry eat pizza” monograph. Frankly, technology, not pizza, interests me. I suppose I am as mechanistic and data centric as some Googlers.
Also, I don’t take sides. Google is neither good nor evil. The companies affected by Google’s waves of innovation are just average companies. Google, however, thrives in sophisticated technology and data. In my encounters with Googlers, most would prefer to talk about a function instead of the color of a sofa. The companies criticizing Google lack Google’s techno-centrism. I point out that Google’s actions and public statements make perfect sense to someone who is Googley. Those same statements when heard by those who operated mostly from subjective information come across as arrogant or, in some cases, pretty wacky.
The conclusion to the study is a discussion of one of Google’s most important initiatives in its 10-year history: the Google App Engine. That surprised some of the people whom I asked to read early drafts of the manuscript. The App Engine is the culmination of many thousands of hours of engineering, and it will make its presence felt across the many business sectors into which Google finds itself thrust.
You can see an early version of the study’s table of contents here. (And, yes, I know the Chinese “invented movable wood block printing”. I used “Gutenberg” as a literary convenience.)
Who Should Read This Monograph?
My mom never read any of my monographs. She looked at my first study, written decades ago, and said, “Dull.” Today, I am still writing dull stuff, but the need to understand what is happening and will happen in electronic information is escalating.
At a minimum, I think the contents of the Digital Gutenberg would be of interest to companies who are engaged in traditional media; that is, publishing, video and motion picture production, and broadcasting. Others who may find the monograph a useful reference may include:
- Analysts, consultants, and pundits who track Google
- Competitors and soon-to-be Google’s competitors
- Lawyers who are on the prowl for Google-related information
- Entrepreneurs who want to find out how to “surf on Google”
- Government regulators eager to find out whether the existing net of regulations has hooked on Google
- People who want to work at Google because some of Google’s most exciting innovations are not well known.
Search Costs: Clouds Come Lower
April 10, 2009
IT-Analysis published Laurie McCabe’s “Will CPAs Bring the Cloud to Earth for SMBs?” You can read the story here. The hook for the story was CPA chatter. I would imaging that “chatter” to a CPA is fairly tame stuff, but I may be wrong. MBAs were once considered harmless but since the financial meltdown, MBAs are downright lethal. The write up is about two accounting groups’ decision to support Intacct for their customers. I never heard of Intacct, but I assume QuickBooks has. Ms. McCabe wrote:
Not only does this alliance pose a strong threat to Intuit QuickBooks’ dominance in the small business accounting market, it has the potential to pull SMBs into cloud computing in vast numbers. Intacct, AICPA and CPA2Biz did a lot of homework beforehand, including research that showed online accounting solutions boost productivity by as much as 50%. By dramatically reducing the need for travel, and the necessity of exchanging paper and email files, CPAs have more time to spend providing guidance to clients to help them improve financial performance and decision-making.
Too bad for QuickBooks, but the green eyeshade set believes that cloud-based applications like accounting make financial sense. Do you think? When the bean counters figure out how to save money, it makes little difference what the info tech folks say. Blossom.com, one of the most successful cloud search vendors, is probably quite happy with the CPAs’ new found ability to see the clouds.
Stephen Arnold, April 10, 2009
Twitter Amazon, Amazon Twitter
April 8, 2009
Twitter has not been the winner of the uptime Derby at least in Kentucky. One of my readers reported Twitter issues in Israel yesterday. What is interesting is that TechFlash reported that some folks are pointing a finger at Amazon.com, the back end for Tweets. Amazon, according to TechFlash, asserted here “Don’t Blame Us for Twitter Problems.” TechFlash’s story reported:
In addition to being a user of Amazon’s S3, Twitter has a relationship with Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos, who is a personal investor in the microblogging service.
Twitter seems to be getting quite a bit of buzz. One hopes the Amazon Twitter or the Twitter Amazon issues can be happily resolved.
Stephen Arnold, April 8, 2009
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