The Future of Database
October 21, 2008
Every five years, some database gurus rendezvous to share ideas about the future of databases. This is a select group of wizards. This year the attendees included Eric Brewer (one of the founders of Inktomi), AnHai Doan (University of Wisconsin), and Michael Stonebraker (formerly CTO of Informix), among others. You can see the list of attendees here.
At this get together, the attendees give short talks, and then the group prepares a report. The report was available on October 19, 2008, at this link. The document is important, and it contains several points that I found suggestive. Let me highlight four and urge you to get the document and draw your own conclusions:
- Database and data management are at a turning point. Among the drivers are changes in architecture like cloud computing and the needs to deal with large amounts of data.
- Database will be looking outside its traditional boundaries. One example is Google’s MapReduce.
- Data collections, not databases, are increasingly important.
- The cloud, mobile, and virtual applications are game changers.
Summarizing an 11-page document in four dot points does not convey the substance of this report. The narrative and footnotes provide significant insight into the shift that is coming in database. Among those likely to be squeezed by this change are such vendors as IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle. And what company’s shadow fell across this conference? The GOOG. The report’s reference to MapReduce was neither a rhetorical flourish nor accidental.
Stephen Arnold, October 20, 2008
Search in the Enterprise: Silly Putty
October 20, 2008
Reading the summaries of what people said or did not say at the Carnegie Mellon conference about search on October 17, 2008, left me confused. I am in London, and I had to rely on write ups by the capable David Needle for Internet News here, a couple of emails, and one hurried phone call to keep tabs on the program speakers’ thoughts.
What I took from these inputs was:
- Enterprise search is not yet too good. I like having my conclusions validated when I am thousands of miles away working with my co author Martin White. Our new study “Managing Successful Enterprise Search”, forthcoming from Galatea in November 2008 accepts this point of “not too good” as a given. We focus on what must be done to address the management shortcomings that are often more responsible than technology for search problems.
- Search continued to be used in different ways and with different meanings. The Googlers talk about finding information. Other speakers talked about locating experts or an individual who worked on a specific project. One word “search” is left fuzzy. Little wonder then that it was, based on the information I received in London, to know exactly what “flavor” of search is the one the speaker is using to explain a particular approach to these issues. It was clear to me that when high profile experts get tangled in definitional issues that users are left at out in the cold.
- Enterprise search, regardless of how one defines it, remains a tough problem. As many entrepreneurs and their sources of funding have discovered, enterprise search is leaving many users dissatisfied. An employee needs information to perform work. Problem is that “work” is somewhat fluid. Some employees need to answer a customer’s question about an invoice. That’s one type of search. Other employees need to get a document signed and want a police style “where is she” service. That’s another type of search. Other employees don’t search at all. These folks are sitting in a meeting and need information pushed to them germane to the task at hand. One system performing all of these functions quickly finds itself expensive to deploy, expensive to maintain, and expensive to support.
One attendee suggested to me that the answer to these problems was more sophisticated systems. My reaction to this is, “Maybe.” In tough economic times, organizations want systems that solve mission critical information problems in ways that make benefits clear, show payoffs from the money poured into search.
Good enough is no longer acceptable. The woes of Fast Search & Transfer in the 18 months leading up to its acquisition by Microsoft are a grim reminder that “traditional” approaches to enterprise information may not be sustainable. I will have to wait until I return to the US to gather more details of this meeting. As it stands on Saturday morning, October 18, 2008, enterprise search is moving quickly to an embedded function, wrapped in more useful enterprise applications, and destined to become one component in different types of information access options. In short, the take away for me from the conference inputs I have is that enterprise search is a bit of a dog’s breakfast.
Stephen Arnold, October 20, 2008
Podcast Interview with Stephen Arnold
October 17, 2008
Beyond Search’s own Stephen Arnold recently talked with Richard Wallis at the Panlibus blog in advance of Stephen’s delivery of the closing keynote address at the Online Information 2008 conference Dec. 2-4 at Olympia Hall in London. The podcast and summary write up are available here.
In the interview, Arnold said, “Organizations want solutions, not unkept promises about information access. Opportunities exist despite the tough economic climate for search and content processing companies.”
Also covered in the conversation are a review of Stephen’s career, notes about his presentation on emerging technologies and enterprise search, and a review of how technology components and the applications they power can be tailored to their users. Stephen is best known for his work on search and the Google phenomenon.
The conversation is also available at the conference web site or you can download the podcast directly.
Jessica Bratcher, October 17, 2008
The Addled Goose’s KMWorld Lecture
October 6, 2008
After stumbling off the airplane from Schipol, I found myself facing an empty, dark lecture hall in the San Jose Convention Center. The building frigthtens me. The weird parking set up, the mysterious passages that connect the lecture halls to two hotels, and the absence of people who know where things are combine to make my goose feathers fall out.
Nevertheless, I was able to face the empty lecture hall. I was about 30 minutes early. I plugged my USB drive into the conference organizer’s laptop, got my flapping duck logo on the screen, and sat back to see if I would have more than six listeners or fewer than six. As it turned out, a brave group of 60 people filed in for my Google talk.
I write a column about Google for KMWorld, and the publisher takes pity on me. No one reads my column, although one high school teacher wrote me and said he found inspiration in my write up about Google Maps. Apparently I was a sufficiently magnetic oddity that five dozen folks trundled in to hear me provide a glimpse of what I was pondering for my November and December columns for KMWorld. (I don’t want to keep you in suspense. My November column will be about places to find informatoin about Google on Google.com. The December column will tackle Google’s most important announcements in 2008. I think you can figure out that I will talk about what Google will do in 2009 for my January 2009 essay.)
So what did I tell the folks who wrestled with the unfathomable floor plan for the San Jose Convention Center. Here’s a summary of the main points of my talk, Google G Cubed.
First, I ran over the now familiar theme from my 2005 monograph The Google Legacy. A happy 20 year old from an outfit called Oliver Wyman, a consulting firm with about which I was and remain deeply ignorant, told me last week that she “really read” my book. Way to go, Laura! The basic premise is that most people see Google as an ad and Web search company. My take is that Google is an application platform and the 21st centruy version of the original Ma Bell in her pre-break up days. The distinction is important because those who see Google as selling ads and indexing the Web miscalculate the risk of Google’s poking its snoot into other business sectors. Get this perception wrong, and the GOOG and its business models will test the market. Clicks, not top down mandates, dictate what the GOOG’s next moves will be. I use this diagram to explain the perception issue. What do you see?
Second, I mentioned Google’s interest in telephony in general and mobile services in particular. I mentioned that one of Google’s earlier telephony related inventions was for Quality of Service. QoS is the girdle for SLAs or service level agreements. These are guarantees that a particular service–now called a cloud service–will be available to a calculated level or some similar provision of the contract for services, appliatons, or software. But the key point I made was that mobile was important because the inventor of Google’s voice search system was not some 18 year old from Vladivostok. The inventor was Sergey Brin, soon to be a spaceman courtesy of Vladimir Putin’s space program. You can verify this by reading the patent document, US 7027987. As I pointed out in my second Google monograph, Googel Version 2.0, apparently of little interest to the hot MBAs at Oliver Wyman, certain big names on a Google patent signal a keen interest in a particular technical field. Sergey Brin’s name qualifies as a big name at Google. I suggested that even the Bell heads at AT&T and Verizon now recognize that Google is a player in their little monopolistic polo fields now. This time last year, these companies weren’t sure Google was “serious” based on my personal experiences with both firms’ executives. Thefigure below shows the flow of query processing in Mr. Brin’s invention:
(Oh, Cyrus, dear Googler, this illustration comes from the Google patent document, not Photoshop. Cyrus has a “ready, fire, aim” approach to figuring out where my Google illustrations come from.)
Third, I talked a bit about the Four complementary technologies and services that are discussed in hundreds of Web log postings, consultant studies, and trade journals. These are: Android, Google Gears, Google Docs, and Google Chrome. Instead of doing a tutorial on how each of these can be used by a programmer, I turned to some screen shots to make the ideas clearer. Most of the audience was snoozing at this point in my lecture. I wouldn’t listen to me either.
I pointed out that these “views” contain virtual machines, perform regular desktop application functions regardless of the user’s device or operating system, and provided Google with a mechanism for personalizing the information, the services, and what Microsoft calls “the experience”. I said, “Microsoft makes many experiences but they are not based on a homogeneous platform. Google delivers increasingly personalized experiences from a homogeneous platform.” No one in the audience knew what I was talking about.
To reinforce this point, I showed some “alleged” screen shots from Google and TMobile Android based device:
I was greeted with a couple of “that’s an iPhone” comments. Those sleeping continued to nap.
I then highlighted several tunes known to the Android-Gears-Docs-Chrome quartet. I mentioned and illustrated:
- A Google based automatic teller machine. I reminded the audience Google has money plumbing. The company uses it to collect its billions in ad revenue and to pay me pennies for AdSense clicks.
- A Google enabled BMW. After fiddling with the computer controlling my neighbor’s BMW, Google’s dashboard is a lot better than BMW’s own engineering clunker.
- A Google refrigerator. The idea is that Googlers who love recipes can log on to their refrigerator, find out what’s inside, and then get recipes for what to make. If the suggestions are not appealing, the system can provide a shopping list and generate more recipe options. This drew a big laugh from those awake. A segment of Google’s recipe interface appears below.
- I reprised my “I’m feeling doubly lucky” information. I included this innovation in a talk in early 2007. No one cared then that Google couold do remote medical monitoring from an Android based device and no cared in San Jose in 2008. At least I am consistent in my crowd appeal.
To conclude the talk, I showed one of my math-related diagrams. I said, “Google can grow quickly with little ramp time. The competitors may be stuck in the never never land of i (the square root of minus one). No laughs, of course.
I pay a $1.00 to anyone who will ask me a question after one of my lectures. One fellow raised his hand and asked, “Are you through?” I paid him a dollar and went back to my room.
Stephen Arnold, October 6, 2008
The Goose Quacks: Arnold Endnote at Enterprise Search Summit
October 4, 2008
Editor’s Note: This is a file with a number of screen shots. If you are on a slow connection, skip this document.
One again I was batting last. I arrived the day before my talk from Europe, and I wasn’t sure what time it was or what day it was. In short, the addled goose was more off kilter than I had been in the Netherlands for my keynote at the Hartmann Utrecht conference and my meetings in Paris squished around the Utrecht gig.
I poked my head into about half of the sessions. I heard about managing search, taxonomies, business intelligence, and product pitches disguised as analyses. I’m going to be 65; I was tired; and I had heard similar talks a few days earlier in Europe. The challenges facing those involved with search are reaching a boiling point.
After dipping into the presentations, including the remarkable Ahead in the Clouds talk by Dr. Werner Vogels, top technical gun at Amazon, and some business process management razzle dazzle, I went back to the drawing board for my talk. I had just reviewed usage data that revealed that Google’s lead in Web search was nosing towards 70 percent of the search traffic. I also had some earlier cuts at the traffic data for the Top 50 Web sites. In the two hours before my talk, I fiddled with these data and produced an interesting graph of the Web usage. I did not use it in my talk, sticking with my big images snagged from Flickr. I don’t put many words on PowerPoint slides. In fact, I use them because conference organizers want a “paper”. I just send them the PowerPoint deck and give my talk using a note card which I hold in my hand or put on the podium in front of me. I hate PowerPoints.
Here’s the chart I made to see how the GOOG was doing in terms of Microsoft and Yahoo.
Source: http://blogs.zdnet.com/ITFacts/
The top six sites are where the action is. The other 44 sites are in the “long tail”. In this case, the sites out of the top 50 have few options for getting traffic. The 44 sites accounted in August 2008 for a big chunk percent of the calculated traffic, but no single site is likely to make it into the top six quickly. Google sits on top the pile and seems to be increasing its traffic each month. Google monetizes its traffic reasonably well, so it is generating $18 billion or so in the last 12 months.
In the enterprise search arena, I have only “off the record” sources. These ghostly people tell me that Google has:
- Shipped 24, 600 Google Search Appliances. For comparison, Fast Search & Transfer prior to its purchase by Microsoft had somewhere in the neighborhood of 2,500 enterprise search platform licensees. Now, of course, Fast Search has access to the 100 million happy SharePoint customers. Who knows what the Fast Search customer count is now? Not me.
- Become the standard for mapping in numerous government agencies, including those who don’t have signs on their buildings
- Been signing up as many as 3,000 Google Docs users per day, excluding the 1.5 million school children who will be using Google services in New South Wales, Australia.
I debated about how to spin these data. I decided to declare, “Google has won the search battle in 2008 and probably in 2009.” Not surprisingly, the audience was disturbed with my assertion. Remember, I did not parade these data. I use pictures like this one to make my point. This illustration shows a frustrated enterprise search customer setting fire to the vendor’s software disks, documentation, and one surly consultant:
How did I build up to the conclusion that Google has won the 2008-2009 search season. Here are the main points and some of the illustrations I used in my talk.
A Head in the Clouds
September 23, 2008
Disclaimer: this is a live on the fly post during a talk. I may edit it later.
I wormed my way into Werner Vogels’ keynote at the Streaming Media conference in San Jose, California. The title of this Web log post is not precisely what Dr. Vogels’ typed on his title slide. He offered “Ahead in the Clouds”, and the idea is that Amazon is leaving Google, Salesforce.com, and others like Apple behind. My version of the title makes clear my skepticism about some of the cloud initiatives for people my age. I know that those under 20 in body and mind see the era of clunky PCs, weird laptops, and other assorted access devices that promise unparalleled freedom. I don’t want to be free of my computing infrastructure but I want to learn. I’m perched on a metal chair with an open mind. I want to capture two or three ideas from Dr. Vogels and then offer my own comments. If you want a complete summary of his remarks, look for Web log postings from “real” journalists; I’m the addled goose, not a human tape recorder.
First, the subtitle of the talk is “The Power of Infrastructure as a Service”. I think I understand, but I wonder what happens if I have lousy bandwidth and the service crashes. Uptime and stability are often a work in progress even at Amazon as I await the lecture. In the back of my mind is the hunch that getting customers to rent infrastructure needed to deliver Amazon’s ecommerce services is a financial angle first and a substantive revenue generator second. I wonder how distant the Amazon Web services’ revenue is from Amazon’s retail revenue? If I remember I will try to find this number.
Second, looks to me as if this keynote is outpulling the other two going on at the same time. Amazon is a much bigger “name brand” than the consultants and software vendors competing for an audience. I estimate the crowd at about 150. You can buy an audio version of Dr. Vogels’ talk at www.streamingmedia.com. No information about the cost or who can buy the talks.
Third, a video is running with quite a few Microsoft centric folks in the images. Site referenced is Animoto. It is not clear if this is an Amazon-allied enterprise. Animoto is a music matching type site. Animoto is running on Amazon Web services. I wonder if Amazon is defraying some of the fees for a share in the company. Animoto is using all of Amazon’s Web services, so it’s a smart start up. Note: sound system is making it tough for me to parse Dr. Vogels’ speech. Animoto, if I heard correctly, delivers its users instant audio gratification.
Fourth, a slide of instance usage shows steady rise over time. I can’t make out the y axis or the x axis. The slide shows Animoto’s usage over time. The company can handle 35,000 customers per hour. Amazon made additoinal resources available. At start up 50 servers and now work is spread over 5,000 servers. The scaling is automatic and Animoto is happy. The pay off is that Animoto’s capital expense is minimized.
Fifth, most of the people in the room are Amazon customers. Now the meat of the talk–the technology side of Amazon. Amazon is a technology company. Technology is at the heart of Amazon. “We just happen to do retail,” says Dr. Vogels. Another graph showing the bandwidth demand over time. This is a hockey stick graph. Amazon Web services is sucking more bandwidth that “regular retail” Amazon. I wonder how the telecommunjications costs work out. The current slide shows the growth in Amazon developers. Now the company has 400,000 developers. The next graph shows a diagram that looks like a picture of an atom exploding. I am not sure what the graph depicts. There are no data and no labels on the chart. “It took us 10 to 12 years to get this Amazon architecture right.” My recollection is that Dr. Vogels joined the company more recently. I will have to look up his date of joining.
Sixth, Dr. Vogels is showing a list of the cost “heavy lifting” that Amazon has done. The idea is that AWS is a “shared services platform”. The infrastructure services scale up and down and are “highly reliable.” I wonder if uptime data will be available in this talk or on the Amazon Web site. The last time I looked, I could not find hard data to support these assertions about uptime as I recall.
Seventh, the services are now available as a content delivery network. This will be a “pay as you go” service. One benefit is scaling up and scaling down. The down scaling takes place in a matter of minutes. Amazon has “spent billions of dollars over ten years to create the infrastructure.” No data provided on total investment.
Eighth, the AWS story is the core of this presentation because it holds down production costs and it is a distribution medium. Companies in the media business want to hold down costs and get distribution. New services can be enabled. The idea is that it is easier and cheaper to build a successful business using AWS.
Ninth, the four stages — produce, encode, distribute, and archive — of a business and AWS can play a role in each stage. Dr. Vogels is going through companies using AWS to deliver their media services. The Web site names are unfamiliar to me and there is no labeling of the sites on the PowerPoint slides. These AWS customers get “extremely high reliability services”. One site is RenderRocket.com. AWS provides capacity to this company. Vimeo.com uses AWS; the site is a social video site. The Indy Racing League uses AWS. IRL shows videos, delivers commentary, and community services. IRL reported a 50 percent savings using AWS. No figures provided. Another video example. This site allows the user to view the scene by selecting different camera’s. Panda Video is an open source community video service. The video sites are hard for me to differentiate. The message is clear: lots of buyers, reliable service, and more economical than using other options. No data on the specific charges for services and bandwidth.
Tenth, the “billions of objects in Amazon S3”. This slide shows growth but there is not definition of an object, so the slide is floating without concrete back up. I now want more substance, not just a run through of small sites using the AWS. I guess I am showing my age.
Stephen Arnold, September 23, 2008
Search: Moving Up the Buzzword Chain of Being
September 20, 2008
In one of my university required courses, the professor revealed the secrets of “the great chain of being”. After 45 years, my recollection of Dr. Pearce’s lecture are fuzzy, but I recall at the top of the chain was God, then angels, and then a pecking order of creatures. Down at the bottom were paramecia like me.
Search terminology works like this I concluded after giving my talk at Erik Hartmann’s conference in Utrecht. I prepared for my remarks by talking with a dozen vendors exhibiting at the conference. I also listened to various presenters for five to 15 minutes. I had to limit my listening in order to get a representative sampling of the topics and interests of the conference attendees.
What I concluded was:
- People perceive Google as a Web search company that sells ads. In this biased sample, I noted a discomfort about Google’s growing dominance of digital information. I did not hear any one criticize Google, but I sensed a growing concern about privacy, scope, traffic, etc. I remain excited about Google and probably come across as a Google cheerleader, which annoyed some of the people with whom I spoke.
- Vendors and consultants who once hawked content management, records management, and enterprise search have changed their tune. Instead of talking about CMS, EDM, and other smart sounding acronyms, the vendors are pulling terminology out of MBA lexicons. (More about this in a moment.)
- The people listening to these talks, including mine, hunger–even plead–for solutions to challenges arising from their inability to find needed information, manage terabytes of digital “stuff” in their offices, and create a solution that does not require constant spoon feeding.
The result is that “old” solutions and half baked solutions are wrapped in new terminology taken from a higher level in the “great chain of buzzwords”. Here’s an example: instead of saying “enterprise search” or “behind the firewall search”, some vendors talked about “information access” and “findability” whatever that means. The lesser word is search, which most people seemed to agree was uninteresting, which is a code word for “does not work”. The words “information access” come from a loftier position on the buzzword “great chain of being”. The vendors are sounding more like McKinsey and Booz, Allen known nothings than subject matter experts.
A representation of the Great Chain of Being. Image source: http://www.kheper.net/topics/greatchainofbeing/Steps.gif
Consider this example: “business process management”. This is definitely a buzzword from a loftier position on the buzzword “great chain of being”. “BPM” is in the Heaven category, not Stone or Flame category. But I don’t know what BPM means. I think the folks using this word want to avoid precise definitions because that limits their freedom. Implying that “BPM” will solve a problem is easier than actually diagnosing the problem and solving it. “BPM” was the acronym of the conference. Presenters from publishers, consultancies, and vendors inserting this three letter token for what seemed like a pretty basic notion; that is, the steps needed to complete a task. Since search and content management are losers in the revenue generating department, folks engaged in these activities now talk about BPM. Old wine, new bottles but the labels have buzzwords from higher in the “great chain of being”.
Intel: LTU Talks Up Next Generation Processors
September 8, 2008
Update: September 8, 2008, 8 12 am Eastern
More about the Intel quad push is at http://www.yourdesktopinnovation.com/
Original Post
Another item about Intel and search. LTU offers an image processing system that law enforcement professionals find useful in certain matters. But LTU’s technology needs processing horsepower. The company had a deal to embed its image classification technology in a consumer video device, but that was slow out of the gates. The reason, according to my sources, was performance.
At the Intel Developer Forum, LTU showed its image processing system running on Intel’s zippy i7 processor. I can’t keep the names straight anymore, but this processor features more cores on die and more cache plus speed ups for computational intensive applications such as image and content processing.
The crowd loved the demonstration, which should make Intel happy. Search vendors need a way to crank up the performance of their systems. Throwing hardware at search bottlenecks may not be the really smart way to solve problems, but it is one that does not require the search vendors to tackle harder problems such as input output and clunky code in their search systems.
I think Endeca will follow in LTU’s foot steps. Intel is poking around the periphery of search, and the company is going to have to take positive action if it wants to do more than sell chips. My hunch is that smart devices with search and content processing functions on board might be an avenue Intel might investigate.
LTU, in case you are not familiar with the company, is French. The company was Founded in 1999 by software and engineering wizards. LTU Technologies provides multimedia content control solutions. Its patented technology is use by the French Gendarmerie Nationale, and the Italian state police; agencies investigating traffic in cultural goods and stolen objects (OCBC of the French National Police); as well as commercial media organizations such as Corbis and Meredith Corporation. You can get more information about the company at http://www.ltutech.com.
Stephen Arnold, September 8, 2008
Google Does Yahoo-Style Math
July 23, 2008
Not long ago, a Yahoo guru opined that building a Web search system cost about $300 million. I made a feeble attempt to point out that if that were indeed true, Yahoo would have accomplished the task and not collected search engines the way my mother adds to her collection of knickknacks. Similarly, Microsoft would not have bought Powerset, Fast Search & Transfer, and football-field sized data centers. I think the Yahoo math in that essay which you can read here was 1 + 1 = 3 bazillion. A bazillion is a technical term favored by the mathematical challenged. You can read about Yahoo math here.
Now, Fortune, sponsor of the Brainstorm Tech conference that featured the Beavis and Butt-head analysis I noted yesterday, offers another number. This time the number is $100 million and the person doing the calculation is Google’s employee #12, Marissa Mayer, high wizardette of the Googleplex.
You can read Fortune’s own take on this calculation here. I cannot do justice to the Fortune writer’s discourse. I can remark that Google News was a project that showed off some flashy Google technology circa 2001. Google News’s developer was, based on what I learned in my research, was Krishna Bharat. In 2006, Google News became official. In the last seven years, Google News has expanded, making it easy for me to see what’s shakin’ in France or a score of other countries.
Google’s technology spiders a subset of important news sources. The system “discovers” the important stories. The front page or splash page is automatically generated with follow on stories appearing in a cluster of related links. There have been some hiccups. These have ranged from major media outlets reminding Google that a newspaper accepting a feed from the mothership should not appear at the top of the news stack for a story. Google fixed this with some “human intervention”, which is now a key distinction of Google’s intelligent software; that is, a human makes sure the numerical recipe doesn’t add too much sugar and not enough salt to the output. The service also provided me with a good example to tell traditional publishers that unless some rethinking of their news operations took place, digital news would erode the traditional news base. I started yapping about this in 2001, but then and now, traditional publishers prefer to talk with my partners not me. I guess I’m too blunt for the white shoes and panama hat set on sultry summer days. Gee, the truth is the truth and the earnings of Time Warner (Fortune’s owner) supports my 2001 insights I suppose.
Now to the magic number.
Google News is a demo; it is not a revenue producer. I provide some information about the technology Google uses for this service in The Google Legacy and Google Version 2.0. If you want to know more, click here. The technology in Google News is darned impressive and generally unappreciated by users and competitors alike. By the way, do you wonder what Mr. Bharat has been doing since 2003, the most recent technical paper on his Google official biography page? (He’s been busy, but he is remiss in updating his research activities. For a peek, check out US20080097833.)
How do I know this? Do you see any ads on this page? As my Wall Street pals tell me, “Google’s revenue comes from ads.” So, no adds means no revenue on public facing Google pages. There’s not even a link to Google Enterprise that I could find.
“Why,” I ask, “are there zero ads on Google News?”
If my research is correct (which it may not be), the reason may be tie back to those traditional publishers. Not even Google can figure out how to divvy up a $0.83 click among the contentious, cantankerous publishers whose headlines are presented on the Google News page. A misstep can trigger another $1 billion lawsuit. Not even Google wants more of these old media new media face offs. I read here that Google even has a deal with the Associated Press, a forward looking outfit if there ever was one. Too many lawyers undermine one’s ability to do math, I have heard.
After seven or eight years, Google News’s presents an ad free face to me. Your mileage may differ, of course. And, according to the Fortune write up, Google wants to handle consumer health records in the same way; that is, traffic generation; to wit:
Mayer said that’s the way Google thinks about monetizing digital consumer health records. The company is one of many working to make it convenient for people to store and access their medical records online, a move that proponents say will improve health care by empowering consumers. But Mayer said that after some internal discussions, Google brass decided not to put ads on health record pages.
I think the strategy is for Google News and the other Google services to pull traffic to Google’s information amusement park. Overall traffic is a net benefit as long as Google can manage the costs associated with scaling to handle the hoards of visitors, buyers, and gawkers.
What strikes me as weird as why Google feels compelled to use Yahoo math–that is, making up a number–to justify its 10-year old business strategy. The top line revenue and net profit reveal the underlying math and the wisdom of Google’s approach. What’s a $100 million to Google. I can’t even get my Bowmar calculator to calculate the percentage because the zeros overflow the display.
Yahoo math from Google I don’t need. Agree? Disagree?
Stephen Arnold, July 23, 2008
Intellectual Riches from the Fortune Brainstorming Tech Conference
July 22, 2008
Harrods Creek is a long way from Half Moon Bay, California. Thanks to the modern technology available here in the hills among the possums and the rabbits, I have been able to follow some of the action at the Fortune Brainstorming Tech Conference. Fortune, as you know, is the Batman of business magazines, and it uses its glittering reputation to corral big thinkers to brainstorm.
One of the most interesting articles about this conference is Stefanie Olsen’s “Viacom CEO: Great Content Is King”. I hope this discussion among Viacom, Verizon Communications, and Google finds its way to YouTube. Please, read Ms. Olsen’s full text report here.
What stopped me in my tracks was this quote from the brainstorming cyclone from Time Warner, owner of Fortune Brainstorming Tech Conference:
We [Viacom] have vast libraries of content, and we are able to find new audiences thanks to emerging distribution. People in Asia are discovering Beavis and Butt-head and it hasn’t been in the United States for seven years…For us, it’s about finding more and more places to put it.
Google’s Vint Cerf asked a Googley question about if “content and distribution of content will be separate going forward?” This is a darn good question. The Viacom and Verizon executives’ answers, in my opinion, were muddled. In my opinion, I don’t think either the Viacom or the Verizon executive knew what Mr. Cerf meant. His question was a lot clearer to me than the answers given to Mr. Cerf.
As I understand, Viacom’s answer, creating and distributing are different but the two are joined by an economic interest. And Verizon emphasize that Verizon is all about the network.
Okay. I must admit I don’t know what these two executives are trying to tell me. Viacom’s intellectual riches include Beavis and Butt-head, who have earning power in China. The Verizon person talks about network, and my last dealings with the company involved a charge for data services in Canada where the data service was explicitly not supposed to work. No one cared about that $300 charge. I just paid the bill and concluded that Verizon is about charging me for services that are not supposed to work outside the US. I paid a price for my curiosity.)
I am still laughing about the reference to Beavis and Butt-head in the context of the Fortune Brainstorming Tech Conference. If this is tech from Fortune, I am glad I live in rural Kentucky, and I am delighted that I dropped my Fortune subscription. I wonder if there are any reruns of Beavis and Butt-head on my Apple TV?
Stephen Arnold, July 22, 2008
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