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Wired Fraying and Shorting Out

Making money with electronic information is tough. Making money writing about the wired world is also difficult. Joel Johnson’s interesting “Welcome, Wired. We Call This Land Internet” here provided me with a useful anecdote for an upcoming talk I will be giving at an NFAIS conference at the end of June 2009. Mr. Johnson informed me that Wired Magazine may be killed off. No surprise. The magazine business was challenging when readers did not worry about dead trees and the chemicals in ink, distribution costs, and the millions of direct mail solicitations required to build a subscription list. In May 2009, the magazine business is different from those salad days between the late 17th century and 2008. Mr. Johnson wrote:

Wired is great print, but if the magazine can’t make money and is shuttered, taking the website down with it, I’m going to be livid. Not that making money online is easy—it’s not, especially without sacrificing your ethics and your voice—but if any mainstream outlet should be able to make the transition, it should be Wired. I fear that may be impossible, not just for Wired but for all these old brands, because they can’t accept that the work at which they have excelled for years will be just as important when it’s online—and online only.

I bought two magazines at the airport news kiosk this morning. The total price was about $14. I paid for them, but I was the only person in the shop in Washington Reagan Airport buying magazines. With buyers like me in short supply and advertisers trying to figure out how to maximize their ad dollars, Wired is not the only traditional publication to face a problematic future.

I also thought about the Wired wizards who described the brave new digital world. It is one thing to write about electronic information. It is quite another to make money from a print publication that contains information about online. I don’t think the Wired Web site can survive in its present form, regardless of the fate of the print publication.

Again. That pesky writing and doing problem.

Stephen Arnold, May 19, 2009

Migrating SharePoint Objects

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

Consultant Tells Vendors Not to Push Unneeded Products

Now that’s quite a statement from a consulting professional. Many consultants make a living selling and upselling services that clients don’t need, don’t want, and didn’t know existed. Once I fought past the irony of the advice giver, I concluded that a mini trend is building. You will want to navigate to ZDNet here and read “Enterprise Software: Are Customers Being Pressured So Vendors Can Make Their Numbers? here. At this point, you may want to answer, “Yes.” I did. Well, that’s the story. For me the most interesting comment was:

Governor says enterprise customers should get aggressive as well. They can pay more attention what their developers are says, to avoid buying software that will end up as shelfware. Also, many open source solutions may be just as good as their commercial counterparts. And take advantage of the cloud. “Focus more on work and less on dog and pony shows. If its going to take 18 months to decide what platform to adopt you’re doing it wrong.”

I have highlighted the operative phrase “open source”. The financial crisis is going to force organizations to rethink certain technical decisions taken in the past. The trend is open source. The expert delivering this message got the main part buried but at least the idea is there. Oh, put your valuables in a locked drawer when meeting with azure chip consultants. Come to think of it, the suggestion may have applicability in other software related situations, particularly search, content processing, and data management.

Stephen Arnold, April 22, 2009

SharePoint Round Up

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

Cutting Information Technology Costs

I read CIO Magazine’s “Five Things You Need to Know: Budget Cutting” here and realized that there are journalists and their are more sophisticated financial types. Before you read the article, click here and learn how Qantas slashed its information technology costs.

Now you can romp through the tips and come away vulnerable to the machinations of a cost analyst. These tips provide a sense of false security which may give way to some even bigger organizational realignments in certain situations. One realignment may be suggesting the person who followed these tips find his or her future elsewhere. In short, there’s more to cost cutting that the tips suggest.

I don’t feel comfortable parroting the five tips. I want to highlight one and offer a few comments. Let’s look at item three:

Break down exactly how you spend your budget. Start by identifying your expenses. A CIO might know she has employees with BlackBerrys, but how much is each person spending on their phone bills? With more specifics, you can set more accurate goals for saving.

Sounds pretty safe, right? The problem is that analysis of a segment of a budget means that the numbers reflect the person’s understanding of costs. Most information technology managers are clueless about the secondary costs triggered by routine information technology actions.

Let’s look at one example. A marketing team must produce a proposal. The marketers named Trent and Wendy need to output the document in two forms: PDF and to an ftp server. The client wants to get ftp access on a Monday and receive the FedEx package with the six copies of the proposal no later than Tuesday, before 5 pm. The Trent and Wendy duo understand the PDF part, but neither knows how to move files to the organization’s ftp server. Trent calls the information technology department and asks for help. The IT person says, “We’ll be there before 2 pm.” The IT person does not arrive. At 5 pm, Wendy calls. The phone rings in space. Trent and Wendy call a consultant, explain the problem, agree to a fee for the ftp part of the job, and complete their work. The cost for the ad hoc consultant is lost in the organization’s budget. The IT manager and the CIO are clueless about the cost their unit created.

Sound familiar?

The problem with the recommendations is that the actions will not return a comprehensive picture. A true cost analysis will surface dependent costs and indirect costs, not just the obvious direct costs. Once tallied, these costs can be tracked back to the root cause of the over or under run.

In my experience, that’s too much work. As I learn about companies going out of business, the casual approach to cost analysis bites back and bites hard. Read the five tips. Track down a cost analyst and enlist his or her help. The present financial climate does not look kindly on those involved in projects such as search. It’s easy to blow through $500,000 in a matter of three or four months and have a non functioning system. Undisciplined thinking about enterprise systems and their costs can crush a career and an organization. The five tips omit that point.

Stephen Arnold, April 1, 2009

Journalists Struggle with Web Logs

Gina M. Chen asked, “What do you think?” at the foot of her essay “Is Blogging Journalism”. You can read her write up here. My answer is, “Nope. Web logs are a variant of plain old communications.” Before I defend my assertion, let’s look at the guts of her essay is that “fear of change” creates the challenge. She asserted that blogging is a medium.

Web logs are not causing traditional media companies to collapse. Other, more substantive factors are eroding their foundations. Forget fear. Think data termites.

Okay, I can’t push back too much on these points, which strike me as tame and somewhat obvious. I also understand the fear part mostly because my brushes with traditional publishers continue to leave them puzzled and me clueless.

The issue to me is mostly fueled by money. Here’s why:

Read more

Software Economics Thought Starter

I am skeptical of economics. We Kentucky geese are skeptical of store bought liquor and revenue agents too. Each of these things can put a world of hurt on an undisciplined goose. If you like economics, you will want to read “Software Economics - Public Goods” here. Author David Welton has spent quite a bit of time rounding up and herding economic doggies in this essay. You will get a snapshot of pricing options and some interesting comments from readers. For me, the write up frames a particular approach to software economics. My concern is that economists may be lagging what is happening in the post Google world. The Google business model marginalizes some of the options presented in the paper. Once this happens, the cost of closing the gap becomes too great. Yikes. Trouble looms for software outfits just as the dead tree publishers are starting to fall.

Stephen Arnold, March 28, 2009

Textbook Publishers under Siege

First, it was the YouTube education “collection.” If you missed that story, you can catch up here. Most of the blog pundits skip dull stuff like educational videos for good reason. Pretty dull. But if you are in the text book publishing business, the GOOG in education is an item of interest. Since I cover this topic in my new for fee study, I want to mention another force lining up to take on the dead tree crowd and its $100 plus textbooks–open source texts. TechDirt’s “Open Source Text Book Company Flat World Knowledge Gets Funded” tells the story. You can read the article here. What happens when you sweep into a mixture the Apple iTunes educational videos and podcasts and MIT’s decision to make its educational content  like professors’ articles into a pile. The mixture blows up the traditional textbook business. Oh, the mixture is volatile. I hated paying big prices for my econ book which I thought was almost worthless. I learned years after Economics 101 that that book and its pricing kept one publishing company solvent for decades. Boom. Good bye.

Stephen Arnold, March 28, 2009

eBay Analysis: Overlooking the Ling Temco Vought Case

Not long ago, I wrote about a trophy generation whiz kid who analyzed company and product failure. I pointed out that a seminal study shed light on the “new” developments the whiz kid was pontificating. The whiz kid pulled the post. I just read a post in a Web log that I find interesting most of the time. The author of “Why eBay Should Consider Breaking Itself Up” is Kevin Kelleher. You can read the story here. The premise of the story is one with which I agree. eBay has collected a number of eCommerce companies and failed to make any of them generate sufficient revenue to generate enough revenue to feed the cost maw of the parent. What made me shake my tail feathers was:

1. The use cases or case studies of the Ling Temco Vought style roll ups do not warrant a mention in the article. Most business school students or investors burned when LTV went south.
2. The failure to integrate acquisitions is not a problem exclusive to eBay. Mr. Kelleher left me with the impression that eBay was a singleton. It is not. Other companies with a similar gaggle of entities and similar cost control problems include AOL, IAC (mentioned by Mr. Kelleher), Microsoft, Yahoo. A key point is that the overhead associated with LTV style operations increases over time. Therefore, instead of getting better numbers, the LTV style roll up generates worsening numbers. In a lousy economy, the decline is accelerated and may not be reversible. There’s no sell off because time is running out on eBay and possibly on a couple of the other companies I mentioned.
3. The impact of LTV type failures destabilizes other businesses in the ecosystem. I never liked the Vietnam era “domino theory”, but I think the possibility of a sequence of failures increases in the LTV type of failure.

You should read the story because the information about eBay is useful. If you have an MBA, you probably have LTV data at your fingertips. Historical context for me is important. Maybe next time?

Stephen Arnold, February 17, 2009

Ad Age Advises Yahoo: Startling Strategic Counsel

I read this weekend that top job opening require technical or scientific training. Imagine my surprise when Ad Age, a dead tree publication for the Liberal Arts and Master of Fine Arts crowd, published “Four Ways Yahoo Can right Itself under New CEO Bartz.” You can read this remarkable article here. Keep in mind that Yahoo is a technology company. The products and services of Yahoo are based on software, systems, and other arcana that delight computer scientists and electrical engineers, leaving the art gallery and soft drink executives lost in a cloud of unknowing. Furthermore, if you have read my other commentaries about Yahoo, you know that the ills of Yahoo are a manifestation of a misalignment of technology and user needs. Fixing Yahoo, therefore, requires more than a public relations blitz and a handful of consultants to change the ad rate price schedule. Some of the Mad Ave ilk will point to the unsold Super Bowl TV spots and assert, “Yahoo needs to snap up these ad slots and make some brand impact.” Right, advertising online services on the Super Bowl will work just as it will for Ask.com’s sponsorship of NASCAR.

Abbey Klaasen, the Ad Age journalist, identifies four strategies for the Yahooligans.

First, Yahoo has to hang on to search. I am a bit fuzzy about what “search” is referenced. Yahoo has a cartload of search systems. My hunch is that Ad Age thinks about Web search and ignoring the Flickr and Delicious systems, which may have more sizzle than the so so Web search. There’s also mail search, the search on the personal section, and so on. Ad Age is aware of the sports and finance information, but I wonder how much analysis is going on at Ad Age. Anyway, the idea is keep “search”. Let’s assume that Yahoo is to keep its various forms of search.

Second, the recommendation is for Yahoo to “combine search and display data.” I have to admit that I am not sure what this means. Yahoo lacks a homogeneous system; therefore, combining any cluster of services means normalization, transformation, and manipulation of data. Yahoo had a project underway to rationalize some disparate data, but I am not sure if that is still underway or if it swam on rocks. Advertisers have been asking for access to specific slices of Yahoo demographics across services for a while. Yahoo can’t deliver these types of audiences because of technical issues. Yahoo is a technology company. If a service is not available, there’s a technical reason, not a managerial reason. If the cost of “fixing up” the system is too high, the service will not be available. Yahoo has not been able to focus its resources on certain technical problems because it has a GM problem; that is, GM knows what Toyota and Honda do to make autos. GM can’t change the culture nor can it amass the resources to implement the Toyota and Honda solutions. Yahoo’s engineers are smart. Some go to Google and become happy campers; for example, the Delicious.com founder. It’s not brains; it’s a fundamental technical problem exacerbated by cost and management.

Third, Ad Age wants Yahoo to sell “the Unilevers of the world”. My hunch is that this is a play that will require fixing search and audience data. It is going to be tough to repaid the Yahoo-mobile unless one has the right parts. Yahoo is going to require the equivalent of a resto-mod rebuild on the jalopy before the Unilevers pump more cash into the Yahoo advertising opportunity.

Fourth, buy Hulu. Yahoo has been fooling around with video for a while. In case anyone missed the news, Google has managed to make YouTube.com the number two search engine. Hulu.com is also way behind the Googlers in terms of traffic. I grant that Hulu.com is better than Yahoo’s video services. Follow me on this line of reasoning: If Yahoo’s previous attempts to do video have been less than stellar, why will Yahoo handle Hulu.com better. Does anyone remember Finance Vision or the original content production push with Lloyd Braun’s return here? So, I assert that Yahoo’s ability to integrate an acquisition is questionable. Yahoo took years to integrate the Yahoo photo site into Flickr. Let’s assume that Yahoo does buy Hulu. Can Yahoo contribute to the service? At this time, whatever management expertise Yahoo has will be stretched trying to deal with the existing Yahoo technology and financial problems.

In short, I find the Ad Age counsel pretty interesting. It’s not wrong as Mad Ave thinking goes; it’s just from another dimension. I will stick with the reality of the goose pond in Harrod’s Creek, Kentucky.

Stephen Arnold, January 19, 2009

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  Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.
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