SharePoint and SharePoint Search: End of Life?
June 16, 2013
I had a chat with a former IBM executive. At lunch, an interesting emerged as we talked about the trials and tribulations large enterprise software vendors are facing. In addition to the embarrassing layoffs at IBM, there are signals that the financial screws are being turned at Hewlett Packard, Oracle, SAP and elsewhere. Part of the pressure is normal because the April May June quarter is an important one before the world goes on vacation in July and August. September, obviously, will be another flat out period for sales and marketing professionals. But there was one t hought which we kicked around in a post-prandial stupor.
A dilemma now exists in the enterprise software sector.
Stick with what works and has worked
Go in a new direction and improvise.
What happens if Microsoft does the Adobe thing and forces SharePoint licensees to embrace the cloud? What happens to the resellers? What happens to the integrators? What happens to the in house staff who know the intricacies of on premises installations of SharePoint but not the secrets of Azure?
Microsoft has a significant dependence on on premises sales. This is the client access license, the enterprise license, and the special set ups which make Microsoft the de facto choice for desktop computing workers worldwide.
Is an end of life play for SharePoint possible without making Microsoft even more vulnerable to the enticements of Google and others who want to supplant Microsoft as the “king of the desktop enter” and “baron of the back office”?
On one hand, the idea that SharePoint and its okay search solution, administrator employing mail and database systems, and its quirky collaboration and document management solutions could shift to the cloud is silly. Why give up those license fees? Why alienate service firms dependent on sales and support to hundreds of millions of SharePoint users? Why assume that a cloud business model will work for on site license customers? Organizations are conservative. Change comes slowly or not at all. Stick with the status quo.
What Hath SEO Wrought? The Google Responds
June 4, 2013
What caught my attention this morning was “Negative SEO: Looking for Answers from Google.” Since the early days of The Point, which we sold to Lycos decades ago, my partners and teams have produced content one way. We follow the format of traditional commercial databases; that is, we track important articles like this one about negative SEO and provide a quote and a comment. Traffic is not high on my list of what I think about because I use the content in this blog Beyond Search as a way to keep track of major developments in search, online, content processing, and, more recently, analytics.
The SEO thing has always been a threat to objectivity. Now the article, if it is accurate, suggests that it is possible to use online content as a weapon; that is, weaponized information. I have given some lectures about “weaponized information” to specialist groups in various government agencies. The substance of much of my work in the last couple of years has been to document how specific mathematical methods can be manipulated by flows of specially prepared content.
This “Negative SEO” article struck a nerve. Here’s the comment which caught my attention:
At the end of the day it is the unsuspecting that need protection. I’ve written before about the relations of SEOs and Google. Those in the know that stray toward the boundaries, they do so at their own risk. I don’t play the ‘hat’ game. It’s all degrees of tactics. If you get burned while knowing the risk, then fair play. I worry more about those who aren’t aware and what ramifications it can have on them. I know plenty of great people that have been stomped over the last while and often they have seemingly done little to incur it. Or were mislead as to what “safe” really was. Some type of simpler system would help benefit webmasters and Google as well the way I see it. If you have some ideas on how this could be dealt with by working with Google, fire it off in the comments. A positive discussion is far more likely to get Google working with us than whining about the evil…
Interesting.
My View of SEO
I gave some talks at search engine optimization meetings. I was horrified with several aspects of these local, regional, and national events.
First, the attendees wanted traffic in order to keep their jobs. I was fascinated with the self preservation bubbling beneath the surface of the casual conversations, the get togethers, and the questions asked of the speakers. Maybe the events have changed, which is probably a step forward. However, my recollection is one of finding some way to prove that a Web site or other online marketing activity would deliver the brass ring — a number one listing for a query.
Second, the presentations were an odd blend of “wow, we discovered this” and “you may want to try that” but “we are good guys wearing white hats.” It took me a while to figure out that a “white hat” reported ways to trip up traditional methods of delivering relevant results. A “black hat” used tricks and methods which would result in a penalty from whichever search engine was spoofed. I watched in fascination as a very large industry grew up to undermine precision and recall.
WinterGreen Translation Companies and Services
May 29, 2013
We came across a 4,600 word news release about the language translation software market. The study has more than 400 pages and covers a wide range of topics, including mobile phone translation systems. We worked on the Topeka Capital Markets’ Google voice report. We are biased because Google seems to have a significant technology and resource edge. As we worked through the news release we did see a list of the firms which WinterGreen discusses.
A notable translation helper, the Rosetta Stone. A happy quack to the British Museum at www.britishmuseum.org.
I want to snag the list because it had some surprises as well as both familiar and unfamiliar firms in the inventory. Here’s what I noticed in the news release:
ABBYY Lingvo (http://www.lingvo-online.ru/en)
Alchemy CATALYST (http://www.alchemysoftware.com/)
AppTek HMT (now a unit of SAIC. http://www.saic.com)
Babylon (free)
Bitext (www.bitext.com)
CallMiner (http://www.callminer.com/)
Cloudwords (http://www.cloudwords.com/)
Cognition Technologies (www.cognition.com)
Duolingo (more of a learning system. http://duolingo.com/)
Google (ah, the GOOG)
Hewlett Packard (maybe www.autonomy.com)
IBM WebSphere Translation Server (try http://goo.gl/hGS2R)
Kilgray Translation Technologies (http://kilgray.com/)
KudoZ (http://www.proz.com/kudoz/)
Language Engineering (http://www.lec.com)
Language Weaver (Now part of SDL. See http://goo.gl/IH3mg)
Lingo24 (An agency. See http://www.lingo24.com/)
Lingotek (http://www.lingotek.com/)
Lionbridge (crowdsourcing and integrator at http://www.lionbridge.com/)
MT@EC (http://ec.europa.eu/isa/actions/02-interoperability-architecture/2-8action_en.htm)
Mission Essential Personnel (humans for rent at http://www.lionbridge.com/)
Moravia (http://www.moravia.com/)
MultiCorpora (http://www.multicorpora.com/en/products/)
Nuance (http://www.nuance.com)
OpenAmplify (http://www.openamplify.com/)
Plunet BusinessManager (A management system at http://www.plunet.com/us/)
Proz.com (humans for rent at http://www.proz.com)
RWS Legal Translation (http://www.rws.com/EN/)
Reverso (Free. See http://www.reverso.net/text_translation.aspx?lang=EN)
SDL Trados (Part of SDL. See http://www.trados.com/en/)
Sail Labs (http://www.sail-labs.com/)
Softissimo (Services and software. http://www.softissimo.com/softissimo.asp?lang=IT)
Symbio Software (http://www.symbio.com/)
Systran (http://www.systransoft.com/)
Translations.com (Services and software. http://www.translations.com/)
Translators without Borders (Humans for rent. http://translatorswithoutborders.org/)
Veveo (More semantics than translation. http://corporate.veveo.net/)
Vignette (Open Text. http://www.opentext.com)
Word Magic Technology (I could not locate.)
WorldLingo (Rent a human. http://goo.gl/dhiu)
Of these 30 or so companies, there were some which struck me a surprise. Hewlett Packard, for example, owns Autonomy. I suppose that other units of Hewlett Packard have translation capabilities, but were these licensed or home grown? Also, the inclusion of Vignette is interesting. I must admit that I don’t hear much about Vignette as a translation system. The list makes translation look robust. The key players boil down to a handful of companies. I did not spot firms in the translation services or software business in China, India, Japan, or Russia, but I may have missed these firms in the WinterGreen news release describing the report.
If you want to buy a copy of the report, which I assume has paragraphs unlike the news release, point your browser at http://goo.gl/97e2s and have your credit card ready. The report is about US$7,500.
Stephen E Arnold, May 29, 2013
Sponsored by Augmentext
Enterprise Search Ignorance Can Be Costly
May 20, 2013
Why What You Do Not Can Bite Your Pocketbook. Marketers Have Their Interests Front and Center, Not the Customers’ Interests
A few days ago, I sat through several presentations about enterprise search. The systems struck me as quite similar. The emphasis was placed on providing basic information access to users. For the purpose of this short essay, I will not make distinctions among search vendors which position themselves as providers of analytics, business intelligence, discovery, and Big Data access, among other synonyms for search and information retrieval.
The missing pieces of the cost puzzle can make budget deficits a reality. A happy quack to Vermont’s Department of Information and Innovation. See the discussion to drive down the cost of doing business. States are paragons of fiscal probity.
However, the talks caused me to reflect on what the vendors left out of their presentations.
Here’s a checklist of the omissions in commercial systems which are now being marketed as an alternative to the high profile and expensive solutions available from Dassault, Hewlett Packard, Lexmark, Microsoft, and Oracle, Each of these large enterprise software vendors acquired one or more search systems. Each has taken steps to integrate search with other enterprise software solutions.
The gap the acquisition of such companies as Autonomy, Exalead, and others is now left to smaller and less well know vendors of search. I don’t want to mention these companies by name, but a quick search of Bing or Google will surface many of the firms vying to become the next $100 million vendor of enterprise search systems.
The first omission is a component which can acquire, normalize, and present textual content in a form the search system can process. For newcomers to enterprise search, the content acquisition process can add significantly to the cost of deploying an enterprise search system. Connectors are available from a number of specialist vendors. Most of the search vendors provide some basic tools for acquiring content. Depending on the organization, the vendor provided tools may be adequate for acquiring documents in text or Web pages in HTML. Other document types may be more problematic. A vendor offering a system which requires documents to be in a supported XML format often emphasizes the system’s ability to slice, dice, parse, and perform certain operations with alacrity. What’s omitted is the time, cost, technical expertise, and work flows required to get content into the search system. Cloud based enterprise search solutions and certain lower cost enterprise search systems leave content to the licensee or offer for fee consulting services to assist with these often complex activities.
Bloomberg and Alleged Two Way Systems
May 11, 2013
Just a small thing, the Bloomberg privacy breach allegations. There are far weightier matters in search; for example, are evaluations and ratings of search vendors objective? Someone on the LinkedIn Enterprise Search Engine Professional Group even raised the possibility that vendors “pay” for coverage in some consultants’ evaluations of technology.
Well, on to the smaller thing which is labeled this way in the New York Times: “Privacy Breach on Bloomberg’s Data Terminals.” You can located the story in the May 11, 2013, edition of the newspaper. If you look online at http://goo.gl/oeMqA you may be able to view the news story. (Google, no promises because I know how you want every blog post to have continuously updated links, but that’s another issue.)
The main idea seems to have originated with a real journalism operation called The New York Post. This point appears in paragraph six, so it is definitely a subordinate point.
As I understand the allegation, Bloomberg tradition terminals had a function which allowed “journalists to monitor subscribers were promptly disabled.” I think that Bloomberg terminals generate some sort of report which allegedly allowed a journalist to determine if someone had used the terminal. The idea is that no use of a terminal suggests that the person has either moved on, lost his or her hands, or experienced an opportunity to find his / her future elsewhere.
How secure are secure systems. Image source: Sandia.gov at http://goo.gl/NaEBE. Modern methods for accessing digital information are difficult to depict. Paper is tangible. Digital data are just “out there.” Humans assume that if it cannot be seen, the problems associated with what’s “out there” are no big deal. Is this an informed viewpoint?
The Atlantic Wire covered the alleged breach in a story called “Why Billions Are at Stake in the Bloomberg Terminal Privacy Problem.” What I found interesting was that the Atlantic Wire pointed out that the breach allegedly allowed a journalist to determine the “news habits” of Bloomberg terminal users. Is this similar to the type of information which online services extract from users’ Web search histories?
A Fresh Look at Big Data
May 8, 2013
Next week I am doing an invited talk in London. My subject is search and Big Data. I will be digging into this notion in this month’s Honk newsletter and adding some business intelligence related comments at an Information Today conference in New York later this month. (I have chopped the number of talks I am giving this year because at my age air travel and the number of 20 somethings at certain programs makes me jumpy.)
I want to highlight one point in my upcoming London talk; namely, the financial challenge which companies face when they embrace Big Data and then want to search the information in the system and search the Big Data system’s outputs.
Here are the simplified curves:
Notice that precision and recall has not improved significantly over the last 30 years. I anticipate that many search vendors will tell me that their systems deliver excellent precision and recall. I am not convinced. The data which I have reviewed show that over a period of 10 years most systems hit the 80 to 85 percent precision and recall level for content which is about a topic. Content collections composed of scientific, technical, and medical information where the terminology is reasonably constrained can do better. I have seen scores above 90 percent. However, for general collections, precision and recall has not been improving relative to the advances in other disciplines; for example, converting structured data outputs to fancy graphics.
HP, Autonomy, and a Context Free Expert Output about Search: The Bet on a Horse Approach to Market Analysis
May 4, 2013
I don’t think too much about:
- Azure chip consultants. You know, these are the firms which make a living from rah rahs, buzzwording, and pontification to sell reports. (I know. I labored at a non-azure chip outfit for what seems like decades. Experience is a good instructor. Oh, if you are a consultant, please, complain about my opinion using the comments section of this free blog.)
- Hewlett Packard. I recall that the company used to make lab equipment which was cool. Now I think the firm is in some other businesses but as quickly as I latch on to one like the Treo and mobile, HP exits the business. The venerable firm confuses my 69 year old mind.
- Autonomy. I think I did some work for the outfit but I cannot recall. Age and the lifestyle in rural Kentucky takes a toll on the memory I admit.
Nevertheless, I read “HP’s Autonomy Could Face Uphill Battle In Data Market.” There were some gems in the write up which I found amusing and illustrative of the problems which azure chip consulting firms and their experts have when tackling certain business issues.
The main idea of the write up for “investors” is that HP faces “challenges.” Okay. That’s a blinding insight. As you may recall, HP bought Autonomy for $11 billion and then a few months later roiled the “investors” by writing off billions on the deal. That was the mobile phone model, wasn’t it?
The write up then pointed out:
HP wanted Autonomy to jump-start its move into software and cloud-based computing. Autonomy is the No. 1 provider of search and retrieval software that companies use to find and share files and other information on their websites and document management systems.
Okay. But that too seems obvious.
Now here comes the kicker. The expert outfit providing inputs to the reporter doing the bull dog grip on this worn out bone is quoted as saying:
“Software license revenue (in this market) isn’t growing at the same rate as before, and we are beginning to see the rise of some new technologies, specifically content analytics and unified information access,” Schubmehl said. These new types of software can be used with types of business analytics software, business intelligence software and other software to help enterprises do a better job of locating specific information, he says, which is the job of search retrieval software.
I don’t know much about IDC but what strikes me from this passage is that there are some assertions in this snippet which may warrant a tiny bit of evaluation.
Will context free analyses deliver a winner? Will there be a Gamblers Anonymous for those who bet on what journalists and mid tier (second string) consultancies promulgate? For more about Gamblers Anonymous navigate to http://www.gamblersanonymous.org/ga/
Here goes:
The Loan, Own, Bankrupt Model for Publishing
April 27, 2013
Author’s Note: I was not going to make a big deal about the death of my father. He had a long, productive life. He was a pal to some heavy hitters in Illinois politics. He had a couple of good jobs. He worked hard. My family, lawyers, and advisors made the tasks associated with this life event less burdensome. There was one problem, however. The Peoria Journal Star failed to publish my father’s obituary on time. I was not going to discuss this procedural failure on the part of GateHouse Media’s newspaper until I read the article in the Wall Street Journal about companies which allegedly loan themselves money and then own the company to which the money was loaned. When the company in the loan-own mode gets into trouble, some financial tap dancing is in order. After reading the Wall Street Journal story, I decided to capture some thoughts. What’s this have to do with search? Two things: Try to find an obituary when it is not in a system is tough. Second, the modern approach to management often leaves the customer adrift. In my opinion, this is not good. Feel free to skip the write up.
Part I: The Financialing
On most days, I don’t think too much about textbook publishing, newspaper publishing, or loaning myself money and then declaring myself bankrupt. Publishing once was an interesting business, but putting ink on paper seems a bit retro for me. Isn’t digital where it is at?
A publisher who hits upon the clever idea of loaning oneself money, spending it, and then going broke is very 2013ish. The notion strikes me as an idea crafted by a couple of MBAs, a handful of attorneys, and a person suffering from sleep deprivation. I thought publishers published. Not now if the Wall Street Journal’s story is any where near accurate.
I read “Buyout Firm Gathers Cengage Debt” in the April 27, 2013 Wall Street Journal, page B2. If you are a savvy MBA you may be able to locate the story at this link. If not, be prepared to pay up. I did. (No, gentle reader of my personal blog, I do not update links in order to curry favor with the Google. You want good links, go elsewhere, please.)
The main point of the story is that an investment/financial type of firm is “both an owner and senior creditor of Cengage.” If you know your history of professional publishing and its wheeling and dealing, Cengage was once a separate firm and then once a chunk of the Thomson Reuters’ outfit. Thomson Reuters is interesting because it has run a number of senior managers though its executive suites and maintained flat revenues and modest profits for several years.
I think the way this owner and creditor thing works is that one part of a big investment/financial outfit buys a stake in something and another part of the big investment/financial outfit loans the recipient of the money some cash. In short, the big investment/financial outfit both owns the recipient of the money and is a creditor who wants money back.
Got that. I sort of do.
Part II: The Unveilingness
But what’s fascinating to me is a series of comments in the original write up and a reference to a publishing company with which I did business on April 9, 2013. Let’s look at these two blips on my aging radar screen.
Here are the quotes I marked in my dead tree copy of the venerable Wall Street Journal, which I think was or is a Rupert Murdoch property:
- “[APAX] the private equity-firm’s potentially conflicting roles as an owner and creditor”. I like the potentially conflicting, don’t you?
- “Some lawyers say wearing both owner and creditor hats can undercut the goals of bankruptcy law.” What are those goals, by the way? Undercut is an interesting word too.
- “By tacking on a debt investment, a private-equity owner can keep control of a company while sometimes using bankruptcy or other means to cut jobs, cancel contracts, or offload pensions and other obligations.” Seems reasonable to take these steps. Hey, it’s just business in 2013.
On April 9, 2013, I arranged for a mortuary to place an obituary for my father in a company mentioned in this April 27, 2013, Wall Street Journal story. The Peoria Journal Star is owned by GateHouse Media, Inc. GateHouse I learned is one of the outfits which may be both a creditor and an owner of properties which are facing financial headwinds. GateHouse Media’s tag line on its Web site says, “We can.”
Well, maybe the company can be listed in the owner-creditor story in the Wall Street Journal. The company may be able to chop staff. And, for sure, the company can mishandle an obituary like nobody’s business.
The Wall Street Journal article pointed out that some firms use various methods to lessen the financial pain. One of them, cited above, is dumping employees. The elegant phrase is “cutting jobs.”
Part III: The Pay Downing
How does this work out in real life?
Well, the Peoria Journal Star’s obituary desk is staffed on what struck me as somewhat loose hours. One person whom I finally reached by calling the City Desk at the Peoria Journal Star said, “I think someone will come in around 9 am.” Another person told me, “There have been many staff reductions at the paper. Most people wear two or three hats.” A bit of Web surfing revealed that the Peoria Journal Star’s obituary “desk” is actually part of the advertising department and that members of the family could not submit obituaries. As it turns out, a member of the family wondering why the obituary did not appear on April 22, 2013, was published only after the mortuary contacted the Peoria Journal Star’s obituary desk a second time on Monday, April 22.
Swinging for the Fences and Search
April 22, 2013
I have been reading—actually time traveling to an economics class in graduate school—David Stockman’s The Great Deformation. I follow the argument. No problem, but I am skeptical of blame from those who were involved in the events. I have been in quite a few crazy meetings, and I avoid discussing the subjects of most of those stories for two reasons: [a] In the midst of events, I had zero clue about the larger, political forces at work in which the meeting was a grain of sand in the larger dust storm and [b] I focus on search and retrieval, a subject definitely not part of the more interesting meetings in which I have participated over the last 40 years.
What impact does the “big bet” approach to investing have on search, content, and analytics vendors?
However, the “deformation” arguments triggered some thinking after I read “Google Investors Say Yes to Big Bets.” I have been looking at some of the reviews of the book. In the Kirkus Review a theme surfaced:
fiscal math hit the shoals,” leaving a legacy of permanent “massive deficit finance” and the legend that “deficits didn’t matter.”
What’s this have to do with search? Well, that is a good question. I took a moment and looked up the venture money which has flowed into a handful of search and content processing companies. Here’s the table in which I captured my result. The link points to the source (maybe a good source, maybe a lousy source).
| Company | Venture Funding | Year Founded |
| Attivio | $48.2 million | 2007 |
| BA Insight | $10.5 million | 2004 |
| Coveo | $34.7 million | 2004 |
| Digital Reasoning* | $5.2 million | 2000 |
| Palantir ** | $301 million | 2004 |
| Vivisimo | $4 million | 2008 |
* The Digital Reasoning number includes In-Q-Tel funding excludes friends, angels, and family funding
** I included Palantir because in one briefing the system was presented as having a robust search function available to analyst users.
If I total these numbers, I get $403.6 million. Tossing out the astounding $301 million for Palantir, the more “searchy” vendors’ funding in this sample total $102.6 million.
Several questions rose in my mind:
First, in today’s economy, how will these firms return to investors their money, interest, and a profit?
Game Over Mode: Consumers and Searching
April 4, 2013
This morning I read “As Web Search Goes Mobile, Competitors Chip at Google’s Lead.” Keep in mind that when the link goes dead you will need the paper edition of the story on pages A 1 and A 4 of the April 4, 2013 issue or a for fee password to the New York Times’s online service.)
The main point is that mobile is surging. For many reasons, mobile search does not work the way desktop search and Web surfing worked when Backrub was bubbling toward Google. The article identifies the geolocation trend where coordinates coupled with some data about user behavior can deliver a place to buy coffee.
The article then says:
No longer do consumers want to search the Web like the index of a book — finding links at which a particular keyword appears. They expect new kinds of customized search, like that on topical sites such as Yelp, TripAdvisor or Amazon, which are chipping away at Google’s hold. Google and its competitors are trying to develop the knowledge and comprehension to answer specific queries, not just point users in the right direction.
The story then points out that there are 30 trillion Web address which is definitely quite a few places to index content. Searching a massive index with 2.5 words just does not work for “consumers.”
The story identifies social systems which put a person closer to someone or some information from someone which answers the user’s question. The wrap up to the article quotes a Google “fellow” who correctly states a Google truism:
“Most people have this very strong Google habit,” he said. “I go there every day and it gives me information I want, so it’s a self-reinforcing cycle. Not anyone can come in and just do those things.”
So what exactly is happening in consumer search? Outfits like Amazon and LinkedIn look like they are growing and presumably taking traffic from Google. On the other hand, Google seems confident that its market share and its remarkable diversity of ways to present information to users is in pretty good shape. Is this a chess-type draw, a paradox, or an analysis which makes search almost impossible to discuss without getting lost in clicks, segments, traffic, and user behavior data?
My view is that search has become a word which is acceptable in some circles and the equivalent of a curse word in others. Consumer wants answers to questions, and according to some experts, answers to questions the user does not know she yet has formulated. Vendors want revenue. Advertisers want people to buy their products and services. Teens want whatever teens want. Each tiny grouping of online users which can be labeled has search needs.
The problem is that figuring out exactly what the “need” is in a specific context is a field where further research and innovation are needed.
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