Google Microsoft Battles: Tactics for 2011
January 1, 2011
“The 10 Bloodiest Battles Microsoft and Google Fought in 2010” provides a good run down of the most visible dust ups between the two giants. The write up covers legal hassles between the two companies and the more interesting squabbles about how office workers should access their fact-filled, action-packed PowerPoints, Word files, and Excel sheets. Two points of conflict that stand out in my opinion is the struggle for US government contracts and cloud services.
My take on the fights is that this article as well as most of the others written to explain what Google is doing and what Microsoft is doing are missing the main point. What is the main point? Google does not have to win any battle. In fact, since 2005—based on my research—Google has been implementing the “death by 1,000 cuts” strategy. (The illustration shows a whimsical kitchen knife block which reminded me of the “tiny cuts method.” I saw this kitchen gizmo at a holiday party last weekend.)
Google and its surgical approach to challenging Microsoft. Image source: http://slashcool.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/voodooknifeblock.jpg
Microsoft depends on revenue from slapping Windows operating system license fees on PCs, netbooks, and notebook computers. Microsoft also has done a great job of getting Windows servers and enterprise software into organizations behind the foot soldiers with Microsoft certification. Like the Oracle database administrators, those certified professionals depend on Microsoft to pay the bills. In other sectors, Microsoft has turned in a mixed record.
The Google is wise enough to know that distraction exacerbates Microsoft’s organizational methods will continue to operate in their traditional manner. Need I mention the Kin as the exemplar of the outputs of the Microsoft system? Google, therefore, takes small steps like offering a cloud based alternative to Microsoft Office for a low ball price. Microsoft reacts and rolls out a product that is more expensive. Go figure.
Repositioning Search: A Cultural Shift for BI
December 28, 2010
I am in the baloney business, and I have no problem making clear my professional life. Sure, a few products made a couple of bucks, but I was trained in the consulting business by some good mentors at Halliburton Nuclear Utility Services and Booz, Allen & Hamilton. Consequently, my baloney recognition system works reasonably well. Today, I find, it lights up frequently. Recent examples include:
- A 20 something wishing good luck in my career. The lass did not know that I am 66 and at the end of a long, dismal career. Things won’t get much better in my opinion.
- A CEO who just wanted to chat, brushing aside my reminder that I charge for my time.
- A VP of technology at a Fortune 100 company wanting me to provide competitive profiles on a number of companies in the text processing sector. The communication problem was that I did not want to work for that firm on its bureaucratically polished terms.
This post focuses on some business recommendations that, I suppose, are relatively harmless. Nevertheless, I found the write up fascinating because it has the potential to perpetuate some methods that are almost certain to increase costs and yet another failed information access system. Let’s begin.
Baloney As Knowledge and Insight
I found “Business Intelligence Programmes Should Be Viewed As a Cultural Transformation” interesting and wildly out of touch with the reality in many US organizations. That reality, as you know from the opening paragraphs, goes through the motions of resolving a problem and often creates a great cost black hole. The problem? Unsolved so the cycle begins again.
The write up reports on three actions to address a problem with business intelligence. Note that the definition of “business intelligence” is not included, so the reader is supposed to “know” what “business intelligence” is. Hmm.
What’s the article recommend?
Three actions, each oh-so-easy to convert to business platitudes.
First deliver “the right information to the right people.” Okay, but what if one does not know what information is available or if it is correct. Once that has been addressed, who are the right people. Most organizations have had some staff reductions. Who needs what? Good question and one that is often not answered in a way helpful to the people trying to level up to a business intelligence system.
Second, “change the mindset” in order to answer the “right questions”. Okay, but what happens if we don’t know what questions to ask because our view of the information is limited or just incorrect. What if the company allows professionals to make decisions without worrying about checking with the boss on every matter?
Finally, “create a project team based on information needs.” Great idea, but the reality of organizations is that if the view of the information available is incorrect and the questions the team wants answered are wrong, how will the project team be the “right team” for the task.
Looks like a recipe for management disaster. In fact, the present economic problems many organizations face are a result of this type of second-class thinking. The use of a fuzzy term to replace a now discredited and equally fuzzy term is part of the problem.
Enterprise Search: Baloney Six Ways, like Herring
December 21, 2010
When my team and I discussed my write up about the shift of some vendors from search to business intelligence, quite a bit of discussion ensued.
The idea that a struggling vendor of search—most often an outfit with older technology—“reinvents” itself as a purveyor of business intelligence systems—is common evoked some strong reactions.
One side of the argument was that an established set of methods for indexing unstructured content could be extended. The words used to describe this digital alchemy were Web services, connectors, widgets, and federated content. Now these are or were useful terms. But what happens is that the synthetic nature of English makes it easy to use familiar sounding words in a way to perform an end run around the casual listener’s mental filters. It is just not polite to ask a vendor to define a phrase like business intelligence. The way people react is to nod in a knowing manner and say “for sure” or “I’ve got it.”
Have you taken steps to see through the baloney passed off as enterprise search, business intelligence, and knowledge management?
The other side of the argument was that companies are no longer will to pay big money for key word retrieval. The information challenge requires a rethink of what information is available within and to an organization. Then a system developed to “unlock the nuggets” in that treasure trove is needed. This side of the argument points to the use of systems developed for certain government agencies. The idea is that a person wanting to know which supplier delivers the components with the fewest defects needs an entirely different type of system. I understand this side of the argument. I am not sure that I agree but I have heard this case so often, the USB with the MP3 of the business intelligence sound file just runs.
As we approach 2011, I think a different way to look at the information access options is needed. To that end, I have created a tabular representation of information access. I call the table and its content “The Baloney Scorecard, 2011.”
Repositioning 2011: The Mad Scramble
December 15, 2010
Yep, the new year fast approaches. Time to turn one’s thoughts to vendors of search, content processing, data fusion, text mining, and—who could forget?—knowledge management. In the last two weeks, I have done several live-and-in-person briefings about ArnoldIT.com’s views on enterprise search and related disciplines.
Today enterprise search has become what I call an elastic concept. It is stretched over a baker’s dozen of quite divergent information retrieval concepts. Examples range from the old bugaboo of many companies customer support to the effervescence of knowledge management. In between the hard realities of the costs of support actual customers and the frothy topping of “knowledge”.
Several trends are pushing through the fractured landscape of information retrieval. Like earthquakes, the effects can vary significantly depending on one’s position at the time of the event.
Source: http://www.sportsnet.ca/gallery/2009/12/30/scramble_gal_640.jpg
Search can looked at in different ways. One can focus on a particular problem; for example, content management system repositories. The challenge is to find information in these systems. One would think that after years of making Web pages, the problem would be solved. Apparently not. CMS with embedded search stubs trigger some grousing in most of the organizations with which I am familiar. Search works, just not exactly as the users expect. A vendor of search technology can position the search solution as one that makes it easy for users to locate information in a CMS. This is, of course, the pitch of numerous Microsoft Certified Gold resellers of various types of search solutions, utilities, and work arounds. This an example of a search market defined by the type of enterprise system that creates a retrieval problem.
Other problems for search crop up when specific rules and regulations mandate a particular type of information processing. One example is the eDiscovery market. Anyone can be sued, and eDiscovery systems have to make content findable, but the users of an eDiscovery system have quite particular needs. One example is bookkeeping so that the time and search process can be documented and provided upon request under certain conditions.
Social media has created a new type of problem. One can take a specific industry sector such as the Madison Avenue crowd and apply information technology to the social media problem. The idea is for a search system to “harvest” data from social content sources like Facebook or Twitter, process the text which can be ambiguous, and generate information about how the people creating Facebook messages or tweets perceive a product, person, ad, or some other activity for the advertising team. The idea is that search unlocks hidden information. The Mad Ave crowd thinks in terms of nuggets of information that will allow the ad team to upsell the advertiser. Search is doing search work but the object of the exercise is to make sense out of content streams that are too voluminous for a single person to read. This type of search market—which may not be classic search and retrieval at all—is closer to what various intelligence agencies want software to do to transcribed phone calls, email, and general information from a range of sources.
Let’s stop with the examples of information access problems already. There are more information access problems than at any other time, and I want to move on to the impact of these quite diverse problems upon vendors in 2011.
Now let’s take a vendor that has a search system that can index Word documents, email, and content found in most office environments. Nothing tricky like product specifications, chemical structures, or the data in the R&D department’s lab notebooks. For mainstream search, here is the problem:
Commoditization
Right now (now pun on the vendor of customer support solutions by the way) anyone can download an open source search solution. It helps if the person downloading Lucene, Solr, or one of the other open source solutions has a technical bent. If not, a local university’s computer science department can provide a student to do the installation and get the system up and running. If the part time contracting approach won’t work, you can hire a company specializing in open source to do the work. There are dozens of these outfits bouncing around.
Microsoft, the US Treasury, and Search
December 9, 2010
The new Microsoft-based Treasury.gov Web site works pretty well. Pictures flash, the links work, and the lay out is reasonably clear. There is the normal challenge of government jargon. So “Help, I am going to lose my home” becomes “Homeowner’s HOPE Hotline”.
I am interested in search and retrieval. I wanted to run through my preliminary impressions of the search interface, system responsiveness, and the relevance of the queries. I look at public facing search services differently from most people’s angle of attack. Spare me direct complaints via email. Just put your criticisms, cautions, and comments in the form provided at the foot of this Web page.
Search Interface
The basic search box is in the top right hand corner of the splash page. No problem, and when I navigate to other pages in the Web site, the search box stays put. However, when I click on some links I am whisked outside of the Treasury.gov site and the shift is problematic. No search box on some pages. Here’s an example: http://www.makinghomeaffordable.gov/index.html. Remember my example from the HOPE Hotline reference? Well, that query did not surface content gold on Treasury.gov. I went somewhere else, and I was confused. This probably is a problem peculiar to me, but I found it disconcerting.
Other queries I ran a query for “Treasury Hunt,” a service that allows me to determine if a former Arnold left money or “issues” for me. Here’s the result screen for the query “Treasury Hunt”:
The first hit in the result list points to this page:
The problem is that the hot link from this page points to this Web site, which I could not locate in the results list.
Several observations:
First, the response time for the system was sluggish, probably two seconds, which was longer than Google’s response time. No big deal, just saying “slower.”
Second, the results list did not return the expected hit. For most people, this makes zero difference. For me, I found the lack of matching hits to explicit links interesting. In fact, I assumed that the results list would have the TreasuryDirect hit at the top of the results list. Not wrong, just not what I expected.
Digital Reasoning Unleashes Synthesys Version 3
December 6, 2010
Our sister publication covers the dynamic world of data fusion and next generation analytics. I wanted to call your attention of an interview with Tim Estes, the founder of Digital Reasoning. The company has announced a new version of the firm’s Synthesys product. You can read a complete, far ranging interview with Mr. Estes in the Search Wizards Speak series at this link. Our analyses of the Digital Reasoning technology are most encouraging.
Here’s a snippet of the interview’s contents from the Inteltrax story which ran earlier today:
“Synthesys V3.0 provides a horizontally scalable solution for entity identification, resolution, and analysis from unstructured and structured data behind the firewall,” Estes said when asked about Digital Reasoning’s new offering. “Our customers are primarily in the defense and intelligence market at this point so we have focused on an architecture that is pure software and can run on a variety of server architectures.” In addition, the program is ripe with features that are miles beyond previous versions. “We’ve enhanced and improved the core language processing in dramatic ways. For example, there is more robustness against noisy and dirty data. And we have provided better analytics quality. We have also integrated fully with Hadoop for horizontal scale. We probably have one of the most flexible and scalable text processing architectures on the market today.”
While the company still works heavily with the government, Synthesys technology will benefit several other fields. “We are getting good bit of interest from companies that need what I call ‘big data analytics’ for financial services, legal eDiscovery, health care, and media tasks.” For example, the program: “can identify the who and the what, map the connections, and deliver the key insights.” Estes continues, “instead of clicking on links and scanning documents for information, Synthesys Version 3.0 moves the user from reading a ranked or filtered set of documents to a direct visual set of facts and relationships that are all linked back to the key contexts in documents or databases. One click and the user has the exact fact. Days and hours become minutes and seconds.”
Google Gives Advice to Facebook
November 15, 2010
No, really. Googlers are telling Facebook what to do to become more social. This comes from the outfit that rolled out Orkut to the delight of certain interesting user communities in Brazil and Buzz to the annoyance of many users. Google had to pay a fine for its social sensitivity over that “Buzz” saw.
This is a metaphor for the Facebook parade. Why doesn’t Google have a band or a float or some twirlers in this spectacle?
Not surprisingly, Google executives continue to amuse this silly goose. Usually former English majors and mid-tier consulting firms crank out management malarkey. But Google is playing this game as well. I think it may be construed as further evidence that Google has begun to show its shrewish side, navigate to “Apps Must Be More Social, Says Google’s Barra.” The main point of the write up is that Google wants applications to be more social. This from the Math Club! Here’s the passage about the Googler’s presentation that caught my attention:
Social media should be an integral part of any app, and personalization will be a key to success, says Hugo Barra, Google director of mobile product management. At this year’s Monaco Media Forum, he refuted speculation Google would be launching its own social network platform, adding, “But we do think social is an ingredient for success for any app going forward. So we’re seeing social more as an ingredient rather than a vertical platform play.” He said personalization would be “absolutely huge” and “being able to relate the different signals that users give you, whether on Facebook or Google, will be a key to success”.
I need to waddle from the goose pond to the shore to think about this.
First, isn’t Google the company that is paying employees to refrain from quitting their job at Google. The numbers I recall are $1,000 and a 10 percent raise for the average wizard and 30 percent raise for the ultra wizard to stay. But the ultimo wizard was offered $3.5 million. Now that’s a management decision that warrants consideration? Google seems to believe that money buys happiness or at least keeping people from abandoning ship? Here’s a question, “Is purchased “love” the same as “real” love?”
Second, hasn’t the Google demonstrated that its interpersonal skills have annoyed some government procurement professionals and the US television broadcasters?
Search Vendors and Mad Men
November 8, 2010
What’s on the horizon for search and content processing companies? When it comes to marketing, there are changes afoot. I want to highlight some marketing methods that don’t work too well and identify three that seem to be working for certain vendors. Azurini, take note. Some of these methods involve your selling contacts in the guise of objective analysis. Believe it or not, you are now more Madison Avenue than most professionals understand.
My hunch is that you, gentle reader, are immersed in the excitement of every day life. You get a paycheck or send an invoice to a sugar daddy client. Life is reasonably good. Just don’t peer too far down the Road to Tomorrow is my advice.
Who can omit the lucky individuals who have to meet payroll, keep vulture capitalists high in the sky, and cope with the Peter Principle experience a different type of thrill. That thrill is the adrenaline rush of avoiding failure, ridicule, and becoming a bit on the Colbert Report.
As the search and content processing sector limps toward 2011, the challenge of generating big revenue looms larger. Maybe the proposed $600 billion in borrowed dollars will turn the trick?
Here’s what I have observed in 2010 about marketing search and content processing systems. These activities seem to be less effective than they were a year or two ago.
- Web site traffic. Vendors get really defensive when one looks at the traffic to search vendors’ Web sites. I know the usage states are wrong, but the data do indicate general trends. The trend I see is that traffic to the top 50 search and content processing vendors I track more closely than the 250 I monitor via Overflight is that Web site traffic is not so hot. Our review showed most Web sites have fewer uniques than this Web log. Run your own tests at www.compete.com. The situation is probably going to get worse in 2011, so that investment may not deliver a pay back beyond brochureware a person may stumble upon despite Google Instant.
- Web logs. These are not working. My Overflight system makes it dead easy to spot vendors with Web logs and the poor track record in updating the content with new posts and corrections. Blogs seem so easy to do, yet are beyond the reach of most search and content processing companies. Consulting firms like 451 and Gartner benefit because their services shift the content burden and the traffic acquisition from the search vendor to the marketing “experts”.
- Big trade show booths. Wow, these are expensive. One vendor told me that qualified sales leads are difficult to find at trade shows. Some types of events do work, but the 1980s style approach is a bit like wearing spurs when I drive a rental car.
- Terminology. I am not sure what some vendors are selling. The buzzwords are an effort to communicate. Most of the explanations from vendors are so similar I could cut and paste paragraphs from different collateral and most people would not notice. How about “information optimization” or “business intelligence”. So easy to say. So fuzzy today.
Misunderstanding Facebook?
November 5, 2010
I just read “Big Deal: Facebook emerges as Major Player in Mobile and Location-Based Services.” In a sense, I agree with the write up. On the other hand, I think that the article is one of those summer stock efforts. You know the play was written by Shakespeare, but what the heck happened to make Act II so confusing.
Here’s a passage that resonated with me:
As context for all of this the company said it has an active mobile user base of 200 million people (out of more than 500 million total users). It doesn’t break out US vs. non-US numbers — though I’d bet the majority are in North America. If even half of those users are in the US it would make Facebook as large as Verizon. The difference is that Facebook’s members are much more engaged.
There are two really important points embedded in this snippet of text, and I want to highlight those and show why Facebook is in a state of increasing misunderstanding among the azurini.
The two words:
Active
Member
These two words are a very big deal, even bigger than mobile. Here’s my view.
Facebook creates a perception of this type of environment. This is not like using the services provided from the local electric or water company.
Word one: Active. As a touch point, consider the Google. Google has lots of users. The users navigate to a Web page, do something, and hit the trail. I know that lots of Google users provide some information about themselves and that lots of Google users rely on various Google services. I rely on the electric and water company, but I don’t spend what my boss at Booz, Allen used to call “quality time.” Google and some other services are like plumbing. Essential—I don’t talk about it at lunch. Facebook users are active. Active means habitual access. Habits in online behavior are good. But a habit like using an electric light are hard to break, but they are still utilitarian functions. Part of the woodwork. Have you hugged your door frame today?
Anti Search in 2011
November 1, 2010
In a recent meeting, several of the participants were charged with disinformation from the azurini.
You know. Azurini, the consultants.
Some of these were English majors, others former print journalists, and some unemployed search engine optimization experts smoked by Google Instant.
But mostly the azurini emphasize that their core competency is search, content management, or information governance (whatever the heck that means). In a month or so, there will be a flood of trend write ups. When the Roman god looks to his left and right, the signal for prognostication flashes through the fabric covered cube farms.
To get ahead of the azurini, the addled goose wants to identify the trends in anti search for 2011. Yep, anti search. Remember that in a Searcher article several years ago, I asserted that search was dead. No one believed me, of course. Instead of digging into the problems that ranged from hostile users to the financial meltdown of some high profile enterprise search vendors, search was the big deal.
And why not? No one can do a lick of work today unless that person can locate a document or “find” something to jump start activity. In a restaurant, people talk less and commune with their mobile devices. Search is on a par with food, a situation that Maslow would find interesting.
The idea for this write up emerged from a meeting a couple of weeks ago. The attendees were trying to figure out how to enhance an existing enterprise search system in order to improve the productivity of the business. The goal was admirable, but the company was struggling to generate revenues and reduce costs.The talk was about search but the subtext was survival.
The needs for the next generation search system included:
- A great user experience
- An iPad app to deliver needed information
- Seamless access to Web and Intranet information
- Google-like performance
- Improved indexing and metatagging
- Access to database content and unstructured information like email.
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