Open Source May Be Disruptive
August 16, 2010
I do not know much about software, information, or the big-time doings of corporate giants. I am not an azurini, a self-appointed poobah, or the cat’s paw of a group of 20-something MBAs from schools that require a great family and a high IQ. I am an addled goose. I float around in a pond filled with mine drainage water and offer some humble observations which the great and powerful dismiss as silly, irrelevant, or just plain incorrect.
No problemo.
However, even the intellectual black hole of the addled goose’s analytic muck pond can figure out from two articles that open source is scaring the heck out of a really tough, superstar executive.
You make your own decision about the accuracy and significance of these two news stories:
First, point your browser thingy with monitoring functions activated so those watching know you really did navigate to a “real” news source and read “Oracle Kills Open Solaris, Moves Development behind Closed Doors.” The idea is pretty easy to understand. Those super-marketers at Sun Microsystems gave away an operating system as open source. Nope. Oracle’s Larry Ellison and his sharp-pencil crowd shut that door. The reason? Open source equals bad business. “Bad”, I presume, means a threat to Oracle’s pricing tactics. Free and Oracle are not words that I associate when I hear the word “Oracle.”
A happy quack to http://jordanhall.co.uk/general-articles/dont-be-evil-licensing-1301401/ for this great illustration.
Second, Oracle is suing Google over its use of Java. Now Java is sort of a piggy, but, hey, lots of universities teach Java, and it can be quite useful when running in today’s nifty hardware environments. Overlook those flaws which have been documented in some detail in the Software Engineering podcasts at www.se-radio.net. Notice: SE-Radio is not exactly an Adam Carolla Leo LaPorte type podcast. You can get some information about the this tussle between two former bosom buddies by tapping to “Initial thoughts on Oracle vs Google Patent Lawsuit.” Yep, those are links to patent documents, so I don’t think the skimmers among my readers will invest much dwell time on the Tirania post.
Nevertheless, the headlines may be enough for a “real” azure chip consultant. The details are murky and former English majors and sociology minors won’t spend too much time doing the analysis a “real” poobah does.
Let me Cliff Notes it: Larry Ellison is a smart, rich person. He understands that open source is a problem for a company like Oracle that charges really big fees for its software. Open source with its unruly developers and hard-to-make-do-push-ups work ethic are the enemy. The fix. Kill open source. If total annihilation is not possible, make open source expensive in terms of legal fees. The way law works for rich people is that a rich person’s lawyers can make a less rich person spend lots of time fighting the rich person’s legal actions. Eventually money wins, particularly when there are fuzzy wuzzy ideas like open source, intellectual property, and rich people arguing as the main action.
There is just one snag. Even rich people have trouble keeping those peasants under control. For my readers who stayed awake during world history, you know that lots of peasants with sticks and rocks can be a real problem. Honk off enough peasants, and the excitement can end in a revolution.
At this moment in the capitalistic, free market sun:
- Lots of companies are strapped for cash. Free is pretty darned appealing when you have to decide how to pay the light bill, the actress assisting the company at a trade show, and paying the lease on a new Bimmer.
- Open source is pretty good, and there are some robust solutions available with the click of a mouse. Examples include Drupal, Hadoop, Lucene/Solr and * lots * more.
- The open source stuff is fun. Training and certification for Oracle or other “carrier class” enterprise solutions are not as much fun as blasting around the lake on a jet ski at 30 knots.
If I focus on relational databases, I am in a Roman ruin. You can see or at least imagine the splendor of the structure. But rebuilding it after a crash and getting it back to the “way it was” is just too much work, too expensive, and too labor intensive. Why not build a new structure, using the tips and methods that HGTV puts on display each night on my local cable channel. Need a granite counter top and have neither money, stone cutting tools, nor expertise. Hey, just shoot over to Home Depot and get an epoxy alternative. That’s the open source approach: New materials, new methods, and new benefits.
Roman ruin. What’s the cost of a rebuild and then upkeep? How do you modify a limestone flying balcony? You don’t. Get some slaves.
Minority Report and Reality: The Google and In-Q-Tel Play
August 9, 2010
Unlike the film “Minority Report”, predictive analytics are here and now. More surprising to me is that most people don’t realize that the methods are in the cateogry of “been there, done that.”
I don’t want to provide too much detail about predictive methods applied to military and law enforcement. Let me remind you, gentle reader, that using numerical recipes to figure out what is likely to happen is an old, old discipline. Keep in mind that the links in this post may go dead at any time, particularly the link to the Chinese write up.
There are companies who have been grinding away in this field for a long time. I worked at an outfit that had a “pretzel factory”. We did not make snacks; we made predictions along with some other goodies.
In this blog I have mentioned over time companies who operate in this sector; for example, Kroll, recently acquired by Altegrity and Fetch Technologies. Now that’s a household name in Sioux City and Seattle. I have even mentioned a project on which I worked which you can ping at www.tosig.com. Other hints and clues are scattered like wacky Johnny Appleseed trees. I don’t plan on pulling these threads together in a free blog post.
© RecordedFuture, 2010. Source: http://www.analysisintelligence.com/
I can direct your attention to the public announcement that RecordedFuture has received some financial Tiger Milk from In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of one of the US government entities. Good old Google via its ventures arm has added some cinnamon to the predictive analytics smoothie. You can get an acceptable run down in Wired’s “Exclusive: Google, CIA Invest in ‘Future’ of Web Monitoring.” I think you want to have your “real journalist” baloney detector on because In-Q-Tel invested in RecordedFuture in January 2010, a fact disclosed on the In-Q-Tel Web site many moons ago. RecordedFuture also has a Web site at www.recordedfuture.com, rich with marketing mumbo jumbo, a video, and some semi-useful examples of what the company does. I will leave the public Web site to readers with some time to burn. If you want to get an attention deficit disorder injection, here you go:
The Web contains a vast amount of unstructured information. Web users access specific content of interest with a variety of Websites supporting unstructured search. The unstructured search approaches clearly provide tremendous value but are unable to address a variety of classes of search. RecordedFuture is aggregating a variety of Web-based news and information sources and developing semantic context enabling more structured classes of search. In this presentation, we present initial methods for accessing and analyzing this structured content. The RJSONIO package is used to form queries and manage response data. Analytic approaches for the extracted content include normalization and regression approaches. R-based visualization approaches are complemented with data presentation capabilities of Spotfire.
Taxodiary: At Last a Taxonomy News Service
August 3, 2010
I have tried to write about taxonomies, ontologies, and controlled term lists. I will be the first to admit that my approach has been to comment on the faux pundits, the so-called experts, and the azurini (self appointed experts in metatagging and indexing). The problem with the existing content flowing through the datasphere is that it is uninformed.
What makes commentary about tagging informed? Three attributes. First, I expect those who write about taxonomies to have built commercially-successful systems to manage terms lists and that those term lists are in wide use, conform to standards from ISO, ANSI, and similar outfits. Second, I expect those running the company to have broad experience in tagging for serious subjects, not the baloney that smacks of search engine optimization and snookering humans and algorithms with their alleged cleverness. Third, I expect the systems used to build taxonomies, manage classification schemes, and term lists to work; that is, a user can figure out how to get information out of a system relevant to his / her query.
Splash page for the Taxodiary news and information service.
How rare are these attributes?
Darned rare. When I worked on ABI/INFORM, Business Dateline, and the other database products, I relied on two people to guide my team and me. The first person is Betty Eddison, one of the leaders in indexing. May she rest in indexing heaven where SEO is confined to Hell. Betty was one of the founders of InMagic, a company on whose board I served for several years. Top notch. Care to argue? Get ready for a rumble, gentle reader.
The second person was Margie Hlava. Now Ms. Hlava, like Ms. Eddison, is one of the top guns in indexing. In fact, I would assert that she is on my yardstick either at the top or holds the top spot in this discipline. Please, keep in mind that her company Access Innovations and her partner Dr. Jay ven Eman are included in my reference to Ms. Hlava. How good is Ms. Hlava? Very good saith the goose.
Recommendation Engines May Engineer the Soul
July 29, 2010
“Recommendation engines aren’t designed to give us what we want. They’re designed to give us what they think we want, “ says Lev Grossman in his recent Time Magazine article, If You Liked This… . And that’s the crux of the difference between recommendation engines and perfection.
In my perfect world, I would open a retail store called “YOU” and you would shop there all the time because every product in the store would suit your taste. I would use your buying habits to build my inventory. You would spend almost all of your money in my store. You would be happy and I would be rich. Fair trade.
In a sense, that’s what recommendation engines do. They use what you’ve already purchased to guess what you might like to buy next… and they offer it to you immediately. It’s you recommending something to yourself with the computer as an intermediary.
Word of mouth from a friend is, by far, the most relied upon source of confidence, says a recent survey. Statistically, almost 90% of us trust a friend’s recommendation to some degree. So wouldn’t you assume that, by being your own best friend, you couldn’t go wrong? You know the answer to that loaded question.
“The trouble with recommendation engines,” says the author, “is that they’re really hard to build. They look simple on the outside—if you liked X, you’ll love Y—but they’re actually doing something fiendishly complex. They’re processing astounding quantities of data and doing so with seriously high-level math. That’s because they’re attempting to second-guess a mysterious, perverse and profoundly human form of behavior: the personal response to a work of art. They’re trying to reverse-engine the soul.”
Technology can engineer one’s soul directly or indirectly, the addled goose assumes. Source: http://www.gizmowatch.com/images/bci_48.jpg
A lot of companies are trying hard to link one preference to others but, unlike the alphabet, human beings just don’t go from A to B to infinity and beyond in any algorithmically defined order.
Pandora, Netflix, Amazon, Facebook, eHarmony, MySpace and the like are tying hard to get it right. Industry studies show that about a third of us buyers choose another selection from the recommendations, so the value is obvious to both merchant and buyer. But getting it right is proving much more problematic than anyone thought.
Social Media Disappoints Some
July 27, 2010
For the very first time, social media has been rated on the ACSI E-business report that scores customer satisfaction in a number of areas including social media sites as well as search engines and portals and the results are a less than favorable. Is the social media apple harboring an ugly worm?
The report from ForeSee Results scores social media low on the scale but notes at the same time that Web sites like Facebook can still enjoy a monopoly with abysmal customer satisfaction ratings. While a score in the report of lower than 70 is considered poor, Facebook only managed to get a 64. It should be no surprise that customers who inked their concerns about Facebook put privacy and security issues at the forefront. (Keep in mind that the goslings at Beyond Search have some concerns about pop up, in your face surveys. We dismiss these as annoying intrusions. Thus, the samples on which the results are based may contain a bias that makes these data as wacky as the addled goose when he goes without sleep.)
The Daily HaHa nailed the goslings reaction to both the pop up data collection method and the findings reported by ForeSee. Source: http://www.dailyhaha.com/_pics/gift_of_disappointment.jpg
On the other side of that fence was Wikipedia that had a score of 77. As far as the news and information sites went there was a constant mean score of 74. It’s also interesting to note that while Google’s overall score stayed high , it suffered an overall decline of seven per cent. (Keep in mind the nature of the sample and the omission of the margins of error.)
Still, the social media scores are the alleged big story since they entered the rating system for the first time. The ForeSee Results Annual E-Business Report with the ACSI had some interesting assertions based on numbers for social media including:
- The ACSI measured 30 online companies and MySpace and Facebook were the lowest scoring sites. (This is interesting since Facebook recently passed 500 million members and MySpace has been either stable or in decline for years.)
- The customer satisfaction issues with Facebook are generally age related. Older people were generally more critical of the site than younger people. (In the absence of demographic anchor data, perhaps older folks are judging Facebook on factors not queried in the survey questions via the pop up? Perhaps those filling in pop ups were biased to be more critical? Hard to tell because the report seems to have an knife to sharpen in our opinion.)
Tech Giants Trade Punishing Verbal Hooks
July 19, 2010
The addled goose and the goslings enjoy watching humanoids who make lots of money tussle. It is even more enjoyable when the squabble involves technical giants. Here’s the latest Silicon Valley death match. In the aptly titled Larry Page Calls Steve Jobs a ‘Little Bit’ of a Liar, the acrimony is more frightening than Muhammad Ali’s remarks in the run up news conference for the Thrilla in Manila dust up with Smokin’ Joe Frazier. Personally I think Mr. Page and Mr. Jobs are more intimidating to an addled goose. (One of Mr. Ali’s relatives works with the addled goose, and I think she would be terrified of these tech titans’ blows too.)
Image source: http://blogs.dallasobserver.com/sportatorium/DWTS%20-%20AliFrazier.jpg
Mr. Page, a math black belt, says that he doesn’t believe the tech terminator’s assertion that Google created the Android after the iPhone became a success of the iPhone. In fact the math black belt suggests Mr. Jobs is engaging in an activity that is a ‘little bit like rewriting history.’ I had a teacher who later became an Illinois Congressman. Dr. Phil Crane asserted that Joseph Stalin did the same thing with certain textbooks as part of much-needed revisionism.
And those Illinois elected officials. Paragons.
According to the aforementioned Gizmodo.com article, one could see the Android as somewhat similar to the iPhone. Coincidence? The addled goose is frightened and cannot think clearly. The whole thing has an air of
Excellent wretch! Perdition catch my soul
But I do love thee! and when I love thee not,
Chaos is come again.
Fascinating.
Stephen E Arnold, July 19, 2010
Freebie
Google Metaweb Deal Points to Possible Engineering Issue
July 19, 2010
Years ago, I wrote a BearStearns’ white paper “Google’s Semantic Web: the Radical Change Coming to Search and the Profound Implications to Yahoo & Microsoft,” May 16, 2007, about the work of Epinions’ founder, Dr. Ramanathan Guha. Dr. Guha bounced from big outfit to big outfit, landing at Google after a stint at IBM Almaden. My BearStearns’ report focused on an interesting series of patent applications filed in February 2007. The five patent applications were published on the same day. These are now popping out of the ever efficient USPTO as granted patents.
A close reading of the Guha February 2007 patent applications and other Google technical papers make clear that Google had a keen interest in semantic methods. The company’s acquisition of Transformics at about the same time as Dr. Guha’s jump to the Google was another out-of-spectrum signal for most Google watchers.
With Dr. Guha’s Programmable Search Engine inventions and Dr. Alon Halevy’s dataspace methods, Google seemed poised to take over the floundering semantic Web movement. I recall seeing Google classification methods applied in a recipe demo, a headache demo, and a real estate demo. Some of these demos made use of entities; for example, “skin cancer” and “chicken soup”.
Has Google become a one trick pony? The buy-technology trick? Can the Google pony learn the diversify and grow new revenue tricks before it’s time for the glue factory?
In 2006, signals I saw flashed green, and it sure looked as if Google could speed down the Information Highway 101 in its semantic supercar.
Is Metaweb a Turning Point for Google Technology?
What happened?
We know from the cartwheels Web wizards are turning, Google purchased computer Zen master Danny Hillis’ Metaweb business. Metaweb, known mostly to the information retrieval and semantic Web crowd, produced a giant controlled term list of people, places, and things. The Freebase knowledgebase is a next generation open source term list. You can get some useful technical details from the 2007 “On Danny Hillis, eLearning, Freebase, Metaweb, Semantic Web and Web 3.0” and from the Wikipedia Metaweb entry here.
What has been missing in the extensive commentary available to me in my Overflight service is some thinking about what went right or wrong with Google’s investments and research in closely adjacent technologies. Please, keep in mind that the addled goose is offering his observations based on his research for this three Google monographs, The Google Legacy, Google Version 2.0, and Google: the Digital Gutenberg. If you want to honk back, use the comments section of this Web log.
First, Google should be in a position to tap its existing metadata and classification systems such as the Guha context server and the Halevy dataspace method for entities. Failing these methods, Google has its user input methods like Knol and its hugely informative search query usage logs to generate a list of entities. Heck, there is even the disambiguation system to make sense of misspellings of people like Britney Spears. I heard a Googler give a talk in which the factoid about hundreds of variants of Ms. Spears’s name were “known” to the Google system and properly substituted automagically when the user goofed. The fact that Google bought Metaweb makes clear that something is still missing.
Autonomy: A Real Success. CMSWatch: Maybe Another Real Miss?
July 12, 2010
In Harrod’s Creek, I can easily spot the real squirrel hunters. They have food. Mostly laconic, these hunters have a big pile of dead squirrels as proof of their competence. There is also the smell of fresh burgoo wafting from their log cabins. I can smell ability from my goose pond.
Lousy hunters have empty gun belts and squirrels shot when snacking on store bought food used to lure the critters. That’s a real danger — cheap tricks or just shooting wildly, often putting bird shot in an innocent’s backsides or the face like the 2006 incident between Vice President Dick Cheney and Texas lawyer Harry Whittington. Some faux hunters have just shot themselves in the foot. Ouch!
Azure chip consultants is a synonym for “bad hunter” in my opinion. Source: http://api.ning.com/files/LCP2NCaWo-ptCqGncB3hGsX8vuh8dnDzSJ0iLnkibas_/18holeinhandG.jpg
One of my two or three readers sent me a link to a write up called “Don’t Ogle Search If You Really Want Content Management”. In my opinion, the write up relies on insinuation, not facts. (I think that some folks are immune to facts, but I find facts useful.) In the article’s headline, the word “ogle”, for example, is one I don’t associate with information retrieval. (The publisher of this “ogle” opinion piece caught my attention in July 2008 with its similar assault on Attivio. My response to that misleading article is here.)
Yet another example of factless criticism of a vendor appears in this segment of the “ogle” write up about Autonomy, one of a very small number of search and content processing vendors with a consistent track record of technical breadth, sales, revenue, and profit:
From an initial focus on enterprise search tools, Autonomy has become a roll-up vendor after acquiring a variety of other information management suppliers such as Interwoven. As a financial strategy this can be successful, and investors seem to cotton to Autonomy. As a technology strategy, vendor roll-ups are problematic. Autonomy’s technology strategy is to rip legacy search subsystems from acquired products, replace them with some pieces from its own IDOL toolset, and then promote its particular approach to search as a distinct advantage for you. Specifically, Autonomy will try to sell you on the value of “meaning-based computing.” Even if you can get your mind around what meaning-based means, you should remain skeptical that Autonomy has technically spectacular or original services here. More importantly, you risk getting sidetracked from your original goal of, say, creating a user-friendly repository for your 50,000 Office documents.
These statements are presented without verifiable foundation to support the allegations in my opinion.
Autonomy is on track to hit $1.0 billion by the end of calendar 2010. The company has a proven track record of improving the performance of the companies it acquires. Autonomy’s management has demonstrated its ability to integrate quickly its acquired products with IDOL (the firm’s integrated data operating layer). The result is Autonomy’s knack of transforming the acquired companies’ position in their markets.
But there are other data that shed light on Autonomy’s track record, which I have documented Autonomy’s technology in my writings such as Beyond Search (Gilbane, 2009), the Enterprise Search Report (CMSWatch.com, 2004-2006), and Successful Enterprise Search Management (Galatea, 2009). Here are three points that must not be overlooked:
- Autonomy has 20,000 plus customers plus around 1,000 licensees of its technologies for use in other enterprise software and systems
- Autonomy has made intelligent acquisitions that has given the firm a strong presence in eDiscovery, rich media, and fraud detection. Autonomy has recently pushed into online marketing using capabilities from Ineterwoven and its IDOL framework. My research reveals that Autonomy has acquired companies to bring its technology to new markets so more content can be understood.
- Autonomy has grown its revenues and generated a profit, making it possible for other UK based technology companies to ride the Autonomy horse in the race for government and venture funding.
In December a year or so ago, at the International Online Conference, in my for-fee, end note debate, I challenged Andrew Kanter (Autonomy), Charlie Hull (Lemur Consulting), and Dr. Charles Oppenheim (Loughborough University) about their views of search, content processing, and related fields. In front of an audience of about 300 search professionals, I pointed out that key word search was dead. I pointed out that most search systems did not understand the meaning of processed information. Autonomy’s Andrew Kanter strongly and politely disagreed with me. As I recall, he said to the audience and me:
Autonomy IDOL is the only product in the market that can understand the meaning and concepts of all information in any language, including audio and video. This has big implications for the content management market as no other vendor can do this.
I demanded some concrete examples to support his position. Mr. Kanter without missing a beat gave me four concrete examples drawn from Autonomy’s work in intelligence, search enabled applications, fraud detection, and rich media.
What did I do?
Autonomy Tasers Its Competition
July 2, 2010
I can hear the yelps now, “Don’t tase me, man. No, not again.” Bzzzap. “Yow.”
Now I hear a gasping, “Autonomy cannot be Number One. We are Number One.”
Who is doing the complaining? Probably about 300 vendors of search and content processing systems that is who. Why the howls on this fine summer day?
Navigate to Chron.com and read “Autonomy Is #1 in Search and Discovery Market, According to Leading Market Research Firm.” There is a write up about IDC’s study “Worldwide Search and Discovery 2009 Vendor Shares: An Update on Market Trends.” So, the 300 yelpers have to do more than howl, issue one shot news releases, or drop the ball on marketing, sales, and customer satisfaction. Autonomy — acording to a big gun analyst outfit — is the top dog, the king of the hill, and the cat’s pajamas in search and content processing. This is not my opinion, gentle reader, I am pointing you to a rock solid source, IDC.
What’s the write up say? Here’s a snippet:
Autonomy continues to be the largest enterprise supplier, using its search-based IDOL infrastructure to act as a foundation for content-centric and search-driven business applications including eDiscovery and compliance, Web content management, enterprise content management and rich media, search marketing, intelligence, call center and customer support, and traditional knowledge management applications.” “Businesses from every industry continue to turn to Autonomy to help them achieve what other technology companies fail to deliver on – identifying the meaning within all forms of information, in real-time, in order to protect and promote their organization,” said Mike Lynch, CEO of Autonomy. “Autonomy’s unique meaning-based approach to information computing is what continues to fuel our rapid growth and clear market leadership, as validated by the recent IDC report on Search and Discovery market shares.”
And no big disagreement from the addled goose. I quite like some of the Autonomy technology. I like most of what IDC produces. If the data compiled for the report are accurate, Autonomy has a big footprint and happy customers. Among the thousands of Autonomy licensees are AOL, BAE Systems, BBC, Bloomberg, Boeing, Citigroup, Coca Cola, Daimler AG, Deutsche Bank, DLA Piper, Ericsson, FedEx, Ford, GlaxoSmithKline, Lloyds TSB, NASA, Nestle, the New York Stock Exchange, Reuters, Shell, Tesco, T-Mobile, the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
You may be using Autonomy technology and not even know it. More than 400 companies glue Autonomy to their own systems in order to provide search and content processing functions. Recognize any of these names? Symantec, Citrix, HP, Novell, Oracle, Sybase and TIBCO.
When the competition is able to stop yammering, perhaps some of these 300 vendors will start selling, marketing, and making Autonomy perspire. Google? Microsoft? Are you paying attention. Autonomy has more than 20,000 customers for its search and content processing systems, applications, and services. Oh, keep in mind that IDC offers data to back up its conclusion that Autonomy is Number One.
Competitors who make Kin phones and then kill their Kin the next day may want to reexamine their strategy. Other vendors may want to stop trying to tell governments how to run their railroads and business licensing policies.
Autonomy seems to have more – ah, how shall I say it? – yes, focus.
By the way, how does that taser feel? Want another zap? Bzzzap.
Stephen E Arnold, July 2, 2010
Freebie
Googlers vs Xooglers: Are Smarts the X Factor?
June 28, 2010
There are lots of Xooglers now. Some are at little-known outfits with pals in the Pentagon. Some are now financiers or pundits. And some others are working at Facebook. I have watched how the Xooglers at Facebook have managed to emulate some of Google’s more interesting characteristics such as zigzagging around user security settings and pushing into the uncharted world visible to lesser mortals. I have also found some surprising insights such as skipping the 1998 approach to relevance by embracing the social network’s predilections.
I was interested in The Snitch’s write up about Web rock star Kevin Rose. Mr. Rose, a former business magazine cover personality, and podcast/meet up superstar. The article was “Is Google About to Launch a Facebook Killer? Kevin Rose Says So.” The idea is that there is a rumor, apparently Velcroed to Mr. Rose about Google’s Facebook killer.
Source: http://mark.koli.ch/2009/01/13/google-facebook.png
Let’s think about these “killers”. You know about these digital Ebolas: the Microsoft Word killer, the Oracle killer, the iPod killer, and so on. In my experience, when someone suggests that another company – usually gasping in second place or even farther behind in a market race – a sure fire way to keep the credibility is to get associated with a “killer”.
I am an old, addled goose. I am increasingly amused by the monopolization that occurs in digital markets. Decades ago, I pointed out in a series of columns for Information World Review that information pools and beckons handling in the way power companies and water companies operate. The infrastructure and captured customers eliminate competition because life is easier for the consumer.
Don’t believe me? That’s okay. You, gentle reader, are probably younger, smarter, and more hungry than this goose. But look around. Apple is in a pretty good position when it comes to high margin computers and gizmos that make teens and college students drool. Google owns the Web search and online advertising sector. The much maligned Microsoft owns the enterprise desktop no matter what a Zoho or Google PR person says. Want to buy a book online? You know the place to go: Amazon. There are other examples ranging from IBM in big companies to outfits like AT& and Verizon for “real telephony”.
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