Local: Hyper, Meta, and Loco
August 21, 2009
For years, local information meant one of three things:
- The Yellow Pages for the city in which one found oneself in the US (an endangered species)
- Suburban papers such as the Gaithersburg Gazette (dog paddling in red ink)
- Asking a female who was hooked into a fancy women’s club like Rockville’s Club 100 (you have to know one to ask one).
Asking a taxi driver, reading the Washington Post or Newsday, or pulling into a gas station would produce mixed up directions and garbled information. Listening to a local radio station like WGN in Chicago provided zero info about DeKalb. The DeKalb radio station was a mess with reverb and dial in shows. Now big companies like NBC want to crack the code. What is interesting is that there are quite a few local Web sites. I live in rural Kentucky and the highly motivated can locate Louisville Mojo (a unit of Tasty Mojo) and check out the local action. if you can remember to put the hyphen in the url, you can read the Courier-Journal online. You can check out the local blogs, local free newspapers, and read the public grade school bulletin board in the Kroger’s or Giant Eagle near you. Local information is a mess. The Business Dateline database, a product with which I was involved from inception to its sale to the dinosaur University Microfilms / Bell+Howell aggregated business information from regional business publications. That experience taught me that local Chambers of Commerce, state and Federal agencies providing business information, and the local colleges and universities were clueless when it came to local information. Even today, with a wealth of electronic tools at my fingertips, I don’t know where and when the collector car meet up will be in New Albany, Indiana. I have to make phone calls to find out about these venues. Navigate to “MSNBC Buys “Hyper-local” EveryBlock.com” and read the announcement. Quite a bit of cheerleading leaks between the punctuation marks. What is missing from the write up are answers to these questions:
- Assume that MSNBC is really successful. How will MSNBC handle the scaling for increased traffic?
- Assume that MSNBC recruits bloggers to provide local information. How will MSNBC prevent another, larger aggregator from sucking up the best and brightest? Pay contributors? How will those costs match up with the costs for item one above?
- Assume that MSNBC pulls a Hulu for local information? How will that consortium scale, monetize, and innovate? Committees are the groups producing camels when the objective is a camel.
Have You Checked Out Google Local Lately?
My suggestion is that you navigate to Google Local at http://local.google.com. Now select a city with a modest population of nerds and run a query for “Web developer”. Here are the results of my query for Des Moines, Iowa and Web developer.
The screenshot below shows the “more info” for Cargocultdesign.com, a Web development company. Notice that there are four tabs: Overview, which is a description of the company, including a snippet of text from the firm’s Web site, a details tab which provides a mailing address for snail mail and an email address for the non-Facebook set, a Reviews tab (Cargo Cult may want to get a “friend” to write a review, and links to two Cargo Cult Web pages.
Commercial Online at Crunch Time
August 17, 2009
Einstein would be confused about the meaning of “time” in the search and content processing sector.
In the early days of online, commercial database producers controlled information that was accessible online. The impetus for electronic information was the US government. Some of the giants of the early online world were beneficiaries of government contracts and other government support for the technology that promised to make information findable.
I recall hearing when my father worked in Washington, DC in the 1950s that there was “government time.” The idea, as I recall, is that when a government entity issues a contract or support, the time lines in that deal stated start and stop dates, but not how fast the work had to be completed. I learned when but a youth that “government time” could be worked so that the contract could be extended. As a result, government time had a notional dimension known to insiders. Outsiders would have another view of time.
Source: http://focus.aps.org/files/focus/v23/st18/time_tunnel_big.jpg
When the first commercial online systems became available, time gained another nuance. Added to the idea of “government time” was the idea that computing infrastructure required time to process information. Programmers needed time to write code and debug programs. Systems engineers needed time to figure out how to expand a system. More time was needed to procure the equipment and time was necessary to get the hardware like DASDs (direct access storage devices) deliver and online.
One word—”time”—was used to refer to these many different nuances and notions of time. Again the outsider was essentially clueless when it came to understanding the meaning of “time” when applied to any activity related to electronic information.
Fast forward to 1993 and the availability of the graphic browser to make the Internet usable to average folks. The idea that a click could display a page in front of the user in very little time was compelling. The user received information quickly and formed an impression that the time required to access information via the Internet was different from the time required to schlep to a library to get information. Time became distorted with another load of meaning: work processes.
Now think about the meaning of “time” today. Vendors are no longer content with describing a system as fast and responsive. The word time has been turbo charged with the addition of the adjectival phrase “real time”.
What is real time? What is real time search? If you think about the meaning of time itself in the online world, you may conclude as I have that when an online vendor says “time”, you don’t have a firm understanding of what the heck the vendor means. When a vendor says “real time” or “near real time”, we are further into the fog.
Microsoft Fast for Portals
August 17, 2009
Author’s Note: The images in this Web log post are the property of Microsoft Corp. I am capturing my opinion based on a client’s request to provide feedback about “going with Fast for SharePoint” versus a third party solution from a Microsoft Certified Partner. If you want happy thoughts about Microsoft, Fast ESP, and search in SharePoint environments, look elsewhere. If you want my opinions, read on. Your mileage may vary. If you have questions about how the addled goose approaches these write ups, check out the editorial policy here.
Introduction
Portals are back. The idea is that a browser provides a “door” to information and applications is hot again. I think. You can view a video called “FAST: Building Search Driven Portals with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Microsoft Silverlight” to get the full story. I went back through my SharePoint search links. I focused on a presentation given in 2008 by Two Microsoft Fast engineers–Jan Helge Sageflåt and Stein Danielsen.
After watching the presentation for a second time, I formed several impressions of what seems to be the general thrust of the Microsoft Fast ESP search system. I have heard reports that Microsoft is doing a full court press to get Microsoft-centric organizations to use Fast ESP as the industrial strength search system.
Let me make several observations about the presentation by the Microsoft Fast engineers and then conclude with a suggestion that caution and prudence may be fine dinner companions before one feasts on Fast ESP. Portals are not a substitute for making it easy for employees to locate the item of information needed to answer a run-of-the-mill business information need.
Observations about the 2008 Demo
First, the presentation focuses on building interfaces and making connections to content in SharePoint. Most organizations want to connect to the content scattered on servers, file systems, and enterprise application software data stores. That is job one or it was until the financial meltdown. Now organizations want to acquire, merge, search, and tap into social content. Much of that information has a short shelf life. The 2008 presentation did not provide me with evidence that the Microsoft Fast ESP system could:
- Acquire large flows of non-SharePoint content
- Process that information without significant latency
- Identify the plumbing needed to handle flows of real time content from RSS feeds and the new / updated content from a SharePoint system.
BlackBerry and Quality
August 11, 2009
I bought an 8320 BlackBerry to test the device. It worked until the ball stuck. I got a replacement. I crushed that one and I had to buy a replacement. Now I have a BlackBerry 8900, and it contained information that urged me to navigate to the BlackBerry App Store to buy applications. I have several mobile devices, so the goslings and I went through the normal routine: download the desktop software, update the desktop software, update the firmware on the device, have lunch, take a nap, and then come back to explore the mobile device. I am baffled about [a] the download times and [b] the lengthy firmware update processes. Other aspects of the BlackBerry baffle me as well, but my focus is on the issue of quality control.
The goslings and I picked an application called Platinum Solitaire 2, where some information is available from a third party. The reason was that we figured version two was probably stable and it was expensive for a dorky game like Solitaire. We clicked the download button. We had to hunt around for the icon with a folder and a downward pointing arrow. We clicked the icon. The system promptly froze. We looked at one another. We took out the battery and tried again. Same result. Frozen mobile device.
To reboot this device, one removes the back and removes the battery. Then a long wait as the consumer device figures out that it is what it is supposed to be and that no evil consumer has hacked the phone. I could have a heart attack from the stress induced from this lengthy process. Unacceptable in may opinion.
Now the interesting part of this test was my navigating to the incredibly hard to use BlackBerry customer support Web site, finding the link to point out this problem with the $4.99 application, and wait to see what happened.
Here’s the scenario:
First, I got an automated response the same day telling me that BlackBerry cared. I had to provide details of the problem. I wrote back that I thought the company’s quality control was lousy. I waited.
Second, I got an email from a human who wanted to talk with me. I wrote back that I was working on a blog story about online search for the BlackBerry app store and I did not want to talk to a human. I wanted to use search to solve my problem.
Third, I got an email from another human who provided me with contact information so I could call. If I didn’t want to call the human said, I could expect a call from this BlackBerry person.
Fourth, I got a call on Friday, August 7, 2009, from a really concerned BlackBerry employee. The person wanted me to know that BlackBerry cared about my problem. I explained that I used a new 8900, went through the hoops that BlackBerry puts in front of a customer to get the phone to work, and I went to the BlackBerry App Store. I pointed out that the app called Platinum Solitaire 2 killed my phone.
Google’s Data Center Strategy Questioned
August 10, 2009
Google fired up its engineering engines in the period between 1996 and 2002. As the company entered its run up to its initial public offering, Google had locked and loaded on some core principles. I am sure you have internalized these by now. It has been more than a 11 years since the Google came on the search world’s radar.
The Register’s headline “Will Google Regret the Mega Data Center?” raises an interesting question. The story was written in August 2009, more than a decade after the GOOG launched itself. Can decade old technology remain viable in today’s wild and crazy technical world? Cade Metz reported:
In the wake of Microsoft’s decision to remove its Windows Azure infrastructure from the state of Washington – where a change in local tax law has upped the price of building out the proverbial cloud – the company’s former director of data center services has warned that Microsoft and other cloud-happy giants may soon find that the mega data center isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. “[Large cloud providers] are burning through tremendous amounts of capital believing that these facilities will ultimately give them strategic advantage,” reads a blog post from Mike Manos, who recently left Microsoft for data center outfit Digital Realty Trust.
Yikes! Google. A fat and out-of-step dinosaur?
Google has three dozen data centers, a model that Microsoft has emulated. Google has according to chatter about a million servers humming along. What is The Register’s take on this important issue? You will have to read Mr. Metz’s article.
My view:
Google Gets Serious about Enterprise Sales
August 7, 2009
I saw an announcement in PCWorld that provoked a happy quack here in the mine drainage ditch. I have long been a critic of the Google for making it darned hard for a prospect to get a Googler to sell them something. If you have tried to call Google to buy something, you know that you had to work to get a call back. One of my clients told me a year ago, “We are a big company and I can’t get anyone to return my call. What’s with that outfit?”
Navigate to “Google Offers On-Site Services to Search Appliance Buyers” by Juan Carlos Perez. Most of the Google watchers, pundits, and experts have not paid much attention to this story which was released on August 5, 2009 on the IDC news service. The program is called ROI JumpStart. The “ROI” is important because Google is making its marketing hook for this big enterprise leap one composed of value. The “i”, according to PCWorld, represents “information”. Ah, return on information. Let me translate: “i” means value from what makes a modern organization run. Mr. Perez wrote:
The two-day service engagements will be provided by Google approved partners with expertise on Search Appliance configuration, deployment and training, Google said. The ROI JumpStart offer runs until Sept. 30. Although the ROI acronym usually stands for “return on investment,” Google uses it in this promotion to mean “return on information,” since the Search Appliance is designed to help employees find a wide variety of corporate data more easily.
Now those who want to buy something will be referred to partners who can sell, integrate, and return phone calls.
Google intentionally moves at a glacial pace, putting its forces in place, and setting up its chess pieces for a game changing approach to enterprise sales. The idea is that if you move really slow and incrementally adjust lots of discombobulated actions, people can’t figure out what is going on. Google, therefore, surprises lots of folks. Here in Harrod’s Creek, we have learned how to monitor Googzilla, so we are not often surprised.
Image source: http://creoleindc.typepad.com/rantings_of_a_creole_prin/images/checkmate.jpg
Who are the Google partners who will become Google’s feet on the street? How will the enterprise sales program unfold? What is the method for connecting a potential buyer with a partner? I don’t have any details. What my years of research into the Google have sensitized me are:
- This is a ** very big and important step ** for the Google
- The partners have been hand picked for their ability to be Googley and deliver sophisticated technical solutions. Partners do return phone calls and understand the methods of traditional organizations.
- The pent up demand for organizations who want to go Google has reached critical mass so partners will be in a position to intermediate between the organizations hungry for Google solutions and the GOOG itself.
In short, I anticipate an explosion in Google enterprise revenue and the realization that Google has taken baby steps, moving slowly to put in place a potent sales and customer service organization that is the polar opposite of traditional enterprise software sales.
The Google is now moving with extreme prejudice. If some of Google’s targets of opportunity don’t know the meaning of that phrase “extreme prejudice”, in my opinion, the meaning will become crystal soon.
Stephen Arnold, August 6, 2009
Magazines on Slippery Slope
August 3, 2009
I fielded a question about magazine publishing on Monday, July 27, 2009. A small publisher with a handful of titles wanted me to offer some new ideas for generating revenue. Magazine publishing has been a challenging business since the implosion of Life Magazine. I have seen interesting business school case studies about the impact of shifting consumer preferences for news and information upon the weekly that provided many Americans with news and visual information. You can now explore in a clunky and limited way some of the Life Magaazine pictures on Google. The service is free, which baffles me, but I am an addled goose and not able to keep pace with the really swift and smart bicoastals who make decisoins about high-value informatoin.
Like newspapers, magazines have some brutal economics with which to wrestle. Paper, ink, distribution, and other must have lubricants for the business are expensive. Forget what the White House says about inflation. The costs for these traditional publishing essentials continue to climb. Printing is a money pit as well. Digital technology helps by eliminating the centuries old multi-step plate process. But direct-to-press requires expensive hardware and software. Printing remains expensive. Finally, there is the cost for human brain power, even if those brains are contractors and 22 year olds from fancy universities. Try as publishers might, it is tough to create a newspaper or a magazine without people to write stories, make ad deals, and place the phone calls to suppliers.
Long a niche business, magazines find themselves on the wrong end of a pointy stick from Web sites such as Alltop.com. I can create a magazine with a few clicks. If Alltop does not suit you, try Congoo. There are quite a few choices created by people who don’t have the same fondness for flipping through Mechanix Illustrated or the Saturday Evening Post that I had when young.
$17 dollars worth of hard copy magazines from big gun publishers.
In short, magazines on paper are finding their corner of the publishing world under the same pressure as people who make wooden shoes or spin wool by hand. Even niche magazines for fanatics of a particular activity such as crafts or kit airplanes are going to have to come up with some new ideas.
In my conversation, I had to say, “Let me think about some ideas.” This blog post is my preliminary thinking about what is likely to be the next zero point in publishing. Let me run down the thoughts that I am pushing around.
The Traditional Product
I went to Barnes & Noble, a recently remodeled store. The magazines are still upfront but the selection has been culled. The new layout not far from my goose pond pushes book lights, book ends, and Moleskine products. The books are pushed to the rear of the store, and the computer book section has been eliminated. The free WiFi was not working but Barnes and Noble is a bricks and mortar business which is now jumping into electronic books. That will be interesting to track.
The magazines occupy four wooden bays. Crafts and kit airplane titles were not to be found. I could not locate the specialist magazines for those interested in archaeology. I noticed that the magazines devoted to watches and luxury goods were few and far between as well. When I did find a specialist magazine like Hemmings Motor News, there were three copies on the shelf. Maybe Hemmings is a big seller at this Barnes and Noble?
I bought two magazines with the idea that I would look at the hard copies and review my subscription copy of the recent New Yorker Magazine. The total cover price for the three magazines discussed below was about $17, excluding tax. Three magazines for about $20. Hmmm. I remember the commutes between New York and San Francisco when I bought four of five magazines on every flight. Not any more. I have info on my iTouch.
Car and Driver
My recollection is that Bill Ziff was into car magazines before he hopped on the computer magazine trend. Automobile fanatics are ideal for niches. I don’t pay much attention to automobiles or automobile magazines. I live in truck and gun-rack country. Car and Driver reviews vehicles that work well in Palm Springs but don’t have much to offer to a person who drives on dirt roads. I flipped through the magazine with the cover date September 2009 and in tiny, tiny type the $4.99 price. (I wonder if the small type communicates modest value?) The feature in this issue was new cars. I may have missed something but three points hit my knee like the weird door design on my 1973 Pontiac Grandville convertible:
First, where were the Hondas? I like Hondas. These are vehicles I can buy over the Internet, sight unseen. I drive them 100,000 miles and then get another. Odd omission in 140 page magazine. Honda is one of the top selling vehicles in the US. I wondered if the news hole was too small to slug in some Honda information or if the Honda vehicles were no longer interesting to Car and Driver readers. Ah, well, editorial decision. Honda information is available online.
Second, some vehicles rated data tables and others did not. I wondered why there was no Web link to the Car and Driver Web site for additional information about each automobile. I solved the problem with a quick visit to The Auto Channel. That outfit has data about the new cars.
Third, the writing was not crunchy. This means that if Bing.com or Google.com indexes an article, false drops are likely to pepper the search results. Let me give you one example. Writing about the Jaguar, Car and Driver used this phrase “evinced a strong whiff of femininity”. I hope Car and Driver has a great search engine optimization program because this type of writing will get the article in a list of results about women’s fashion. Maybe that’s the Car and Driver audience?
Google and Games
July 31, 2009
Editor’s Note: Stephen E. Arnold delivered this talk at the games conference held in Louisville, Kentucky, on July 31, 2009.
Introduction
I want to provide a quick review of Google’s approach to games and gaming. I want to show some screenshots that make clear that simple and more complex games are available with more games becoming available everyday. I then want to describe how Google views the notional topic of games for users of computing devices. I want to conclude by putting my remarks in a timeline that carries the subject of Google and games to the year 2015. The date is not arbitrary because Google works in chunks of three to five years. Google’s approach to games won’t change too much in the next 16 years, but the scope, application, and monetization of games and game technology will. My conclusion may surprise you. By 2015, Google may be one of the leading game platforms with a broad range of products and services that use gaming technology in interesting, revenue-boosting ways.
Google People
Most users of Google’s systems don’t know individual Google engineers by name. The company has nearly 19,000 professionals on staff and about two thirds of them are engineers, computer scientists, mathematicians, or physicists.
Quite a few people today play games. The devices range from the high-end, state-of-the-art platforms like the Microsoft Xbox, the Nintendo Wii, and the Sony PS3 to the grandma friendly games on Yahoo or mobile phones. One store in rural Kentucky where I live sells a $5 keychain with a simple game for bored adults and affluent seven year olds to play when stuck behind a horse in Harrod’s Creek. New platforms bring new people to the “game party”. Add in the influx of mobile device users, and the stage is set for a “game revolution”.
I want to highlight two Google engineers and mention some of their work to give you an idea about how deep game technology has been embedded at Google.
Steve Lawrence, an Australian, is a gamer. In addition to authoring technical articles that have been referenced more than 5,000 times, he is the author of Game sports betting markets, Sandip Debnath, David M. Pennock, C. Lee Giles, Steve Lawrence, ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce, 2003, pp. 258-259. Dr. Lawrence is one of Google’s most prolific inventors, and his technical skill has influenced inventions ranging from user interface (US7272601) to personalized network searching (US2008/0215553).
Consider Ross Koningstein. He was a graduate student at Stanford’s Aerospace Robotics Laboratory when he contributed to the development of Chuck Yeager’s Advanced Flight Trainer II and Car & Driver Text Track. Google’s advertising system is based on bids. The methods used are dependent on calculations used in traditional games like horse racing. Mr. Koningstein has been working to bring game-like features and interface elements to Google’s advertising management system. The idea is that a person at an ad agency can use a game-like method to model what certain types of ads and a specified amount of ad money will generate for the advertiser. Dr. Koningstein wants to make modeling ad spends and ad management more of an interactive game experience. You can read more about his approach in Google patent documents US20050228797 , US20050096979, US20060224444, US20060224447, US20050114198, and several others.
You get the idea. Dr. Koningstein is not dabbling; he is inventing systems and methods that have roots deep in the interactive game experience.
Keep in mind that other Googlers have equally deep roots in gaming.
Google Technology
I want to do a quick fly through of Google technology and provide you with some screenshots of applications that are available today.
First, Google is a platform, and it offers a range of software development kits, application programming interfaces, and “sandbox” toys. The idea is that a developer with online basic programming skills can use the Google platform. At the other end of the spectrum, a professional developer or a company focused on game development can create applications that run on the Google platform.
Keep in mind that the platform is a one way street. This means that you can put code into Google but it can be difficult to repurpose that code for another platform. Therefore, the best way to think about using the platform for a game or some other application is to create a game for a platform such as the iPhone and then recycle the graphics and other useful bits for the Google Android platform. You will learn in a few moments that this recycling approach may be the path forward for the next few years.
Second, Google tried to cut a deal with Yahoo for online games in the 2005 to 2006 period. My sources suggested that the tie up did not make sense. Google on the surface has not played a major role in commercial game development. In fact, the model today is influenced by Google’s need to be perceived as an open source company that is not a monopoly. The point is that if you get into the Google development space with a game, you will be operating in a competitive but open environment. At some point in the future, Google could change its approach, but there is little downside for experimenting with the Google platform. New tools such as Google Wave will be forthcoming. Coupled with Chrome (Google’s virtual machine and container system) and Android (a chunk of the Google operating system), Google now offers a usable platform for game development.
Third, the forthcoming Google Wave technology (a component of Google’s dataspace initiative) appears to be a significant new component of the Google service suite. The idea behind Wave is a plastic bag. Put carrots or small parts in the bag, and you can manage them. Wave allows a developer to create a space – a digital freezer bag. Activities can take place within the bag. Wave makes it possible to have the objects in the digital bag interact. The idea is to make it possible to create new types of social interactions with information objects. The most important feature is that states can be saved. It is possible to slice and dice the objects and the interactions by time. If you think about this functionality, new opportunities for games and game like experiences can be built on these multidimensional functions. Let me give one example: lectures, lab experiments, and student interaction. I think certain types of instructional constructs where traditional game like features and time can be combined with social interaction in useful ways.
Keep in mind that Google’s technologies pivot on programming languages that many developers know. These include JavaScript, php, python, and Java, among others. The point is that you can hit the ground running with Google’s sample code and your favorite programming language. At this time, there’s no fee, just a Google registration.
Opportunities
In the time I have remaining, let me look at two different doors that are now opening. Each door is a metaphor for a way to exploit Google as a game platform as well as a platform for building game like applications. In short, I want to suggest that the notion of a game must be viewed in two ways.
Google has completed much of its next-generation computing platform. Consumer applications such as games are now a potential growth area with Android, Chrome, and Wave as enablers.
First, I think it is wise to look at the Google platform as one in which 10 percent of one’s development effort should be invested. The reason is that Android and Wave are immature or not yet built out. Therefore, the idea is to take a simple game idea or an existing game feature and recycle it for Google. Within the next two to five years, additional development resources should be directed at the Google platform. Five or six years out, development for only the Google platform is likely to be possible.
The reason for this is that the game platform and game device market does not change as rapidly as some believe. The high end, dedicated game devices will persist in the market. In the short term, the Apple iPhone is a more viable mobile game platform. However, over time, the shift to mobile computing and cloud computing will change the equation.
In short, learn and recycle. Don’t bet the farm on Google.
Second, I think it is important to recognize that Google moves in small, incremental steps. The company does this in order to avoid alerting competitors to its broader strategy and to minimize antitrust actions. Nevertheless, you should plan on allocating your time based on how the Google market shapes up. This means that delay in learning how to code for Google is a bad idea. Among the technologies to learn are SketchUp (Google’s drawing program), Android (the visible part of the Google operating system), Wave (collaborative spaces), and Google Apps and OneBox APIs. These functions are, at a minimum, the way in which to obtain the Googley expertise you need.
In closing, let me make three observations about Google, games, and the game like applications that will be the norm in computing in the future:
Future Microsoft SharePoint ESP Features Revealed
July 30, 2009
Stephen Bell wrote “Microsoft Fast Search to Mate with Social Networking.” The title brought a grin to this addled goose’s bill. I like the idea of Fast ESP “mating” with a social network. The metaphor brings a number of images to mind and invites a wide range of double entrendre. Maybe the ComputerWorld editors were tickling the goose’s funny bone?
The story asserts that a fellow named Steve Letford, a Microsoft wizard in New Zealand, revealed at a SharePoint conference that Fast ESP will be “mated with SharePoint in a number of ways.” What? I thought the headline said Fast ESP, and now it is SharePoint.
Which is it? Fast ESP gets social? SharePoint gets social? SharePoint is a collaborative content management platform with search available upon installation. I guess I don’t understand what is happening.
Mr. Bell reports:
In ordinary office productivity work, the Fast search tool will give more meaningful results than an ordinary search engine on unstructured data, because of its ability to recognize the semantics of such elements as a date or an address, Letford says. Its pipeline architecture enables different inquiries to be made concurrently on a stream of documents as they pass down the pipe, meaning multifaceted queries can be executed more efficiently. Documents retrieved by the search will be able to be further interrogated interactively and the documents and their interrelationships presented in graphical format.
Now that would be something. I need “meaningful results”. I am not sure if an address is a “semantics” component but entity extraction or a tagged field can be interpreted under the fuzzy wuzzy banner of semantics. Precision is not part of the toolkit of a marketer.
The article references a now long-i-the-tooth IDC study about the cost of looking for information. In the present economic climate, my hunch is that the organizations with such high costs might be road kill, but that type of thinking does not slow the rush of the Microsoft argument Mr. Bell reports.
The killer comment for me was:
Customers of the enterprise search tool will have to buy a specific license and purchase a dedicated search server. Enterprise search is not something you install on your PC or laptop, he [Letford] says. A third common use for high-end search capabilities, Microsoft predicts, will be in monetizing website offerings by guiding users to content for which they will be willing to pay, and bringing up relevant advertising messages. Letford confirmed, in answer to a question from the audience, that Microsoft’s public search-engine, Bing, will evolve to use FAST-style technology.
What does this statement mean for Powerset, the Xerox Parc plumbing, and the glue code created to create the Bing.com systems? More evolutionary change? Sounds like a major overhaul to me. If this statement is accurate (keep in mind that it comes far from the search think tanks in Redmond and Oslo, Microsoft has big plans for Fast ESP. SharePoint, and Bing.com.
Let’s do a flashback to the pre-Fast ESP sell out and before the Norwegian investigators looked into the alleged fraud at Fast Search & Transfer.
Microsoft Destabilized by Google
July 26, 2009
I enjoy John Dvorak’s “crankiness.” When I worked at Ziff Communications in the hay day of computer magazine publishing, he was a home run hitter. If I turned up on his door step, he wouldn’t recognize me, but I would recognize him. He’s ubiquitous, and I think he is close to the “truth” about Microsoft.
I want to piggyback on his “Is the Party over for Microsoft?” that ran as a “second opinion” essay on July 24, 2009. He provides a good run down of the distractions to which Microsoft succumbed. But in my opinion, these distractions gained greater urgency when Microsoft realized that Google was a really big problem.
Here’s my take on the Google factor:
First, Google was a champion of open source. I don’t think Google woke up one sunny day in 1998 and said, “We are all for open source.” I think the company, once it got some cash, realized that open source could bleed Microsoft’s attention and revenue. There was only an upside for the Google because it didn’t have the legacy problem and the established base’s need for backwards compatibility. So, the Google rotated about 10 degrees and became an open source engine. Microsoft’s various executives have pointed out that open source was a problem. I will leave it to others to provide the history of Microsoft’s open source, Unix, and community initiatives. While Microsoft thrashed with open source, the Google chugged along.
Second, Apple has been a thorn in Microsoft’s side for a long time. When Apple realized that Google had Mac power connectors in its conference rooms and no Microsoft compatible power connectors, the love bond between Apple and Google grew in intensity. With Eric Schmidt on the Board and Googlers dropping to the Unix command line in their ubiquitous Mac notebooks, the folks at Microsoft had a new problem. Google and Apple found common ground in their desire to give Microsoft a digital (see the illustration below for nerd humor), the two companies cooperated to annoy Microsoft. My hunch is that the annoy Microsoft aspect of the Google Apple tie up is the driving force. Yep, I don’t pay much attention to the “competition” between the iPhone and Google’s telephonic dreams. Google is building the 21st century AT&T. Apple is the “new Sony”. I see symbiosis.
With two outfits with lots of smart nerds, Microsoft had its hands full because together Google and Apple make Microsoft’s technology look pretty lame. Enterprise search is just one example. Microsoft has no product that is industrial strength that can be deployed quickly. Google offers a search toaster which is good enough. Vaporware is not a box shipped overnight from Dell Computer, another outfit squabbling with Microsoft. So Google and Apple doubled Microsoft’s pain. Google with enterprise initiatives and Apple with killer ads that made fun in a nice way of the Microsoft technologies.
Third, Google has proved hugely disruptive to Microsoft’s internal teams. Bing.com, for example, is a response to what Google was in 2007, not what Google is today or even more telling what Google is becoming. Where is a Microsoft dataspace initiative? Google’s Wave is rolling toward a broader developer shoreline and Microsoft’s dataspace row boat is still docked.
Add this up, and I see that Microsoft’s woes have been given a couple of twists of the thumbscrews because of Google.
Mr. Dvorak is right. Don’t get me wrong. I just think the Google is a much bigger factor than most of the pundits, mavens, azure chip consultants, and analysts have recognized. Now Google is on the path to be the next Microsoft. As I wrote in 2004 or 2005, Microsoft is now the next IBM. IBM is now a consulting company.
Looks like I was spot on when I pointed out that Google was moving to “check mate” mode in its relationship with Microsoft. Zune, Xbox, Codd based SQL Server, and ribbons won’t do much to stop the decline.
Stephen Arnold, July 26, 2009
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