Microsoft and Search in a Time Warp
November 2, 2008
In grade school in Illinois, I recall learning the meaning of the word anachronistic. For some reason, the explanation has stuck with me for more than 55 years. The teacher, Miss Chessman, told the class, “Ancient Greeks did not have an alarm clock.” The idea is that if you mix up when things occur, you run the risk of creating the equivalent of a dog’s breakfast.
My newsreader delivered CIO Magazine’s “Search Will Outshine KM” by Mike Altendorf to read. I don’t know Mr. Altendorf, and I have to admit that I disagree with a couple of the points he makes in this two part article, which you can read here. I am a tired goose, and I don’t want to trigger a squabble in the barn yard. I do want to point out where Mr. Altendorf and I part company.
First, the notion of search outshining KM is not something I have thought much about. KM is mostly baloney, one of those “trends” that promise much and deliver little that one can measure. When I watch intelligent people leaving one company for another, no software system captures what that person knows. IBM is trying to prevent a chip designer from leaving Big Blue to join Apple. If KM worked, IBM wouldn’t take such extreme action to prevent a person from changing jobs. That’s KM for you. It doesn’t deliver. And search? It is, in general, not too helpful either. In fact, search is one of the few software systems to engender a dissatisfaction rate among its users of 60 to 70 percent. In my opinion, search outshining KM is a silly assertion, and one that makes it seem that one lousy system can deliver information better than another lousy system. Both search and KM work best when applied to specific problems and bounded by realistic expectations and budgets.
 |
 |
Second, the reference to Microsoft’s acquisition of Fast Search and Transfer and Powerset is startling. First, Mr. Altendorf makes no reference to the police action in Oslo that threatens to undermine the credibility of the Fast Search technology, finances, and executives. Second, Powerset is not complement to Fast Search technology for two reasons: [a] Powerset technology is part of the Live.com service and has not to my knowledge been hooked to the Fast Search system at this time and [b] notion that Microsoft can “tie together” disparate technologies is out of touch with reality. Let me be clear. Microsoft has compatibility issues within its own product families; specifically, SharePoint and the Dynamics range of software. When you toss in the Fast Search conglomeration of original code, the bits of open source Fast Search has used in its system, and the technology from the acquisitions Fast Search made prior to its purchase by Microsoft, you have quite a bit of integrating to do. Now add the Powerset original code with the licensed technology from Xerox Parc, and you have even more work. Microsoft’s units can’t make the ribbon interface consistent across Outlook, Word, and Visio in Office 2007. Mr. Altendorf’s blithely reassures me that Microsoft can work out these incongruities. I beg to differ.
New Info Mix: Search and Enterprise Publishing
October 31, 2008
The 20-somethings who want to rescue enterprise search from the swamp in which it is lost have to look at another player in the enterprise information game. The technology in question focuses on printing “dead tree” documents. These documents are mailed to millions, often tens of millions of people. Here’s an example. You lease an automobile. Each month the financial institution or entity brokering the deal sends you a statement. The real estate on these paper documents can be put to better use that reminding you to pay within 20 days. The financial institutions want to remind you to refinance your house (there’s a great idea) or remind you to take the vehicle to so and so’s dealership for the 6,000 check up. Some financial institutions want to greet you personally, with a cheerful “Hello, Tabitha.”
Time Magazine, the Wall Street Journal and other “dead tree” experts have figured out how to personalize certain print runs of their publications. Print personalization in the regional editions of Time Magazine have been around longer than some of the snappy Web personalization services. Advertisers like the idea of buying a specific demographic. Financial institutions, electric utilities, health care insurers, and other firms that mass mail invoices to known customers want to personalize as well.
A Web content management system is a toy compared to the industrial strength systems required to crank out the personalized invoices for a company like Honda, Prudential, or one of the few remaining banks that can pay for postage. The systems to handle this procedure have to connect to various back office systems, provide graphic tools, offer work flow controls to move information object A to financial analyst B and then to invoice C. Mistakes when it comes to billing customers are not acceptable. Web content management systems are able to produce Web pages, but it takes a broader, more comprehensive system to perform industrial strength enterprise publishing.
Now here’s the surprise that most of the enterprise search companies are ignoring. These systems include search functions, but it is a utility within a broader, mission critical enterprise system. This is not the world of the marketing department or the Web specialists. These systems make the day for the organization’s chief financial officer, regulators, and attorneys.
Source: http://www.exstream.com/Applications/Telecommunications/bundledservicebills.asp
One of the early players in this enterprise publishing game was Optio Software, which was acquired by Bottomline Technologies this year. Streamserve, a company based in Sweden, is a leader in this sector. IBM and Ricoh hooked up and created InfoPrint last year to pursue this market sector. Xerox has long been a player with its now-long-in-the-tooth “Docutech” systems. Exstream Software, headquartered in Lexington, Kentucky, sold to Hewlett Packard earlier this year for about $1.2 billion.
Disturbing Data, Possible Parallel for Search
October 30, 2008
After wrapping up another section of my forthcoming monograph Google Publishing technology for Infonortics Ltd. in Tetbury, England, I scanned the content sucked in by my crawlers. Another odd duck greeted me with the off point headline “Outlook: Don’t Panic It’s Not 2001” here. (This is a wacky url so you may have to navigate to the parent site www.commsdesign.com and hunt for the author Bolaji Ojo.
For me, one telling paragraph was:
In 2001, for instance, the wireline communications equipment market sank 18 percent to $69.6 billion, from $85.3 billion in the previous year. Semiconductor sales to the segment tumbled 37 percent on a combination of sagging demand and severe pricing declines. Seven years later, wired communications equipment sales have yet to recover to the 2000 level, and estimates indicate the market won’t bounce back fully until sometime in the next decade. ISuppli expects 2009 wired communications sales to be approximately $76.6 billion, improving from an estimated $72.5 billion in 2008, but still below the record 2000 figure of $85 billion.
Source: http://thesaleswars.wordpress.com/2008/02/
Another interesting point was:
The entire semiconductor market wasn’t as fortunate. Chip sales plunged 43 percent in 2001, to $101.8 billion from $178.9 billion in 2000, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association. The industry resumed growth in 2002, but it wasn’t until 2004 before global sales finally crawled past the previous record. By then, dozens of semiconductor, passives, interconnect and electromechanical companies and electronic manufacturing services providers had disappeared, some merging with stronger rivals. A few others went under, unable to finance operations as customers froze purchases or exited the embattled networking equipment market.
What these data suggested to me was that the search, content processing, and search enabled application sectors may face significant revenue declines and could take years to recover. The loss of companies that have no revenue is understandable. Funding sources may dry up or cut off the flow of money. Large firms may shed staff, but these vendors will, for the most part, remain in business. The real pressure falls on what I call “tweeners”. Tweeners are organizations that are in growth mode but the broader downturn can reduce their sales and squeeze the companies’ available cash. Slow payment from customers adds to the problem.
SAP: We Hardly Know Thee
October 29, 2008
SAP seems to be in a pickle. I profiled the company’s aging TREX search system in one of the Enterprise Search Reports I wrote between 2004 and 2006. The system had a number of interesting linguistic features. One of the SAP search wizards was quite helpful, and I was confident that SAP would make TREX into a higher profile service. SAP, however, left TREX to improve without publicizing the system. You can see SAP’s search system in action. Just navigate to SAP.com and enter a query. I heard that the company, like Microsoft, uses it own technology. I found it interesting that the investment arm of SAP pumped money into Endeca. SAP seemed to be taking a step toward acquiring Endeca but stopped short, preferring to make a strategic investment. Endeca, like much of the SAP system, requires configuration. Unlike the Google Search Appliance or the Thunderstone appliance, Endeca requires a bit of tweaking and configuring to deliver its full payload to a licensee. The pairing of the tweaking and configuring champion SAP with the Endeca system made sense to me. I could see license fees supplemented with consulting fees where SAP deployed Endeca’s system.
I was surprised when I downloaded the SAP white paper “Realizing Maximum Benefits from SAP NetWeaver XI/SAP NetWeaver PI”. You can download the paper from Bitpipe.com, but you have to jump through the wacky Bitpipe.com hoops. I use my dog’s name and sign up for whatever option I am offered, download the paper, and let the mail go to a dummy email account. Also, I can’t keep the SAP lingo straight. R3 is the “regular” SAP system. NetWeaver, acquired years ago from an outfit in Israel, is the Web services component. TREX ran in NetWeaver, and to access TREX search in R3, you had to license both R3 and NetWeaver.
In the white paper, search is mentioned only in passing. The white paper tells me that search is part of the dashboard on page 11 and that’s about it. The remainder of the 14 page paper talks about magical benefits that seem to accrue to having data at one’s fingertips. Information access seems to be presumed in this “boil the ocean” approach.
NetWeaver block diagram. Copyright SAP 2007.
I did not buy the argument in this white paper. In my crawler I hit upon a story that suggests others are having the same doubts about these pie in the sky assertions from SAP. For example, Lionel Laurent, a Forbes’ Magazine writer, painted SAP bright red in “SAP May Need More Cuts to Survive.” You can read the full text of the article here. The main point of the article is not that SAP has to tighten its belt. I understood from Mr. Laurent’s write up that SAP may have to undergo a colectomy and a foot amputation to extend its life.
Sham Wow.
Google: Supranational Company, Emerging Nation State
October 27, 2008
A very amused and cheerful quack to the reader in the Eastern Mediterranean who sent me some useful snippets about Russia and online. I want to capture these before my flakey email system nukes the information. Gentle reader, you may want to go elsewhere if you loathe Russia or simply don’t care much about the policies of nation states. Keep in mind that this Web log is a diary and opinion drop point for me. Let me run down the items provided by my sun baked correspondent and then conclude with some comments, again designed for me to capture my thoughts on October 26, 2008.
Set Up
In Google Version 2.0 I expanded on the argument I introduced in my 2005 study The Google Legacy. In a nutshell, I presented information to support my notion that Google was not perceived correctly by competitors or regulators. The kindergarten colors and lava lamps filed down the claws of the company’s technological trajectory. Heck, Google is about Web search and online advertising. The general consensus was in 2005, “What me worry?” Flash forward to October 2008, and I think we see that publishers, telephony companies, and enterprise software vendors understand that Google is exerting some “strange force”. Most executives can’t put their finger on what Google is doing. The view is that Google is just too darned diffused, chaotic, and unbusiness like to figure out. A recent book characterizes Google as a planet. I don’t think that’s a useful analogy. The metaphor connotes bigness, but it misses the organic nature of how Google is a transformative entity. It’s not a planet; Google is an information applications platform that could alter how traditional businesses operate. Moving operations out of a location and into a barge holding servers outside the three mile limit poses some interesting challenges for Google’s competitors and opponents.
The metaphor that comes to mind is a mesh that wraps the earth. The mesh is a meta layer that puts competitors inside a planet sized drift net. Competitors can’t get away from Google. Competitors–even countries–are within Google. I see this as a Google mesh, something like this:
Source: http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/db2luw/v9/topic/com.ibm.db2.udb.spatial.doc/g7nation.gif
There is now a general discomfort triggered by Google’s trajectory is causing regulators to dig in their boot heels. The messages sent by different regulatory groups are confused, almost on again and off again. Google continues to do what it wants. The company appears to be tolerating regulatory and legal issues, but in general the company continues to move forward like gas diffusing through a closed space. You can’t pin down where the molecules are going, but the molecules are distributing themselves and each continues to wag its tail and do interesting things.
I am now thinking about Google’s buying a jet fighter. Information is here.
Insight into Why Google Wants to Acquire In Country Operations
My questions to myself are: “Does this allow a new loophole for Google in China after the acquisition of Yahoo? And is this the strategy behind the attempt to acquire Begun in Russia?” These were stimulated by Lindsay Eastwood’s “Don’t Be Evil: Google Faces the Chinese Internet Market and the Global Online Freedom Act of 2007” in the Minnesota Journal of Law, Science & Technology This is an academic write up and you can read it here. For me, the key passage was:
“…many U.S. Internet companies do not own their Chinese counterparts, but operate through local owners. One of the four main targets of the legislation, Yahoo! Inc., runs its China operations through Alibaba.com, of which it owns only a 40% stake. As a result, Yahoo! could find itself unaffected by the Act and its work in China immune from liability. Google operates its Google.cn business under a license owned by a local company, Ganji.com, but the precise nature of the relationship between the two entities has not been made public.”
My thought is that this in-country strategy may be a way to deal with certain business barriers to expansion inside of other countries.
- Two further quotes from Eastwood demonstrate intent and ethical confusion in equally opposite ethical directions:
“Choosing to ignore U.S. Internet speech violations while enacting legislation that would target similar activities abroad may seem overly hypocritical” (p.311) - “…The vast majority of Internet searches in China are for local Chinese content such as local news, local businesses, weather, games and entertainment, travel information,blogs, etc.—Google, Inc. determined that the ethical balance tipped in favor of the introduction of the new [censored or filtered ]site. Indeed, Schrage testified that Google estimated that fewer than 2% of all queries in China would result in pages from which search results would be unavailable due to filtering [out results].” (p.303)
Arista Lands Sun’s Bechtolsheim
October 27, 2008
TheStreet.com reported on October 23, 2008, Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder and chief architect, will reduce his role at Sun Microsystems “to help build network switch startup Arista Networks.” You can read the full story here. Sun Microsystems has fallen on hard times. Tech wizards can engineer the pants off the Bach statue in Eisenach, but so far the Stanford University Network crowd has not been able to pump revenue into the company. The deal, if I understand the news reports, is that Mr. Bechtolsheim will become Arista’s chairman and chief development officer. In addition, he will continue to contribute to Sun.
What’s an Arista Networks? According to TheStreet:
“Arista is touting high-speed 10-Gigabit Ethernet switches and is clearly aiming to challenge Cisco in the data center networking niche.”
The problem with high speed switches is that these gizmos are like potato chips. You can’t get by with just one. Unlike the Dlink and Netgear devices, wavelength and optical solutions are exotic, expensive, and in demand. Outfits like Microsoft and Yahoo are building data centers designed to handles 50,000, 100,000, or more servers. Servers are useless unless telecommunication pipes can get data into the data center and from the data center to the servers. Arista Networks wants to play in this fast growing segment. Mr. Bechtolsheim is a savvy technology wizards, and he knows an opportunity for an upside when he sees one. The Arista play is not without risk which may explain that Mr. Bechtolsheim is working two jobs at least for now.
Arista gizmos. The 7124s is a 24-port 10GbE switch with 480 Gbps of bandwidth costs about $150 per port or about $3,600. Pricing data are hard to get, so if you want to buy a couple dozen of these gizmos, contact the company.
Arista’s angle, based on information available to me, is to offer high throughput at a more compelling per port price than other vendors such as Cisco. The Arista secret sauce is a combination of smart software and less expensive components. The combination of computational intelligence and more commoditized pieces translates to a high performance device at a price the Microsofts, Yahoos, Amazons, and Equinixes of the world will find attractive.
SurfRay Round Up
October 24, 2008
SurfRay and its products have triggered a large number of comments on this Web log. On my recent six day trip to Europe, I was fortunate to be in a position to talk with people who knew about the company’s products. I also toted my Danish language financial statements along, and I was able to find some people to walk me through the financials. Finally, I sat down and read the dozens of postings that have accumulated about this company.
I visited the company on a trip to Copenhagen five or six years ago. I wrote some profiles about the market for SharePoint centric search, sent bills, got paid, and then drifted away from the company. I liked the Mondosoft folks, but I live in rural Kentucky. One of my friends owned a company which ended up in the SurfRay portfolio. I lost track of that product. I recall learning that SurfRay gobbled up an outfit called Ontolica. My recollection was that, like Interse and other SharePoint centric content processing companies’ technology, Ontolica put SharePoint on life support. What this means is that some of SharePoint’s functions work but not too well. Third party vendors pay Microsoft to certify one or more engineers in the SharePoint magic. Then those “certified” companies can sell products to SharePoint customers. If Microsoft likes the technology, a Microsoft engineer may facilitate a deal for a “certified” vendor. I am hazy on the ways in which the Microsoft certification program works, but I have ample data from interviews I have conducted that “certification” yields sales.
An Ontolica results list.
Why is this important? It’s background for the points I want to set forth as “believed to be accurate” so the SurfRay folks can comment, correct, clarify, and inform me on what the heck is going on at SurfRay. Here are the points I about which comments are in bounds.
Google: A Powerful Mental Eraser
October 23, 2008
Earlier today I learned that a person who listened to my 20 minute talk at a small conference in London, England, heard one thing only–Google. I won’t mention the name of this person, who has an advanced degree and is sufficiently motivated to attend a technical conference.
What amazed me were these points:
- The attendee thought I was selling Google’s eDiscovery services
- I did not explain that organizations require predictive services, not historical search services
- I failed to mention other products in my talk.
I looked at the PowerPoint deck I used to check my memory. At age 64, I have a tough time remembering where I parked my car. Here’s what I learned from my slide deck.
Mention Google and some people in the audience lose the ability to listen and “erase” any recollection of other companies mentioned or any suggestion that Google is not flawless. Source: http://i265.photobucket.com/albums/ii215/Katieluvr01/eraser-2.jpg.
First, I began with a chart created by an SAS Institute professional. I told the audience the source of the chart and pointed out the bright red portion of the chart. This segment of the chart identifies the emergence of the predictive analytics era. Yep, that’s the era we are now entering.
Second, I reviewed the excellent search enabled eDiscovery system from Clearwell Systems. I showed six screen shots of the service and its outputs. I pointed out that attorneys pay big sums for the Clearwell System because it creates an audit trail so queries can be rerun at any time. It generates an email thread so an attorney can see who wrote whom when and what was said. It creates outputs that can be submitted to a court without requiring a human to rekey data. In short, I gave Clearwell a grade of “A” and urged the audience to look at this system for competitive intelligence, not just eDiscovery. Oh, I pointed out that email comprises a larger percentage of content in eDiscovery than it has in previous years.
Dataspaces in Denmark: The 2008 Boye Conference
October 22, 2008
Earlier this year, the engaging Janus Boye asked me to give a talk and offer a tutorial at his content management and information access conference. The program is located here, and you will see a line up that tackles some of the most pressing issues facing organizations today. The conference is held in Arhus, Denmark. My first visit was a delight. I could walk to a restaurant and connect. Arhus may be one of the most wired and wireless savvy cities I’ve visited.
About a year ago, before Google decided I was Kentucky vermin, I discovered in the open source literature, a reference to a technology with which I was not familiar. In the last year, I have pulled this information thread. After much work, I believe I have discovered the basics of one of Google’s most interesting and least known technology initiatives.
Source: http://www.lohninger.com/helpcsuite/img/kohonen1.gif
Unlike some of the other innovations I have described in my 2005 The Google Legacy and my 2007 Google Version 2.0 reports. Those documents relied extensively on Google’s own patent documents. This most recent discovery reports information in Bell Labs’s patents, various presentations by Google researchers, and published journal articles with unusual names; for example, “Information Manifold”. The research also pointed to work at Stanford University and a professor who, I believe, has been involved to some degree with Google’s team leader. I also learned of a Google acquisition in 2006, which does not appear in the Wikipedia list of Google acquisitions. Although the deal was reported in several Web logs, no one dug into the company’s technology or its now-dark classified ad site.
Accenture Redefines Enterprise Search
October 21, 2008
A happy quack to the reader who alerted me to a white paper–a brief white paper–from Accenture. As you may know, Accenture is a consultancy spawned by an accounting firm. Unlike Price Waterhouse Coopers, Accenture has continued under its own electric motor and it has worked hard to rank among the McKinseys and the Booz, Allen & Hamiltons of the world. Accenture publishes essays and studies to buttress its position as a “thought leader”. I downloaded the paper “In Search of Answers: Enterprise Search and the High Performance Business” here. I did not pause in my goosely quest to ponder the jarring “in search of answers” or the oxymoronic “high performance business”. That’s standard consulting word smithing. I dived into the meat of the six page document. When you retain a High Street consulting firm, you get more than six pages. The white paper is an intellectual appetizer, not an entire meal. I assert that Accenture is delivering the information equivalent of low fat yogurt or “search lite”.
This is a watercress salad. Not too filling and probably not a meal for a lumberjack.
The most interesting aspect of the write up to me was what it did not contain. Accenture pauses briefly on the problem that exists in most organizations; namely, enterprise search is a source of dissatisfaction. The company’s pundits also bound happily over the pain points of cost, complexity, and deployment time. This addled goose assumed that these issues are understood and documented in the reports to paying customers.
What struck me was the the placement of “what lies ahead” before the “how does it work” discussion. Since I am on record as the person who first proclaimed that “search is broken” then “search is dead”, it came as a surprise that Accenture sought to educate me about the future of a not too lively business sector. I thought briefly of the Fast Search & Transfer tangle in Oslo, Norway; the case studies of failed search vendors such as Delphes and Entopia; and the growing number of search vendors gasping for oxygen. You can read about the TeezIR and SurfRay businesses in this Web log. In short, from giants like IBM and Oracle to smaller companies, enterprise search is a bit of a challenge for vendors and users alike.
A more substantive solution to information access in an organization delivers calories and longer-lasting satisfaction.
What did Accenture say about the future? I am not going to quote from the firm’s document. It is the consultants’ intellectual property. The gist is that the future of search is analytics and monitoring, sentiment analysis, and multimedia. These are subjects that I assume will provide answers to a high performance business.
In reality, the Accenture white paper contributes to the problem of enterprise search. A high performance business won’t be a high performance business if it loses sight of one simple point–employees need information to help them do their jobs better. Making an employee type a query and watch a video to get an answer is sillier than the band playing as the Titanic goes down.
If you thrive on consulting firm input, you will find the Accenture white paper food for thought. If you have a more discerning palate, you will look for a more substantial starter. The Accenture white paper about enterprise search is what I consider “search lite”. You are welcome to a different opinion. I want substance, not MBA floundering.
Stephen Arnold, October 21, 2008
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
