Google Jets and a Place to Park
December 25, 2011
Too bad for Larry Ellison. He has to park his jets somewhere other than Google Air Force Base. Since mid September, Occupy Wall Street protesters have used the memorable slogan “We are the 99%” to reference the growing disparity in wealth in the U.S. between the richest 1% and the rest of the population. Google executives are not exempt from these attacks.
According to the TechCrunch article “Google’s 3 Top Executives Have 8 Private Jets,” Google executives, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt own eight jets. 2.6 jets per person, for the 2 co-founders and the executive chairman? That seems a bit excessive.
The article states:
The jets are not owned or operated by Google. Instead, the 3 Google leaders operate the fleet through an LLC called H211. Google has no official relation with H211. Ken Ambrose, the Director of Operations for H211, announced the funding offer at a public meeting this week. He also complained that NASA, which owns Hangar One, has taken too long to respond to the offer.
While it is not abnormal for CEO’s and executives to own private jets, owning eight seems extreme. I guess this is just another example of how the 1 percent lives. Hopefully it will not add too much fuel to the Occupy Wall Street fire. The deal may also pour fuel on Mr. Ellison’s ire.
Jasmine Ashton, December 25, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
OpenText, Its Management Shift, and Search Challenge
December 16, 2011
Short honk: Management shifts are flashing yellow lights. Examples range from the shuffles underway at America Online to the RPMs at Thomson Reuters’ revolving door. Now OpenText, a collection of poorly integrated information and content processing companies, has allegedly started the process of replacing its top dog. I read “SGI’s Barrenechea To Run Open Text.” Here’s the passage I noted:
Open Text this morning said it has named current SGI chief Mark Barrenechea as president and CEO effective January {,2012].
Mr. Barrenechea’s background according to Forbes includes:
Mr. Barrenechea served as Executive Vice President and CTO for CA, Inc. (?CA?), (formerly Computer Associates International, Inc.), a software company, from 2003 to 2006 and was a member of the executive management team. Prior to CA, Mr. Barrenechea served as Senior Vice President of Applications Development at Oracle Corporation, an enterprise software company, from 1997 to 2003, managing a multi-thousand person global team while serving as a member of the executive management team. From 1994 to 1997, Mr. Barrenechea served as Vice President of Development at Scopus, an applications company. Prior to Scopus Mr. Barrenechea was with Tesseract, an applications company, where he was responsible for reshaping the company’s line of human capital management software as Vice President of Development. Mr. Barrenechea holds a Bachelor of Science degree in computer science from Saint Michael?s College.
Interesting. Three developments to watch in my opinion are:
- OpenText’s ability to integrate a wide range of products and services into a cohesive offering. Compared to Autonomy’s marketing, also a company built via content centric applications, OpenText has not mounted compelling marketing campaigns which make the company’s products interesting.
- OpenText’s engineering to update some of its properties to keep those products in step with competitors’ offerings.
- OpenText’s cloud services deliver value and features to enterprise customers unable or unwilling to cope with the burdens of traditional on premises solutions.
One of the more interesting tasks for the new president will be figuring out what to do with OpenText’s line up of search systems. These include the aging BASIS and BRS Search, the Nstein system, the SGML search system, and the embedded components in such OpenText properties as RedDot. The cost of keeping each of these systems in step with competitive solutions strikes me as too large for even OpenText’s revenues.
Will OpenText be a kinder, gentler marketer? Will open text implement Computer Associates’ style of sales? Exciting 2012 for OpenText, its customers, employees, and technology staff. I hear the revolving door spinning in rural Kentucky.
Stephen E Arnold, December 16, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Jungle Logic? How about Jungle Growth?
December 13, 2011
Let me be upfront. I am not a professional writer. I am not a “real” journalist or story-telling consultant. I am a semi retired person living in rural Kentucky. I know my limits, and I know when another is testing those limits.
I read in the dead tree edition of The New York Times this morning (December 13, 2011), an article on page A 29, “Amazon’s Lost Jungle.” The author is Richard Russo. I looked him up in Bing and learned that he is a “real” writer. You can get more information about him at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Russo. I was disappointed that the dead tree edition of the New York Times did not include some basic information about the author, but that’s what sets dead tree publishers apart from the faux folks who write in blogs like Beyond Search. I am supposed to know Mr. Russo. I told you I had limits.
Amazon has been making headlines. First, there was the Kindle Fire, which was supposed to be an Apple iPod killer. The gizmo is an okay reader. The “iPad killer” part is a non starter. Second, there has been a flurry of information on podcasts, including Adam Carolla’s comedy program, about Amazon’s offering authors money to publish a book with Amazon in place of a New York outfit. Third, there’s The New York Times’s article by Mr. Russo.
I want to focus on that write up.
The hook for Amazon’s Lost Jungle is the cash back for buying from Amazon, not a brick and mortar store front. There are not many of those left in Harrod’s Creek. WalMart, Costco, and BestBuy took care of that. What the big boxes did not crush, Kroger and convenient stores mostly eliminated. Need a vacant store front? Harrod Creek’s for you.
The article recounts via quotations from authors various views of the shift from paper to digital content. The observations are interesting, and I quite liked the phrase “scorched earth capitalism.” Here’s the passage I marked with a question mark:
Like just about everybody I’ve talked to about it, I first attributed Amazon’s price-comparison app to arrogance and malevolence, but there’s also something bizarrely clumsy and wrong-footed about it. Critics may appear weak today, but they may not be tomorrow, and if the wind shifts, Amazon’s ham-fisted strategy has the potential to morph into a genuine Occupy Amazon movement. And even if the company is lucky and that doesn’t happen, what has it really gained? The fickle gratitude of people who will have about as much loyalty to Amazon tomorrow as they do today to Barnes & Noble, last year’s bully? This is good business? Is it just me, or does it feel as if the Amazon brass decided to spend the holidays in the Caribbean and left in charge of the company a computer that’s fallen head over heels in love with its own algorithms?
I think, just guessing I suppose, that Amazon is “bad” somehow. Amazon is successful because people find value in what the firm does. Is Amazon supposed to behave differently with regard to books. In its own way, Amazon is just doing what comes naturally to 21st century, information based companies.
I have three observations:
- Amazon is going to get bigger and more invasive. Mr. Bezos has a vision which may be as all encompassing as the Apple or Google view of what the firms can accomplish.
- Books are going to face an uphill battle. I know that in certain demographics books are hot tamales, but in certain demographics so are vinyl records. Unfortunately the big world of money is not based on looking at the world through niche colored glasses.
- Consumers in the US are into video. Now I know that I like books, but I am old and woefully out of step with the 20 somethings with whom I am sometimes forced to work. The world is video and embedded devices which pump connectivity direct to the brain. Watch for it in the next 10 years.
The “jungle logic” is not operative in the digital world. Think in terms of natural monopolies which attempt to embrace broad expanses of information, information services, and content outputs. The law of the jungle is a lion eats man thing. The law of the digital Amazon is closer to uncontrolled cellular growth colonizing a host. Without meaningful regulation and management common sense, we are looking at some unpleasant, large, and ultimately unhealthy growths. Call the doctor. I just went to voicemail and I have to listen because the menu choices have changed.
Stephen E Arnold, December 13, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
System Deployment Woes Continue: Search and More
December 12, 2011
Financial directors can only do so much from their end, and are frustrated by poor management of their software investments. That’s the gist of “Why Do Financial Directors Have Little Confidence in Business Software?” from the UK’s BCW.
Writer Julian Swan cites research showing that only 7% of financial directors in the UK are very confident that their organizations software is correctly deployed, and 65% are unhappy with the way it is being managed. Furthermore, we learned from the write up:
Only 12% of FDs think that Intellectual Property (IP) is valued within their company, which might explain why almost 30% of those surveyed admitted that illegal software could be in use in their organization. Some of the worst performing organizations when it comes to software management are in the public sector. Only 35% of FDs in the education sector are confident that their software is deployed correctly.
Swan recommends proper, long-term planning as the remedy. Assuring that licensing issues are addressed can not only ward off all the problems that come with unlicensed software, but also save money lost to over-licensing.
We know, we know; that’s why we’re on top of it here. Do we get a gold star? Do we, do we, do we? Guess not. Our deployments work. No poobahs or satraps of home economics, big smiles, and laser printed taxonomy boot camp certificates needed. Thanks though.
Cynthia Murrell, December 12, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Protected: CRM Idol Offers ISV Insights
December 8, 2011
Enterprise Search: You Know You Are in Trouble When
December 7, 2011
When I was jammed between two less than svelte individuals on a flight from Dallas to Louisville, I read a chubby article called “IT Inferno: The Nine Circles of IT Hell.” My view of the write up was that the author walked to the end of the pier and fell into the water off the shore at one of the beaches south of Rio’s harbor. Yikes.
I then noted “Six Lessons from a Lightning ERP Rollout.” I think the main idea is that if one goes fast, the outcome of an enterprise resource planning project is going to better. Speed does only good, which will bring joy to the wanna be F1 and Nascar drivers in information technology. I found this statement interesting:
ERP implementations have gained a bad reputation, in which merely late is considered very good, and spiraling out of control is considered common. There are always more ways of doing something wrong than doing something right. Beyond that, the act of defining an effort as an ERP implementation contributes to the likelihood of disappointing results.
The idea in these two write ups was a good one. Make some mistakes and end up caught in a Dante-esque world. In theory one could emerge in the land a paradise, but few make it. As far as I know, Dante, whose house in Florence looked over a street in which all manner of technical and non technical activities unfolded, did not think much about information technology, online systems, and Service Level Agreements with $100 billion consulting outfits like IBM. No Watson was in the neighborhood to assist Dante with a thorny question.
I want to ignore the reference to Dante and focus on a handful of ideas in the six page write up. Furthermore, I want to sidestep the generalizations about large scale information system projects in organizations and narrow my focus to search. I won’t even draft business intelligence or the other 13 euphemisms for search I wrote about a few weeks ago. (I picked up this theme and drilled into some specific companies in my December submission to the January or February Information Today for which I write columns for money. Amazing, I know.
So, no big picture, no Dante, and certainly no theological overtones. I remarked at a speech in November 2011 that I once studied and indexed medieval religious literature. Got a laugh. Too bad it is true. Now you know why I poke mercilessly at English majors, failed high school teachers, and self appointed experts. The goose is talking about his guru-ness or, I should say, his being a goose-ru.
So, you know you are in trouble when:
- You cannot control your budget for search. You will know when this occurs because the organizational equivalent of a six grade Catholic school teach armed with a wooden pointer and a habit (the good kind) tells you to stay after class. The CFO watches the money, and she will bring you up to speed on the magnitude of the problem you have created. Numbers make clear that a search project has gone south. I can hear the snap of the wooden pointer now. Ouch.
- Users work around the system. Now most information technology professionals deny that users are unhappy with any aspect of a system which is actually online and functioning to some degree. However, when we ask users about search systems, the message we receive from surveys and interviews is easy to understand: Search is not too useful. The proof, however, is not a survey. Just ask users what they do to find information and you will learn about intra-company networks, bootleg systems, and even hosted services which poke through the firewall to index content. The sticky notes are a dead giveaway as well.
- The infrastructure is not able to keep pace with indexing. We hear a lot of baloney about how fast a search system is, how small an index’s overhead will be, and how little latency exists within a search system. The reality is that most search systems cannot provide near real time index updates. As a result, there are numerous instances of old information used for proposals, financial summaries, and marketing reports. How does a cash strapped search system manager keep pace with burgeoning digital content? Easy. Index less and update the index on a relaxed schedule. Don’t believe me? Where is the marketing PowerPoint for the presentation given yesterday by the marketing VP? I get these materials by asking the person to give it to me on a storage device or dump it in an online file sharing service. That sometimes works. Search usually does not work.
- The vendor changes his marketing tune. Here’s how this goes. You license a search system from a company which asserts that it is 100 percent committed to enterprise search. then you read in Beyond Search that the company is in customer support, information optimization (whatever that means), business intelligence (an oxymoron at Bank of America or Goldman Sachs perhaps?), or taxonomy generation. What happened to search? In the quest for revenues. search vendors change more rapidly than we can track. When this happens, how easy is it to get the exact technical inputs your need without delay? If less than 10 minutes, you have a winner vendor. More than 10 minutes, well, well, well.
- Your open source wizards takes a job at Cisco Systems, eHarmony, IBM, or one of the other Open Sourcey firms. You remember the old space launches. I bet this triggers a memory moment, “Houston, we have a problem.” One certainly does.
Check out the IT inferno. Just make sure search is not throwing coke into the oven as someone increases the oxygen flow. You can have a coal fired meltdown without nuclear powered search. AtomicPR, however, will lay down a radioactive blast zone for its various solutions, including XML as a universal search solution. I have heard that phrase before, “universal search.” Those categorical affirmatives are a sixth indicator I believe.
Stephen E Arnold, December 7, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Protected: Pick Your Programmer People to be the Perfect SharePoint Piece
December 6, 2011
Protected: Is SharePoint the End All Content Management Solution?
December 5, 2011
Amazon, Apple, and Google: The American Automobile Industry Approach to Innovation
December 3, 2011
I have been amused by two things:
First, Amazon watched and implemented Google ideas with remarkable consistency. Now maybe it was chance or the old college dorm discussion about simultaneous insights as a result of zeitgeist and beer. Regardless of the cause, Google described the cloud as a computer and Amazon implemented it. Google was in the game, but Amazon’s remarkable sense of timing meant that Google arrived in a niche plastered with Amazon’s arrow logos.
A sign of decay in innovation? Image credit: http://detroitfilms.com/blog/news/proposals-to-draw-more-filmmaking-to-michigan/
Second, Google fell into a pattern of reacting, not innovating, particularly in high value services. Forget the cloud stuff, Google was a late entrant to shopping, online payments, and street view search. Why these examples? Amazon arrived first.
I read “Google Wants to Create an Amazon Prime for the Entire Internet.” The main idea is that Google wants to pull an iPhone; that is, implement another company’s idea with a few wrinkles to demonstrate “real” innovation. You may be aware of my sensitivity to “real” consultants, “real” experts, and “real” innovation.
Here’s the key passage in my opinion:
Google is teaming with online retailers to cook up a standardized way to ship things to customers super fast (for a fee, of course). Sound familiar? Yeah, Google’s going after Amazon Prime. The WSJ’s sources say that Google has started this ‘Amazon Prime for other retailers’ initiative because people have began searching for products directly on Amazon rather than Google. And Google needs to protect its corners! The current rumored plan is to use Google’s existing product search in Google Shopping and combine it with a behind-the-scenes system that’ll figure out what stores have what in stock and how fast customers can get it.
Several observations:
First, I find it interesting that in the spirit of competition, a small number of companies are competing by rolling out me too products. In my view, I would like to see a bit more effort put into a service. A couple of wrinkles alters the suit in a superficial manner, but how about something fresh, interesting, and useful?
Protected: Are Enterprise CMS Suites Going Extinct?
December 2, 2011
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