Google Shoes the Next Money Maker?
October 19, 2011
We know the home economics major, the failed Web masters, and the “real” analysts are busy with the Endeca Oracle tie up.
We’re not. Oracle bought a late 1990s technology which requires a ton of services. This move reminded us of three things:
- When the acquisition price is not disclosed, we think that Oracle ponied up some big bucks to get Endeca’s 600 customers, its services business, and the technology that makes the Harvard Business School wiggle with joy
- Oracle is now going to tackle HP and Autonomy with its Oracle database plus Endeca. This should be exciting and create some enterprise marketing excitment. Happy customers? Will that be secondary?
- After $70 million in funding, a stalled IPO, an injection of cash by Intel and SAP Ventures, Endeca is no longer the last remaining 1990s search vendor.
Despite Google’s well designed and ever-impressive logos on their homepage, shoes are not their forte. Well, I suppose we can at least deduct that Evan Steinberg, Google Community Manager for Android has nothing to do with their graphics department, according to Gizmodo’s article, “These Google Designed Nikes Are Proof That Google Has No Taste.”
Yes, Google has a shoe designed with its likeness, if an Internet entity can one of those. The elements range from a snapshot of Larry Page’s face on the tongue, to Google Maps watermarked underneath the swoosh, all the way back to the original exclamation point studded logo.
The Gizmodo article accurately points out the following:
The Nike Air Mags, though not the prettiest shoe, represent a sort of nostalgic geek beauty. These Google designed Nike Dunks though? Just plain fugly. Even the geekiest, worst-dressed Googler would never be caught dead in these.
Hopefully people will see these shoes for what they are, a shoe given to the friend who excessively says “let me Google that” or the family member who is employed by the search engine giant–not any sort of representation of their reputation.
Will Google sneakers be allowed at Oracle?
Megan Feil, October 19, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Google Amazon Dust Bunnies
October 13, 2011
The addled goose has a bum eye, more air miles than a 30 something IBM sales engineer, and lousy Internet connectivity. T Mobile’s mobile WiFi sharing gizmo is a door stop. Imagine my surprise when I read “Google Engineer: “Google+ Example of Our Complete Failure to Understand Platforms.” In one webby write up, the dust bunnies at Google and Amazon were moved from beneath the bed to the white nylon carpet of a private bed chamber.
I am not sure the information in the article is spot on. Who can certain about the validity of any information any longer. The goose cannot. But the write up reveals that Amazon is an organization with political “infighting”. What’s new? Nothing. Google, on the other hand, evidences a bit of reflexivity. I will not drag the Motorola Mobility event into this brief write up, but students of business may find that acquisition worth researching.
Here is the snippet which caught my attention:
[A] high-profile Google engineer … mistakenly posted a long rant about working at Amazon and Google’s own issues with creating platforms on Google+. Apparently, he only wanted to share it internally with everybody at Google, but mistaken shared it publicly. For the most part, [the] post focuses on the horrors of working at Amazon, a company that is notorious for its political infighting. The most interesting part to me, though, is … [the] blunt assessment of what he perceives to be Google’s inability to understand platforms and how this could endanger the company in the long run.
I want to step back. In fact, I want to go into MBA Mbit mode.
First, this apparent management behavior is the norm in many organizations, not the companies referenced in the post.I worked for many years in the old world of big time consulting. Keep in mind that my experiences date from 1973, but management idiosyncrasies were the rule. The majority of these management gaffes took place in a slower, not digital world. Sure, speed was important. In the physics of information speed is relative. Today the perceived velocity is great and the diffusion of information adds a supercharger to routine missteps. Before getting too excited about the insights into one or two companies, most organizations today are perilously close to dysfunction. Nothing special here, but today’s environment gives what is normal some added impact. Consolidation and an absence of competition makes the stakes high. Bad decisions add a thrill to the mundane. Big decisions weigh more and can have momentum that does more quickly than a bad decision in International Harvester or NBC in the 1970s.
Second, technology invites bad decisions. Today most technologies are “hidden”, not exposed like the guts of a Model T or my mom’s hot wire toaster which produced one type of bagel—burned. Not surprisingly, even technically sophisticated managers struggle to understand the implications of a particular technical decision. To make matters worse, senior mangers have to deal with “soft” issues and technical training, even if limited, provide few beacons for the course to chart. Need some evidence. Check out the Hewlett Packard activities over the last 18 months. I routinely hear such statements as “we cannot locate the invoice” and “tell us what to do.” Right. When small things go wrong, how can the big things go right? My view is that chance is a big factor today.
Third, the rush to make the world social, collaborative, and open means that leaks, flubs, sunshine, and every other type of exposure is part of the territory.. I find it distressing that sophisticated organizations fall into big pot holes. As I write this, I am at an intelligence conference, and the rush to openness has an unexpected upside for some information professionals. With info flowing around without controls, the activities of authorities are influenced by the info bonanza. Good and bad guys have unwittingly created a situation that makes it less difficult to find the footprints of an activity. The post referenced in the source article is just one more example of what happens when information policies just don’t work. Forget trust. Even the technically adept cannot manage individual communications. Quite a lesson I surmise.
In search and content processing,the management situation is dire. Many companies are uncertain about pricing,features, services, and innovation. Some search vendors describe themselves with nonsense and Latinate constructions. Other flip flop for search to customer support to business intelligence without asking themselves, “Does this stuff actually work?” Many firms throw adjectives in front of jargon and rely on snake charming sales people to close deals. Good management or bad management? Neither. We are in status quo management with dollops of guessing and wild bets.
My take on this dust bunny matter is that we have what may be an unmanageable and ungovernable situation. No SharePoint governance conference is going to put the cat back in the bag. No single email, blog post, or news article will make a difference. Barn burned. Horse gone. Wal-Mart is building on the site. The landscape has changed. Now let the “real” consultants explain the fix. Back to the goose pond for me. Collaborate on that.
Stephen E Arnold, October 13, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
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OpenText Ups Management Horsepower
October 13, 2011
OpenText announces its appointment of Kamran Kheirolomoom to Senior Vice President and General Manager of its BPM business. The entire press release can be accessed here: “OpenText Appoints Kamran Kheirolomoom to Lead its BPM Business.”
The press release discusses the appointment:
Kheirolomoom, who joins the company from Serena Software, will be responsible for driving OpenText’s aggressive strategy in BPM and dynamic case management solutions. OpenText has moved quickly this year to build a leading portfolio of BPM solutions, acquiring Metastorm in February and Global360 in July. The combination brings complementary capabilities, and accelerates the company’s investment in leading content and process solutions. According to Gartner, the BPM market was $1.9 billion in 2009, growing 15 percent that year.
We have to ask, when will OpenText’s various findability systems be integrated? We will keep an eye out to see if Kheirolomoom is willing to make that move.
Emily Rae Aldridge, October 13, 2011
Google’s Management Strives for Irony with Google+
October 12, 2011
Google CEO Larry Page and other top execs don’t seem that invested in Google+. No, I didn’t add them to my circle to see their lack of activity–I don’t have one. This great blog entry from the understatement broke down their usage in the form of a good old pie chart.
It turns out that only 3 of the 12 people listed on the Google Management Team page have ever made public posts on the site, which has been up and running for 3 months now.
The entry sums up some more of the stats they found in their research:
In total, of the 18 most senior people charged with overseeing Google, 11 have either not joined or have never made a single public post, and 5 have barely used it at all. Only Senior VP of Social / head of Google+ Vic Gundotra and SVP of Chrome Sundar Pichai have made any effort to seriously adopt Google+.
This lack of internal usage may be indicative of the site’s popularity. Usually if there’s a great product out there the employees, let alone the higher-ups, want to use it. This data collection does make me wonder how many Google employees overall are on Google+.
Megan Feil, October 12, 2011
AOL Management Lessons
October 10, 2011
I skimmed “Former AOLer: ‘Seed Was A Flop From The Beginning’” and thought it was another AOL shoots itself in the foot write up. Enough already. I thought about the example of Seed and its “boss”. I realized that the story was a great example of the “we’re almost like Google” approach to running a high profile department, business unit, or service.
I noted this passage:
Additionally, Saul Hansell — the the “real” journalist in charge of Seed — was more of a big news guy. (Our source reported that Hansell had a copy of the article he wrote about the AOL/Time Warner merger on his desk.) The Seed purview didn’t fit his interest or his skill set.
On the reread, three questions:
- Where was senior management as the top dog sniffed for big news?
- Is it not insubordinate to undermine an employer’s goal?
- Why would one keep old “dead tree” clippings on one desk when there is Facebook to memorialize certain important moments?
In short, the Googley approach does not work particularly well in certain corporate settings. Maybe there is some value in knowing how to manage?
Stephen E Arnold, October 10, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Do Some Search Vendors Have Name Issues?
October 6, 2011
Long conference call after I returned from the land of beets and goulashes. The problem which the client wished to discuss was traffic to the firm’s Web site. My view of search engine optimization is that it is pretty much a waste of time. Buy Adwords and skip the silliness of have home economics majors “index” content and coders looking for ways to fool Father Google and Mother Bing.
I won’t mention the client’s company, but I can use a handful of examples to illustrate the what I call the “findability” problem. Here are a few examples of vendors selected from the Overflight service:
Brainware. Clever name, but when you run the query on YouTube.com, I get academic institutions, an outfit in India sharing the same company name, and some “interesting” videos which I won’t describe.
Connotate. Connotate does well in Google search results. When looking for the company in blogs, the word “connotate” predominates. Run a Twitter query to see what I mean.
Mark Logic or MarkLogic. There seem to be two spellings floating around. I am not sure if the name is an issue or if there is simply zero content when running queries in services like Moreover.
Solr. Although not a company, the name is a problem. A publicly traded company uses the string “solr” as a ticker/trading code. To see the consequences of this naming choice, set up an alert on Google or another service. You will see that the “solr” links pumps mostly the stock, not the search system.
Thunderstone. This company has been in the search business a long time. When I run a query for Thunderstone, most of the hits are to a game. Google does show the company on the first page of the search results, but the game company seems to be in a commanding position in a query.
What’s my take?
I think that search vendors have quite a bit of work to do to protect their existing product or company names. I think that Brainware and Thunderstone are examples of vendors not putting enough horses on the wagon to keep their firms visible. For Connotate, the word is a good one, but in today’s free text world, work must be done to keep the company semantically hooked to the terms. Clearly, that’s not happening for Connotate, the vendor of agent software. For MarkLogic, I think the dual spellings are a possible factor, but maybe the company is just not outputting enough information to have traction.
Is there a fix? Yep, www.augmentext.com. Will SEO do the job? Probably not.
When I mentioned this on the call, my client wanted SEO. I said, “So buy SEO services.” Then I said, “Supplement that investment with Adwords.” Traffic is the name of the Bing and Google game, not traffic because one has a clever name.
Stephen E Arnold, October 6, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Page Views Add Top Dog Credibility
October 3, 2011
Short honk: I wanted to capture the reference to “one billion page views.” This is a big number, and I don’t know if it is accurate. Online usage data are—ah, how shall I phrase it—somewhat malleable. The source that carried the claim was “HuffPost at One Billion Monthly Page Views: More buying, More Launching, More Hiring.” The article contained a hint of what one of the goslings called “page view envy.” I have no idea what the person was talking about. I learned:
Along with the record one billion page views, the site also said it had 37 million unique visitors in August, the largest number it has posted yet, with 5.1 million comments.
This struck me as important for one simple reason: HuffPost and Ms. Huff herself now have some additional ammunition to oust the Googler and take over AOL. In my view, Ms. Huff has what it takes to make AOL grow. The Googler in chief at AOL now has the distinction of making a deal for an acquisition that knows how to generate traffic, capture headlines, and operate in an organized fashion. Am I right? Hard to say. I wanted to capture this thought, however, because “real” journalists are not in this particular game at this time. Real journalists mostly report was Ms Huff is doing.
Stephen E Arnold, October 3, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Protected: SharePoint and Product Lifecycle Management
September 21, 2011
Protected: A Tip for Adding Muscle to SharePoint
August 11, 2011
Delightful Irony: Human Crashes Google Car
August 7, 2011
This morning my Overflight information service overflowed with Google related information. There were coveys of quales [Latin and not a misspelling, gentle reader] about Google and patents. There was another Googley shutdown story. The idea is that you should just Google a word. Who cares about a “real” dictionary entry. I find the reference appropriate because who cares about a “real” anything, including an azure chip consulting company with a penchant for becoming authorities in ANSI standard controlled term lists. I found a tardy response to the feline centric “How Do I Hate Google? Let Me Count the Ways”, which had precious little of the Elizabeth Barrett Browning gentleness from her pain and suffering.
Consider this EBB passage:
First time he kissed me, he but only kissed The fingers of this hand wherewith I write; And, ever since, it grew more clean and white.
Now evaluate the budding wordsmith Brian S. Hall’s passage:
David Drummond, you are [lame]. Larry, Sergey, you are [lame]. And I know why you’re [lame]. I know why you have monopoly profits in one business, use them to *destroy* other businesses, dominate the newest business (smartphones) and still whine.
Now who should be the focus for legions of soon to be unemployed English majors?
But what caught my attention was this item: “Google Blames a Human for its Robo-Car Crash.” My take: Algorithm good. Human bad.
Now what happens if Google’s next big product initiative such as a relaunch of the fascinating Google TV product line or a fully integrated, graphically consistent interface to the Android mobile devices flops?
Maybe algorithm good, human bad? Amusing to me because humans, not algorithms, are actually making decisions at the Googleplex. So a failure at Google boils down to “Human bad.” Seems logical.
Stephen E Arnold, August 7, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com, publishers of The New Landscape of Enterprise Search
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