Traditional Media Explains Why It May Be Marginalized
August 10, 2009
Short honk: Navigate to the New York Times’s article “Breakfast Can Wait. The Day’s First Stop Is Online”. In my opinion, the article does a good job of explaining why traditional media are being marginalized. Note the pattern. Up. Online. Leave. No time for the newspaper. Not a hint of interest in a magazine. A book. Not a source of fun for anyone except grandmother. How will traditional media respond? Hybrids; that is, a marriage of traditional publishing and new technology. Great idea. How will these solutions be fit into a day that begins with email and ends with surfing YouTube.com?
Stephen Arnold, August 10, 2009
SAP and Its Evolving Business Model
August 10, 2009
First, the Tibco rumor and now the SAP on demand software strategy. Managing Automation’s “SAP Unveils an On-Demand Software Strategy for Large Enterprise Customers” surprised me. I had dismissed SAP’s cloud chatter as fog. Not so according to Jeff Moad, a member of the Managing Automation editorial staff. He wrote:
At a recent SaaS conference in Amsterdam, John Wookey, SAP’s executive vice president for large enterprise on-demand, said the company plans to roll out a series of SaaS products for large enterprises that integrate tightly with SAP’s on-premise Business Suite and run on the Java-based on-demand platform that SAP acquired along with Frictionless Commerce in 2006. SAP will concentrate on selling the SaaS offerings to existing users of its business suite rather than new accounts, Wookey said. SAP’s SaaS offerings for large enterprises will include some existing and some new products. Existing products include SAP’s CRM on-demand and e-sourcing services. SAP CRM on-demand will be migrated to the Frictionless on-demand platform…
You can get a consultant’s viewpoint and some verbiage from SAP top brass. For me, the article triggered three thoughts:
- How will SAP make up the shortfall between the revenue from its traditional approach to licensing and deploying its software and the “cloud” model?
- If there is strong uptake for SAP cloud services, from where will the engineers needed to service the clients come? If SAP trims down the functionality, won’t the savvy buyer look for lower cost cloud options or just fire up some coders to create a solution using Google or Microsoft functions?
- What will customers be getting? Will this service be a 2009 version of Microsoft’s early push into cloud computing?
- Whither TREX search?
I don’t have answers, and I didn’t see them in the Managing Automation write up.
Stephen Arnold, August 11, 2009
Washington Post Riffles Google Books
August 10, 2009
First, the source: the Washington Post. A traditional newspaper. Presumably the Washington Post is aware that Google has become the poster child of the network-centric world in which traditional media must operate. Second, the Google: a company that has destabilized Yahoo, annoyed telecommunications executives, and operates by playing three D chess in a world happier with Tic Tac Toe.
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The editorial “Google’s Fine Print” identifies one of Google’s chess moves in a Tic Tac Toe world. Traditional media want the game to be Tic Tac Toe. There is an elegance to it and the business model predicated on taking intellectual outputs, putting them on paper, selling ads, and charging enough money to build information empires like those enjoyed by William Randolph Hurst, among others.
The problem, however, is that in order to win at Google’s game, the folks on the other sides of the 3 D chess board have to know what game is being played. Google has been grinding away at indexing and archiving information for quite a while. The Books interest kicked in a year or so before Google hired a wizard and Caere executive to move the Google parade toward books.
Then Google invoked fair use and started digitizing with some partners who were sufficiently Googley to figure out that playing Google’s game was a reasonable undertaking. Folks objected. Google negotiated. A deal emerged. Now, after the fact, the Tic Tac Toe crowd wants to play their game.
I have written many times that dealing with Google requires a different understanding. The traditional media are one group of Google contestants lagging in the game playing expertise. Keep in mind that Google is an “as is” outfit. The Tic Tac Toe crowd is working on the “to be” scenario. Publishing will be in the same two person raft as Microsoft and Yahoo. That craft is not going to close the gap, let along leapfrog the Google.
Let me think. Google said it would index the world’s information 11 years ago. Since that time, Google has been playing its game of 3 D chess. Now more than a decade later, the Washington Post wants to play Tic Tac Toe. Well, maybe the lawyers will pull off the Greek deus ex cathedra play. Will that change the fact that no other entity can do what Google is doing to preserve and make accessible books and research information. A national library? Right, good luck with that one. How about a commercial database company? Fat chance. Some of thsee outfits would sell out to Google in a Kentucky Derby minute so the lawyers and accountants who run these information sweat shops can buy a house in France.
Tell me how wrong I am. Just keep the “as is”, the signed deal, and the available archive in mind. “To be” arguments will not hold the addled goose’s attention. The Christian Science Monitor has weighed in as well.
Stephen Arnold, August 10, 2009
Publishing Fantasy: The Hybrid Solution
August 10, 2009
I can visualize the meeting that sparked the idea for “Staving Off A Spiral Toward Oblivion”. You can read the essay by Mary Tripsas in the hard copy of the New York Times in the Business section, August 9, 2009, page 3, or poke around online until you locate a link to a digital version.
The argument references hot metal typesetting, sailing ships, and other chestnuts from the buggy whip approach to business analysis. In today’s world, these examples are intriguing. I recall meeting a talented professional writer named Fred Czufin, who used history to illustrate modern technology. We used his firm to create a remarkable historical view of energy for Eric Zausner, then the head of Booz Allen’s energy practice. This was in the era of a single Booz, Allen & Hamilton at a time when the firm was competing to be among the top two or three management consulting firms in the world.
Ms. Tripsas has used the same method to explain that publishers can save themselves by becoming hybrids. The idea is that by bolting on whizzy new functions to the proven methods, an organization has time and opportunity to make further changes.
Wrong.
Hybrids are at best a bit like Frankenstein’s monster, neither fish nor fowl.
Consider Google. The company focused on solving fundamental problems using available hardware. The company’s focus was on solving known problems and using quite different business methods and processes to achieve the firm’s objective of making the world’s information available.
Google along with Facebook and a handful of other companies have come to define the next generation in information services and systems. Sure, these outfits use established technology but the companies have blended technology with business methods, processes, and models.
The New York Times’s Web site renders its content incorrectly in Firefox. The page displays in Internet Explorer. Perhaps the New York Times will make it possible for Firefox users to view a properly rendered page generated from its hybrid system? I know that’s a detail and probably not meaningful to a company embracing Frankenstein methods.
The problem for publishers and other last-generation information companies is that kicking the habits formed in the past is proving really tough.
I want to mention a couple of examples that hit my radar this week. You may, of course, agree or disagree. Keep in mind I am not in the same kettle of fish as the information companies that are fighting for their lives:
ITEM 1: A large organization cannot deploy a Web site that works. The fix was to ignore the business management and process issues and fix the blame for the problem on the information technology contractor.
ITEM 2: A publisher has reduced its work week from five days to four days. In order to save money, the accounting department makes “errors” that delay the payment process.
ITEM 3: A tabloid publisher cannot create a new online service because the editorial procedures are set up for print and management lacks the appetite to make changes.
ITEM 4: A new media company exits one technical field which makes money to focus on electronic content which does not make money.
What does each of these “items” have in common? Management problems. Hybrids don’t fix management problems. Period.
Each of these outfits has whizzy new technology. Each of these outfits is a hybrid. If that’s the way to save publishing, I must be missing something.
Stephen Arnold, August 10, 2009
Kindle Murdoch Show Down
August 9, 2009
The theme for News Corp.’s top dog is that great journalism is expensive. Mr. Murdoch has that right. The Daily Online Examiner ran a story that makes this goose nervous: “Clueless Murdoch Move: Without Subscribers Names, Might Break with Kindle”. The “clueless” surprised me. I bet it surprised Mr. Murdoch even more. Money equals brains, and Mr. Murdoch has a lot of money. Therefore, Mr. Murdoch is a smart person. Wendy Davis wrote:
In a statement that appears tone deaf to the privacy concerns surrounding digital media, the head of News Corp. recently announced that the company might stop allowing its material to be sold on the Kindle because Amazon doesn’t disclose subscriber names. “Kindle treats them as their subscribers, not as ours, and I think that will eventually cause a break with us,” he said this week.
I would like to have access to some of the individuals whom I research reading lists. That is difficult information to get. My hunch is that because digital systems make it possible to have new types of data, then some folks want that data for their own purposes.
Mr. Murdoch is particularizing a need for data. Other entities have the data, don’t talk about it, don’t explain what can and is done with those data, and reflexively throw a fog of obfuscation over these data. Mr. Murdoch is forcing a show down. He is getting older. His traditional business methods are becoming less reliable. He is fighting back.
This and the charging for content will be an interesting lab test and IQ test.
Stephen Arnold, August 9, 2009
Yahoo and Reality
August 8, 2009
I scanned the SEO crowds’ view on the top Yahooliganette’s view that Yahoo is not a search engine company. You can read Search Engine Land’s view with a video link in its story “Revisionist History: Bartz Claims Yahoo Was Never A Search Engine.” The journalist who gave the story prominence was Ashlee Vance, writing for the venerable but struggling New York Times. That article “Yahoo Chief: We Have Never Been a Search Company” reported:
The company’s strength has been in collecting information, not producing it.
The write up contains some memorable quotations, and I urge you to read these first hand, not from the webbed feet of the addled goose.
Now the view from Harrod’s Creek:
Yahoo Chose a Path of Knee Jerk Adaptation
Yahoo lacked a vision. The company had money and it had quite a few individuals who operated as each was running a separate company. The result was that by 2004, Yahoo was a crazy quite patchwork of unrelated businesses. Often each had a separate technical infrastructure and not much enthusiasm for playing well with other units of the Yahoo empire. This became and remains a huge drag on Yahoo’s businesses. Reaction time is slow and costs are high and tough to control. In these knee jerks, Yahoo created great public relations but lacked a strategy. By 2005, advertisers could not buy ads that would be in front of a demographic across the range of Yahoo properties; for example, 18 to 24 year old males across Flicker, Sports, Groups, and other Yahoo properties. Knee jerk reactions are land mines for online information companies.
Yahoo’s View of Search Was Different from Google’s View of Search
I have had run ins with the wizards from Google and Yahoo. Believe me, the squabbles I have had with Google have been about search. Larry Page snapped at me when I chided him about his refusal in Year 2000 to support truncation. But that disagreement was 100 percent about search. I did not agree with Mr. Page, but we both knew we were talking about what was the defining application for the Internet in the post Year 2000 period. My squabbles with Yahoo were never about search. I would point out a search issue, and I would be met with a haughty, uninformed response in most cases. One example concerned the implementation of semantic functions via smart software. Yahoo’s super wizards insisted that Yahoo’s approach was better and smarter than Google’s. I didn’t think so because Google was ** using ** semantics as an embedded function, and Yahoo was trying to convince me that its engineers were smarter than Google’s. Yahooligans, it is not about IQ and college connections. The subject is the implementation of core technology about search in a cohesive manner. Yahoo’s view of search was not in line with my view of search.
Yahoo Had Many Search Systems, Not One Search System
In one briefing I did when I was a rental for an outfit called Gerson Lehrman, I recall talking with a couple of superstars from a New York big name investment banking firm. This outfit somehow ended up with me in a conference room talking about my cost analysis of Yahoo’s many search systems. I had a PowerPoint slide in 2007 that listed these search systems: [a] a license for InQuira natural language processing system for customer support, [b] Flickr search which ran on the tough-to-scale home brew system that Yahoo purchased, [c] the Stata Labs’s email search system, [d] the Delicious.com search system, [e] whatever was left of the Inktomi search system which I used for the original FirstGov.gov search system in September 2000, [f] the search system for Yahoo News, [g] the Yahoo shopping search systems (note the plural), and a couple of others. The point on the slide is that it is really expensive to maintain, scale, and innovate across different and complex search systems. I recall vividly that these 25-year-old MBAs from colleges with great PR programs told me that the costs of search were irrelevant. Wow! That was stupid then and it is stupid now. Yahoo’s promiscuity in search doomed it to be a loser in findability. Forget the customers. Think about the expense and opportunity cost the Yahoo view of search created. Microsoft has “inherited” this problem, and it has left Yahoo the company it is today—a portal.
Wrap Up
I can understand why the Yahooligan top management team does not see Yahoo as a search company. Yahoo was a human-built directory. A directory is about “findability”. Search is one component in findability. Most people—including the management of Yahoo—don’t understand what Google has done in the last 11 years. As a result, the Yahoo logic is to say, “We don’t do what Google does.”
Since Google is essentially a search company, the Yahoo logic makes it clear to them I suppose that Yahoo has never been a Google. That is a valid observation.
In short, I care about search. I don’t care about Yahoo’s version of the portal approach to information. I think the Yahoo presentation of its new positioning is quite significant:
- Yahoo has essentially conceded vast amounts of conceptual territory to Google. Google is search and it is now Microsoft’s problem to figure out how to deal with Googzilla
- Yahoo may be able to develop a sustainable business for the consumer user of the Internet who wants to navigate to one place and get information about television, sports, the weather, and finance. AOL could pose a threat to Yahoo and I ask myself, “Why do we need both AOL and Yahoo?”
- Yahoo’s cost problem is going to have lasting repercussions. Stepping away from some engineering costs, operational costs, R&D investments in search, and the administrative and management drag of search will help some. But the expense of the search system legacy at Yahoo will hamper the company going forward unless more stringent steps are taken and taken quickly.
In Harrod’s Creek, we see the new Yahoo as the same old Yahoo with a management team that has to control costs while keeping pace with the changes perturbing the datasphere. Was passing on that Microsoft buy out offer evidence of how Yahoo’s interprets its world?
Stephen Arnold, August 8, 2009
Funnelback, Squiz, and Content Management
August 7, 2009
Funnelback, http://funnelback.com/index.php, an enterprise organization search engine technology and services company, is now part of Squiz, http://www.squiz.co.uk, an enterprise software development company. This will combine Funnelback’s Software as a Service (SaaS) and enterprise-wide hosted search solutions with Squiz’s open-source content management system. A PR push is underway to help the companies unite; Funnelback is particularly focused on overseas expansion. “I think that there is massive potential for the enterprise search market to grow dramatically from what it is currently,” said David Hawking, Funnelback’s chief scientist, in a video interview at http://www.squiz.co.uk/resources/blog/cmsdebate-davidhawking. “I think as soon as people realize that there are effective solutions to the problem that they’re all grappling with, then the market will expand enormously.” So as Funnelback has the opportunities of this new partnership, will it embrace Squiz’s open-source CMS more tightly, or will they stick with proprietary plans? Funnelback is looking the gift horse right in the mouth, it just needs to take the reins. The goslings here in Harrod’s Creek think that this view is one more example of search vendors rotating into more lucrative markets via a positioning move.
Jessica Bratcher, August 7, 2009
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
Oracle, Cloud Computing, and Search
August 6, 2009
I recall that Oracle was once skeptical of cloud computing. I also remember when Oracle bought me breakfast in New York to explain the wonders of Secure Enterprise Search 10g. The world has changed. I read “Oracle To Keynote Cloud Computing Expo” and did a quick double take. The Sys Con publication stated:
Private clouds for the exclusive use of one enterprise can however mitigate these concerns by giving the enterprise greater control. In a keynote address to be given at SYS-CON’s 4th International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo, Richard Sarwal (pictured), SVP of Development for Oracle Enterprise Manager, will explore how enterprises are likely to adopt public and private cloud computing, building on a foundation of virtualization infrastructure and management systems. The keynote will be titled: “Cloud Computing: Separating Hype from Reality.”
Now I know that cloud computing within the Oracle embrace is good. But what about Secure Enterprise Search 10g, on premises or from the cloud?
Stephen Arnold, August 6, 2009
Large Online Lab Experiment: Charging for News
August 6, 2009
Short honk: I am looking forward to the results of the News Corporation’s decision to charge for its news. Actually, according to MarketWatch’s story “News Corp. Swings to Loss on Charges” reported:
“Quality journalism is not cheap, and an industry that gives away its content is simply cannibalizing its ability to produce good reporting,” Murdoch said.
The addled goose does only old information, certainly not news and never quality journalism. The addled goose learned when he had to generate revenue from commercial online products (successfully I must add) is that making a profit from electronic information required a different mindset from the traditional newspaper who hired him. Those tricks are still mostly unknown even among some online publishing wizards.
Now the big lab experiment is underway. The likelihood of the mice dying is high.
Stephen Arnold, August 6, 2009
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