Microsoft Fast Want a Search Health Check
October 28, 2008
Obscured by the roll out of Azure, the Microsoft cloud made it hard to spot a new survey. A happy quack to a savvy reader in the UK for this information. If you did not get an invitation to this “The Health of Enterprise Search”, click here, and you ca participate. The survey engine is Zoomerang’s or Market Tools. I did not want to spend much time figuring out whom Microsoft Fast hired for this important data collection effort. I was more interested in the 11th questions which asks about vendors and then provides no guidance to the survey participant.
The invitation says,
Search has come a long way over the past 10 years, and many organizations are now using Search to improve customer experience, drive innovation, manage risk, reduce costs, build communities and share intelligence. We would like to hear your opinions on the Health of Enterprise Search and its impact on business performance by asking you to complete this 12 question on-line survey.
I would agree. In a decade Fast Search & Transfer dumped its advertising and Web indexing business, leaving the field clear for Google. Fast Search then asserted that it would become the world’s leader in enterprise search. Autonomy objected and turned in financial reports that made clear that Fast Search was not the only dog in the kennel. By 2007, Google outperformed Fast Search and, based on my data, surpassed Autonomy as well. Fast Search had a lousy 2007 and sold out to Microsoft in April 2008. In October 2008, Microsoft Fast started one day with several Norwegians with police authority. The police gathered up “evidence” of alleged wrong doing. Yes, it’s been an eventful decade.
Sometime in 2006 I concluded that enterprise search was dead. And, if not dead, enterprise search was not in the best of condition. Now, two years later, Microsoft Fast is doing a search health check. I find this remarkable.
Stephen Arnold, October 28, 2008
Amazon’s iTunes Like Interface
October 28, 2008
Amazon has developed a new interface. You can read the news story on TechCrunch here. The graphical presentation is intended to make it easier and more fun to browse Amazon’s products. Jason Kinkaid’s article does a very good job of explaining the features of this interface. For me, the most important comment in the write up was:
The site seems geared towards shoppers who are just looking for ideas, as there isn’t a search feature. Users can scroll through the site using their arrow keys, zooming in on individual products by hitting the spacebar. Each product includes a demo video (in the case of movies, songs, and video games) or an excerpt (from books).
I have often asserted that search is dead. I did not say that search was not useful. Amazon believes it has cracked the code on information retrieval without asking the user to type in the title of a book or an author’s name. Amazon wants to be a combination of Apple and Google. Amazon may have to keep trying to manage this transition.
Stephen Arnold, October 28, 2008
The Metabolism Metaphor
October 27, 2008
The New York Times’ article “To Survive, Net Start Ups Slow Their Metabolism” is one of those news stories that summarize a trend and give us a metaphor to guide our thinking. You can read for a while the full text of the story here. NYT’s articles may require registration or a fee to view after a story’s initial publication. The author is Brad Stone with assistance from Claire Cain Miller. For me, the most important item in the article is the metaphor of slashing staff in order to slow down a new venture. Almost as interesting to me was this comment:
The only certainty in Silicon Valley is that survival is quickly becoming more challenging. The growth in online display advertising, which helps fuel the new Internet ecosystem, is declining. Venture capitalists and other investors in start-ups, like hedge funds, are cutting back. The market for initial public offerings remains closed and potential acquirers — Google, Yahoo and the rest — are deep in their own problems. Many entrepreneurs and deal makers agree that a shake-out is indeed coming. Venture capitalists have begun preaching frugality, urging the start-ups they have invested in to cut costs and get profitable. Their advice shares themes: cut employees, do not count on raising more money and move quickly.
These actions have been well document. The Yahoo staff reduction made headlines when it was a rumor not a fact. The Hewlett Packard job chop is in the neighborhood of 20,000, but it hasn’t had the visibility of Yahoo’s retrenchment.
Do we need reminding that cutting funds, reducing staff, and spending less is prudent when credit is not readily available? The New York Times thinks we do need reminding. Judging from the flurry of comments about this article, many other people agree. We have a new metaphor, and I want to jot down my thoughts before they slip away:
- I am troubled by the metabolism metaphor. Without sufficient nourishment, perhaps weaker organizations will die. In the Darwinian environment of information, perhaps this is a good thing. Certainly the individuals affected are adversely affected. The larger benefit is that the survivors survive. I need to think about this more because the speed with which an organization fails may not change its chances for survival.
- The euphoria of the early years of the Internet fizzled when business models were in short supply in the 2000-2001 period. Exogenous shocks accelerated the thinning of the herd. Companies surviving included Amazon and Google. Now another round of thinning seems to be underway. The metaphor of metabolism does not stretch to cover this winnowing and no belt tightening will slow what seems to be happening to good ideas that can’t generate cash.
- Metabolism strikes me as an organic process. The problems of GM and Chrysler have broader economic implications than cut backs in smaller firms with little or no footprint outside of their investors’ sneakers. GM and Chrysler face problems that defies a metaphor. In my opinion, I think that Microsoft’s online initiative to “catch” Google and Yahoo’s decline present challenges for which we need a different metaphor.
I am no poet, and I don’t have an easy way to relate the problems facing information centric companies with a clever analogy. When I think about the dominance of Google, my hunch is that the companies facing metabolic problems may be saddled with a flawed business model and technology (in its broadest sense) that is out of step with the opportunities that do exist.
The problem for me is that the type of shift that Google represents has not been fully understood and internalized by organizations within the content processing sector and outside of that sector. The basic management policy of reducing transaction costs and making rapid innovation a matter of low incremental cost with short product and service release cycles is lacking. In the emergent commercial world, companies lacking this management philosophy cannot be saved by a metabolism change. The companies need something more significant, perhaps the management equivalent of genetic engineering?
Stephen Arnold, October 27, 2008
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)
Mahalo: Pulling Out the Stops to Pump Usage
October 27, 2008
Social search site Mahalo.com has added an incentive program to pump up page views. MicrosoftPersuasion.com’s “Mahalo Launches Incentive Program to Spur Use” reported on October 26, 2008:
Mahalo, a hybrid web directory/zeitgeist/search engine with wiki capabilities, has quietly added a Loyalty Program that tracks the number of pages people view and rewards the most loyal visitors with prizes.
You can read the full text of this story here. The Mahalo page explaining the move is here. Mahalo recently trimmed its staff. Now it looks to me as if the company is shifting down a gear. In my experience, incentivizing yields some short term gains. These taper off over time. Sites that draw traffic are magnetic and don’t need tricks. Microsoft has an incentive program in place, yet the Redmond giant finds itself unable to close the gap between Google and Live.com.
What’s next for Mahalo.com? A gentle stasis until the company needs a cash infusion. Then management will have to paint a bright picture or face further constraints. Social search is one of those “sounds great, less filling” approaches to search and retrieval. The reality is less filling than one expects.
Stephen Arnold, October 27, 2008
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.
Not HAL: Computational Intelligence at Google
October 26, 2008
“Thinking Ahead with Google” by Elise Ackerman and Scott Harris is a very good article about a subject near and dear to some Googlers’ hearts–computational intelligence. You must read the full text here. The old term “artificial intelligence” or AI is not too popular. AI is science fiction. Computational intelligence is pragmatic. The story opens with a reference to a 2002 comment by Sergey Brin about the future of search. The analogy was to the HAL computer in “2001: A Space Odyssey”. HAL, as you may recall, went off his rocker. Accordingly, Google is the “borg,” shorthand for cyborg. The subject of “smart software” is not one that turns up in daily newspapers. I commend the San Jose Mercury News for tackling the subject.
Ms Ackerman and Mr. Harris report that Google will support the “Singularity University” announced at a conference called Singularity Summit. The idea is that “smart computing” is important and needs a focal point. The most important comment in the article for me was this:
The meeting was reported by technology writer Nicholas Carr in his blog Rough Type, after one of the participants blogged about it. But don’t look for the item on Google; organizers requested the information be taken down.
My recollection is that Mr. Brin delivered a talk at a Google developer conference in 2007. That talk did not become available on Google’s YouTube.com. Apparently, the support for a better HAL does not extend to making in depth information available. In my opinion, Google is the computational intelligence singularity. Google’s patent documents are chock full of references to smart software; for example, US20070198481 has little smart fellows named janitors running around autonomously. The janitors clean up data and resolve ambiguities in certain procedures. Check out the San Jose Mercury News story and take a peek at how janitors get smart. Like I said, the computational singularity is Google. I’m fuzzy with regards to “Singularity University”. It might be another Google recruiting method. If you are somewhat paranoid, don’t read Kevin Kelly’s “Evidence of a Global SuperOrganism” here. The creature is wearing one of those flashing Google lapel pins.
Stephen Arnold, October 26, 2008
Microsoft Financials and Online
October 26, 2008
Update October 26, 2008: I just read a very interesting comment about Microsoft’s financials at Gizmodo. You can find the full text of the article here. The article’s title was “Microsoft Still Has a Vista Problem.” For me, the key analysis was:
…More people might be PCs lately, but they’re other, less profitable versions. Microsoft makes about $70 per Vista PC, but less than half of that on a netbook Windows license, which now makes up more of the Windows mix than ever. So the Windows division actually saw a 4 percent drop in operating income for the quarter. And it’s likely not going to get better with Windows 7 looming so conspicously on the horizon. [Bits]
Original Post
I was on the road when Microsoft released its financial report for the first quarter of 2009. Pressed for time, I turned to eWeek’s Microsoft Watch. Joe Wilcox does a good job of summarizing the key points about Microsoft’s view of the world. I navigated to “Microsoft Q1 by the Numbers” here and was not disappointed. I noted that Microsoft is on its way toward $70 billion. That’s good, I thought. I scanned down the discussion and noticed that the revenue for “Online Services”, a catchall for Microsoft’s various anti Google- and pro advertising-centric activities, generated $671 million in “Fiscal 2008”. The projection for “Fiscal 2009” was $770 million. Most companies would be thrilled to have a 10th of this revenue, maybe 1/100th. But in the context of Microsoft $770 million is a tiny sliver revenue. Google, on the other hand, generates about $20 billion from this sector. So, despite the solidity of the overall financial performance, I gasped at this disparity. Microsoft has been working hard to close the gap with Google. These numbers suggest that Microsoft hasn’t done a very good job. Even more unsettling was the table in Mr. Wilcox’s article that reports Online Services as a money losing proposition. Here’s the chart that caught my attention:
Mr. Wilcox’s comment is even more telling:
The division hemorrhaged capital yet again, even as Microsoft claims gains. The division lost $480 million on $770 million revenue. Online advertising revenue grew 15 percent year over year to $72 million. Agency revenue from aQuantive topped ad sales at $98 million.
Steve Lohr adds some Vista color to the overall financial results. These data are pretty negative as well. I don’t care too much about desktop operating systems, but you may find the information useful. The story “Microsoft’s Vista Problem by the Numbers” is here.
I don’t have much to add except that unless Microsoft can close the gap, Google will maintain and perhaps increase its lead in the online area. With cloud computing rushing from the horizon to Harrod’s Creek, Kentucky, Google may find that its attack on the enterprise becomes even easier. Google does not have to retool, rework, or reengineer anything. The enterprise is a logical extension of its core. In homage to the late night commercial for an absorbent cloth, “Sham Wow.”
Stephen Arnold, October 26, 2008
Portfolio Magazine on the Microsoft Fast Problem
October 25, 2008
Portfolio Magazine has a solid, interesting story about the police raid on Microsoft Fast in Oslo, Norway, earlier in October 2008. You can read the full text of the story here. A quote from the addled goose found its way into this story. I must admit that my observation that when the police raid a company, seize data, and scurry back to their secure facility, the company has lost control of its future. If I had been the editor on the story, I would have sent my remark to the bit bucket. The Portfolio story summarizes a number of important actions prior to the police raid. These range from board members squabbling to allegations of improper financial dealings to a precipitous drop in revenues without warning shareholders or Wall Street. I know something about Fast Search & Transfer Enterprise Search Platform. I know less about what Microsoft plans to do with that amalgamation of aging code, open source, and acquired technologies. I do know that Microsoft thought it was a great idea to spend $1.23 billion for a vendor whose files and other information are now in the capable hands of Norwegian police. I have some experience with police and intelligence officials in Scandinavia. My impression is that the reputation for investigative and intelligence excellence is well deserved. Microsoft has its hands full with Google. Now the company has to deal with its Google-killing acquisition spending time giving depositions, digging through email for information, and facing the astounding costs of litigation. Microsoft has to close the search gap between itself and Google. Any distraction from this mission is a benefit to Google. I wonder who did the due diligence on this deal for Microsoft. If you know, let me know. I would like to try and interview the person. I bet I could learn something useful.
Stephen Arnold, October 25, 2008
Exalead: Making Headway in the US
October 25, 2008
Exalead, based in Paris, has been increasing its footprint in the US. The company has expanded its US operation and now it is making headlines in information technology publications. The company has updated its enterprise search system CloudView. Peter Sayer’s “Exalead Updates Enterprise Search to Explore Data Cloud” here provides a good summary of the system’s new features. For me, the most important comment in the Network World article was this comment:
Our approach is very different from Google’s in that we’re interested in conversational search,” he [the president of Exalead] said. That ‘conversation’ takes the form of a series of interactions in which Exalead invites searchers to refine their request by clicking on related terms or links that will restrict the search to certain kinds of site (such as blogs or forums), document format (PDF, Word) or language.”
Exalead’s engineering, however, is the company “secret sauce.” My research revealed that Exalead uses many of the techniques first pioneered by AltaVista.com, Google, and Amazon. As a result, Exalead delivers performance on content and query processing comparable to Google’s. The difference is that the Exalead platform has been engineered to mesh with existing enterprise applications. Google’s approach, on the other hand, requires a dedicated “appliance”. Microsoft takes another approach, requiring customers to adopt dozens of Microsoft servers to build a search enabled application.
On a recent trip to Europe, I learned that Exalead is working to make it easy for a licensee to process content from an organization’s servers as well as certain Internet content. Exalead is an interesting company, and I want to dig into its technical innovations. If I unearth some useful information, I will post the highlights. In the meantime, you can get a feel for the company’s engineering from its Web search and retrieval system. The company has indexed eight to nine billion Web pages. You can find the service here.
Stephen Arnold, October 25, 2008
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