ISYS:web 9 Now Available
November 11, 2008
A happy quack to the reader in Colorado who alerted me to the new release of ISYS Search Software Version 9.0. I had a pre release version, and I found that its speed and date features were particularly useful. According to ISYS Search Software:
ISYS:web 9 offers customers several major enhancements, all designed to deliver the speed, efficiency and accuracy required to find information fast. More importantly, ISYS has expanded its content mining capabilities using predictive and reliable methods that help customers better understand their content. Through its Intelligent Content Analysis, ISYS notes key characteristics about a content collection, such as metadata patterns and entities, and leverages these facets in the interface to provide a more fluid search and discovery process.
Among the new features are:
- Intelligent Query Expansion. Designed to give users greater context and avenues to pursue, Intelligent Query Expansion offers suggestions based on your query and the document. For example, a search for “SharePoint” might suggest “SharePoint search web part.”
- ContextCogs are snippets of relevant and contextual information pulled from third-party sources and displayed alongside standard ISYS results. When a search is executed, the query is also passed to each registered Cog, which could include enterprise-level applications, Internet search engines or Active Directory Contacts.
- Intelligence Clouds enable rapid navigation of key information. The tag cloud appears as a collection of search terms and phrases, with the various terms shown in larger or smaller fonts depending on their density within the index.
- Improved Performance and Scalability. ISYS:web handles most search requests concurrently with a higher throughput. Additionally, we’ve increased index capacity from 24 gigabytes to 384 gigabytes per index. With indexed data representing, on average, 10 to 20 percent of the total data size, ISYS can now index two to four terabytes of information per index.
- Search Form Customization. ISYS now offers both automatic and custom designed search forms. For automatic search forms, users point the wizard at their indexes and ISYS creates a search form automatically by analyzing the content and structure of the information. ISYS also offers a point-and-click method for creating forms for searching structured information.
- Index Biasing. ISYS told me that the company wanted to enhance ISYS:web’s tuning capabilities. “Tuning” in this context means giving administrators with the ability to adjust the weighting on entire collections of documents. This option enables an organization to further tune relevance to suit specific situations; for example, boost specific content across result sets.
- De-Duplication. ISYS automatically identifies identical documents and either removes them from the results or visually marks them. This capability is of particular importance to legal professionals conducting discovery work, or any user attempting to conduct analysis of a given content collection
- ISYS:web Federator allows customers to federate their searches across both ISYS and non-ISYS content sources. ISYS:web displays results from each source separately, allowing users to navigate between the sets of results without compromising relevance.
- Exchange Indexing. Particularly important for responding in a timely manner to discovery requests, ISYS:web enables administrators to centrally create and manage individual indexes for each user’s email account. Administrators can also opt to make these indexes available to end users, relying on Active Directory permissions to ensure users can only search the email indexes for which they are authorized.
I ran several queries on the new system. You can read about my tests and examine a sample screen shot here. In my April 2008 study for the Gilbane Group, I identified ISYS Search Software as a “company to watch.” In fact, I highlighted the company in lecture about enterprise search in 2009 here. For more information about the company, navigate to the ISYS Search Software Web site here. You can download a trial version of the software here. If you want to get a flavor for the company’s commitment to search, you may find the interview I conducted with Ian Davies, founder of ISYS Search Software a way to understand the firm’s approach to information access. I conducted the interview in March 20008, but it is quite relevant today (November 11, 2008).
Stephen Arnold, November 11, 2008
Azure as Manhattan Project
November 3, 2008
I usually find myself in agreement with Dan Farber’s analyses. I generally agree with his “Microsoft’s Manhattan Project” write up here. Please, read his article, because I can be more skeptical about Microsoft’s ability to follow through with some of its technical assertions. It is easy for a Microsoft executive to say that software will perform a function. It is quite a different thing to deliver software that actually delivers. Mr. Farber is inclined to see Microsoft’s statements and demos about Microsoft Azure as commitment. He wrote:
Microsoft’s cloud computing efforts have gotten off to a slow start compared with competitors, and it’s on the scale of a Manhattan Project for Windows. Azure is in pre-beta and who knows how it will turn out or whether consumers and companies will adopt it with enough volume to keep Microsoft’s business model and market share intact. But there is no turning back and Microsoft has finally legitimized Office in the cloud.
My take is similar but there is an important difference between what Microsoft is setting out to do and what Google and Salesforce.com, among others, have done. Specifically, Google and Salesforce.com have developed new applications to run in a cloud environment. Google has many innovations, including MapReduce and Salesforce.com has its multi tenant architecture.
Microsoft’s effort will, in part, involve moving existing applications to the cloud. I think this is going to be an interesting exercise. Some of these targeted for the cloud applications like SharePoint have their share of problems. Other applications do not integrate well in on premises locations so those hiccups have to be calmed.
The big difference between Azure and what Google and other Microsoft competitors are doing may be more difficult than starting from ground zero. Unfortunately, time is not on Microsoft’s side. Microsoft also has the friction imposed by the bureaucracy of a $60.0 billion company. Agility and complexity may combine to pose some big challenges for the Azure Manhattan Project. The Manhattan Project was complex but focused on one thing. Microsoft’s Azure by definition has to focus on protecting legacy applications, annuity revenue, and existing functions in a new environment. That’s a big and possibly impossible job to get right on a timeline of a year and a half.
Stephen Arnold, November 3, 2008
SAP: Trying a Little Too Hard
November 2, 2008
SAP, home of the TREX search system, seems to be trying almost too hard to convince me that the company is humming like a top. In CXO, a publication which ran one of my articles a year or so ago, published here “SAP Helps Weather Economic Storm” by the CXO Staff. The article is short but it hits on themes that, I presume, resonate with beleaguered corporate types who face unprecedented credit challenges and a generally lousy economic climate. SAP is a company with middleware. Increasingly, this middleware runs on Microsoft servers. Microsoft at one time wanted to buy SAP because its midddleware commands multi million price tags and requires considerable hands on configuration, tuning, and customization. Like Baan and other enterprise wide umbrella solutions, SAP is a beast with quite a few moving parts. In fact, in one SAP installation, I recall hearing, “It was easier for us to change our processes to fit what SAP had than try to modify SAP to fit out methods.”
The CXO article makes these points:
- Real time tools to manage in today’s financial climate
- Special incentives are available
- Easy deployment
- Business intelligence available
What is interesting about this write up is that it is almost a brochure. There’s no mention of search; that is, finding what you need in the files and the SAP generated and distributed meta data that makes the SAP integration of information possible. There’s no hint that the the cost and deployment time have changed significantly. Nope. In my opinion, SAP is struggling. The IBM magic that juiced the company when it was founded is gone. The interest Microsoft showed in the company seems to be on the back burner.
The emergence of cloud computing, SharePoint, and enterprise publishing systems make the SAP solution seem out of step with the times. SAP may be the harbinger of change in enterprise applications that integrate disparate systems and data. And what about search? CXO has shifted search to business intelligence. That’s a nice touch as well but I still have to locate the purchase order, the manufacturing order, and the memo about the change to the order.
Can SAP adapt? Unlike the CXO Staff, I am skeptical. Oh, the “X” means any type of chief officer; for example, chief technical officer, chief financial officer, chief strategy officer. A bit of algebra never hurts.
Stephen Arnold, November 2, 2008
Microsoft Azure
October 28, 2008
The most useful write up about Microsoft’s cloud computing play is Mary Jo Foley’s. You can find “Microsoft’s Azure Cloud Platform: A Guide for the Perplexed” here. Her approach is to describe the layers of Azure, highlighting important components like Red Dog, the base operating system. Please, read her write up. It’s an excellent summary. On the other hand, Azure might be a big demo. Click here for this view. The Microsoft Azure splash page is here.
The questions that I have about price, licensing, service level agreements, and deployment data remain unanswered. I watched a couple of videos today, but the Microsoft engineers were too cheerful for me. I tuned the programs out, but I do recall the word “great” being used several times. The layers are not surprising at all. The engineering details about resolving bottlenecks, eliminating manual tasks and moving them to smart software, and getting away from expensive, high performance data center gear are lacking. I remain baffled about SharePoint search running from Azure. In my experience, performance is a challenge when SharePoint runs locally, has resources, and has been tuned to the content. A generic SharePoint running from the cloud seems like an invitation to speeds similar to my Hayes 9600 baud dial up modem. I am taking a wait and see approach. Clouds are wonderful as long as the user has bandwidth, the cloud does not crash, and unexpected software problems don’t make an application sit and wait while the operating system tries to figure out what to do what an unexpected event occurs. Some of the engineering issues are described in the Monsoon paper by Albert Greenberg, et al, which is available from the ACM as 978-1-60558-181-1/08/08. Azure has some interesting engineering short cuts baked into it if this paper “towards a Next Generation Data Center Architecture: Scalability and Commoditization” is accurate.
Stephen Arnold, October 28, 2008
More Fast Search Excitement: A View from London
October 16, 2008
The news buzzed through the Internet Librarian International Conference. Word of the Norwegian authorities’ actions hit a nerve. Not surprising. Many of the information professionals in attendance rely on Microsoft search technology in their organizations. Details, of course, were sparse. The International Herald Tribune has a write up online and one person had printed out the story. Here’s the link to the AP article “Norwegian Police Raid Microsoft Subsidiary.” I don’t want to quote from an AP story and then have to deal with accusations that I am using content without permission. You can find this story online in a number of places. Another good source is http://e24.no/boers-og-finans/article2716323.ece. You can translate this at http://translate.google.com. Select Norwegian as the source language. A helpful PCWorld write up “Microsoft’s Fast Search Charged with Fraud in Norway” by Jeremy Kirk here includes this comment: “Microsoft has said it has taken steps to align Fast Search & Transfer’s accounting practices with its own.” This suggests to me that Microsoft wants to work through this problem and move forward. That’s good news for Fast Search employees in Oslo.
I spoke with several people about this situation. One executive who does business with both Microsoft and Fast Search said, “That’s really bad news.” A Danish software vendor said, “This is a public relations disaster. Fast Search had worked hard to make itself the number one Scandinavian software company. Now that’s a joke if there was fraud.” An information professional in Germany told me, “We are looking at Fast Search for our SharePoint installation. I don’t know what today’s police action will mean. We are a very conservative organization so we will have to get more facts. We don’t like difficulties with our vendors.”
A black eye for those involved. Source: http://www.lonewolffx.com/images/large%20images/make%20up%20effects/black-eye-from-Flynton.jpg
After I heard about the economic crime division’s actions, I jotted down my thoughts about this incident. Feel free to comment about my opinions. You may have more detailed information than I can get at the conference venue:
First, this is a public relations problem for Microsoft. If the company conducted a thorough audit and missed something, we learn that the phrase “Microsoft audit” carries a connotation that is not too positive. If Microsoft did not do a thorough audit, we learn that when the company decides to buy something, the philosophy may be “Fire, Ready, Aim. Microsoft will have to deal with this “do you still beat your wife” situation.
Second, Microsoft just said that it would concentrate search research and development in Oslo, presumably with Fast Search engineers. If the authorities action is more than window dressing, what is the working situation in Oslo in the wake of this high profile action. Norway is a comparatively wealthy and small-town type of country compared to my own beloved US of A. Fast Search’s employees, the reputation of the Norwegian business community, and Norway itself have a black eye. How long will it be to remove the mark if a problem is uncovered?
Third, Microsoft sales professionals and partners are making Fast Search a big part of SharePoint procurements where large document collections must be indexed. How will some organizations react to finding the suggested solution the product of an engineering operation that has been the subject of this alleged action by the police? My thought is that in some government procurements, the police action against Fast Search could be a deal breaker.
Fourth, I have had little experience with investigations of this type. If the action results in more negative information, a court action may make the marketing and public relations task even larger. If I were a competitor, I would communicate to potential customers that the action reported by the Associated Press might be sufficient cause to shift the procurement effort from Microsoft Fast to an alternative without a similar issue.
As I thought about this information–assuming that it is true–I don’t see a silver lining to this particular cloud. Here’s why:
TechRadar: Knife Stabs Deep into Microsoft
October 7, 2008
If you want a world without Microsoft, you will revel in TechRadar’s “analysis” of Microsoft here. The in-depth review “Has Microsoft Lost It?” covers Vista, the Yahoo play, cloud challenges to Office, Live.com, Zune, and more. After reading the well-written, detailed write up, I was not sure what to think. Microsoft has $65 billion in revenue, cash, and 100 million SharePoint licenses, and some other assets such as 93 percent of the desktops running Windows. I get frustrated with Microsoft because the “we’re really smart” attitude of some of the Microsoft employees throws grit into decision making. The result is weird stuff like Microsoft software that doesn’t work on SharePoint or SQL Server back ups that don’t restore. Please read the article and make up your own mind. For me, I just want to know what’s the fit between MOSS and Fast Search ESP. I am a simple goose.
Stephen Arnold, October 7, 2008
The Goose Quacks: Arnold Endnote at Enterprise Search Summit
October 4, 2008
Editor’s Note: This is a file with a number of screen shots. If you are on a slow connection, skip this document.
One again I was batting last. I arrived the day before my talk from Europe, and I wasn’t sure what time it was or what day it was. In short, the addled goose was more off kilter than I had been in the Netherlands for my keynote at the Hartmann Utrecht conference and my meetings in Paris squished around the Utrecht gig.
I poked my head into about half of the sessions. I heard about managing search, taxonomies, business intelligence, and product pitches disguised as analyses. I’m going to be 65; I was tired; and I had heard similar talks a few days earlier in Europe. The challenges facing those involved with search are reaching a boiling point.
After dipping into the presentations, including the remarkable Ahead in the Clouds talk by Dr. Werner Vogels, top technical gun at Amazon, and some business process management razzle dazzle, I went back to the drawing board for my talk. I had just reviewed usage data that revealed that Google’s lead in Web search was nosing towards 70 percent of the search traffic. I also had some earlier cuts at the traffic data for the Top 50 Web sites. In the two hours before my talk, I fiddled with these data and produced an interesting graph of the Web usage. I did not use it in my talk, sticking with my big images snagged from Flickr. I don’t put many words on PowerPoint slides. In fact, I use them because conference organizers want a “paper”. I just send them the PowerPoint deck and give my talk using a note card which I hold in my hand or put on the podium in front of me. I hate PowerPoints.
Here’s the chart I made to see how the GOOG was doing in terms of Microsoft and Yahoo.
Source: http://blogs.zdnet.com/ITFacts/
The top six sites are where the action is. The other 44 sites are in the “long tail”. In this case, the sites out of the top 50 have few options for getting traffic. The 44 sites accounted in August 2008 for a big chunk percent of the calculated traffic, but no single site is likely to make it into the top six quickly. Google sits on top the pile and seems to be increasing its traffic each month. Google monetizes its traffic reasonably well, so it is generating $18 billion or so in the last 12 months.
In the enterprise search arena, I have only “off the record” sources. These ghostly people tell me that Google has:
- Shipped 24, 600 Google Search Appliances. For comparison, Fast Search & Transfer prior to its purchase by Microsoft had somewhere in the neighborhood of 2,500 enterprise search platform licensees. Now, of course, Fast Search has access to the 100 million happy SharePoint customers. Who knows what the Fast Search customer count is now? Not me.
- Become the standard for mapping in numerous government agencies, including those who don’t have signs on their buildings
- Been signing up as many as 3,000 Google Docs users per day, excluding the 1.5 million school children who will be using Google services in New South Wales, Australia.
I debated about how to spin these data. I decided to declare, “Google has won the search battle in 2008 and probably in 2009.” Not surprisingly, the audience was disturbed with my assertion. Remember, I did not parade these data. I use pictures like this one to make my point. This illustration shows a frustrated enterprise search customer setting fire to the vendor’s software disks, documentation, and one surly consultant:
How did I build up to the conclusion that Google has won the 2008-2009 search season. Here are the main points and some of the illustrations I used in my talk.
Microsoft Sees Google as Goliath
October 2, 2008
Imagine my surprise when the $65 billion dollar Microsoft allegedly characterized Google as “Goliath.” By the time I flapped from my nest of reeds and mud, my newsreader refreshed with another 15 stories on this topic. I, quite naturally for an addled goose, dived in. Here’s a quick rundown of the “Goliath” metaphor. I will wrap up with several observations about this wordsmithing. I think the larger issue behind the trope has been overlooked, which says more about how pundits perceive both Google and Microsoft.
The Zero Ambiguity of Goliath
Rory Cellan-Jones, technology correspondent, BBC News wrote “Google Goliath Microsoft Says. You can find the article here. In an interview, Mr. Ballmer allegedly characterized Microsoft as “David” in search. Google, Mr. Cellan-Jones reports, is “Goliath.” Mr. Ballmer, the BBC story reports, said: “We may be the David up against Goliath but we’re working on it…. We probably missed the power of the advertising model, not so much the technology.” My quotes don’t do justice to this excellent article.
The Guardian, a paper that is quite a bit paper than our local weekly Harrod’s Creek shopper, picks up the theme. “Ballmer Says Microsoft is David to Google’s Goliath.” The Guardian piece added for me a useful item of information: “Ballmer says that search is his ‘favourite business’ because when you have nothing the only way is up: ‘Everything is possible, we have nothing to lose. (Of course, you can also just continue along flatlining. But his salesman’s instinct probably won’t let him consider that.)”
Silicon Alley Insider, a Web log I quite like, picks up the theme of Microsoft’s response to Google in its “Ballmer Talks Up Windows Cloud. Don’t Believe It.” You can read Eric Krangel’s article here. Mr. Krangel focuses on the wisp-like Cloud OS, but it’s clear to me that Mr. Ballmer is setting the stage for a major announcement at the upcoming Windows conference on October 27. For me, the most interesting point in the piece was this statement attributed to Mr. Ballmer: “The last thing we want is for somebody else to obsolete us, if we’re gonna get obseleted [sic] we better do it to ourselves.” The somebody else, in my reading, is our pal Goliath.
In my opinion, Google equals Goliath.
What’s with Goliath?
In Kentucky, despite the high rate of illiteracy and the miserable education system, there’s no shortage of opinions about David and Goliath. For example, there’s quite a range of opinions about the David and Goliath clash. These range from Goliath won to there were two Goliaths and David only nailed one of them.
My hunch is that the purpose of the metaphor is to make clear that Microsoft with its control of 90 percent or more of traditional personal computer operating systems and common applications like word processing, its 100 million or so SharePoint licenses, its thousands of resellers, its hundreds of thousands of VisualStudio.Net developers, and its activities in games, mobile software, and consumer audio players is an underdog. David is the under dog, a wimp, a Mr. Peepers. Some of the sources I had to grind through in a required ancient history class said he was a musician. He wasn’t a rapper wearing shades, sporting tats, and wearing FBI sunglasses and prison clothes. David played a harp. He was, as I recall, untrained for war. In short, a wimp.
Goliath, on the other hand, is your classic André the Giant professional wrestler. Slow moving and slow of speech, Goliath was the equivalent of a roid-crazed street fighter. Goliath would have made a good power forward for a pick up game in the Bronx. The key point was that this fellow Golyat (standard Hebrew) was a philistine. Forget Goliath’s size. His real transgression may have been that he was perceived as an invader or intruder with access to hot technology; specifically, iron smithing. Goliath had armor; David wore a cotton tunic. Although cool, cotton does not withstanding a sword thrust too well.
The metaphor, then, operates for me on two levels. The little guy (David) has to fight off the big guy (Goliath or Golyat). And, Goliath was an outsider, at least to David and his pals.
The rest of the story is well known even in Kentucky. David uses a sling and throws a stone at Goliath. The stone knocks Goliath down. Then, depending on your preference for murky sources, chops off Goliath’s head or walks up to the prone Goliath and checks out the prostrate enemy. The sling, the stone, the unexpected victory–that’s the metaphor.
The Reality
Google’s revenue for 2008 will be in the $20 billion range or close enough for horse shoes. Microsoft’s revenue for 2008 will be north of $65 billion. Google has 19,000 full time equivalents, give or take 2,000. Microsoft has 55,000 full time equivalents, give or take 5,000 happy workers. Microsoft has a de facto monopoly in desktop operating systems, standard office software for word processing and spreadsheets, and the 100 million SharePoint licenses. Other Microsoft businesses are big, but none is in the monopoly category.
Google, on the other hand, has about 70 percent of the Web search market. Google touches more than two-thirds of the Web search related advertising. Google has a modest footprint in several other businesses, but it is a one-trick Goliath in terms of revenue.
The big difference between the two companies is that Microsoft represents the status quo in personal computing. Google represents the next-generation in personal computing. In 2005, I created this diagram for my The Google Legacy study.
© Stephen E. Arnold and Infonortics Ltd., 2005
The conclusion of that analysis was that most of the companies in the software business were blissfully ignorant of Google’s single minded build out of an application infrastructure. Furthermore, most pundits looked at Google as a one trick revenue pony and did not abstract that revenue model into a broader business model; that is, someone pays to get access to Google’s systems and users. As a result, Google was running free with no significant oversight, competition, or technical challenges since 1995. Yes, 1995. The Google kids were fiddling with BackRub in the mid 1990s and learning from the AltaVista.com service. Google’s biggest technical guns have roots in one of three companies: AltaVista (Digital Equipment), Bell Labs (AT&T), and Sun Microsystems. What these clever folks did was take the best from research computing and integrate those insights into a distributed, massively parallel architecture. The Internet was the equivalent of the connections in a desktop PC. The Google infrastructure was the computer just as Scott McNealy (Sun Microsystems) allegedly said.
What’s happening is that Microsoft’s business model, not its technology, is colliding with the Google business model. Furthermore, the collision has nothing to do with David and Goliath. The issue is Darwinian. Dragging metaphors into what is a strategic confrontation after a decade of inattention is misleading and indicative of why Microsoft can’t bridge the gap. Microsoft cannot catch up by following its present 10,000 sailboats going in the same general direction approach. Google is doing what it has done for a decade, and the company is now finding itself pulled into new, potentially lucrative new opportunities. David needs to get a Ph.D. in math, publish a couple of important papers, and apply for work at Google in my opinion.
Stephen Arnold, October 2, 2008
Beyond Search’s Search Function Back On Track
August 10, 2008
I have had many positive comments about the search function for my Web log “Beyond Search”. Last week, we had reports of current postings not appearing in the index. Our hosting company had in place a method to block certain clickstreams when certain conditions were detected by the hosting company’s automated systems. The increasing demand for access to the site and the additional content indexed by the Blossom search system caused a slow down in “Beyond Search.” The hosting company, Blossom.com, and my engineering team have resolved the problem. Thank for your patience. Blossom.com’s Web log indexing system continues to delight me. If you are looking for a search system for a Web site or a Web log, please navigate to http://www.blossom.com and check the company. Feel free to mention that Beyond Search is happy. I’m sufficiently happy to award the Blossom.com team three happy quacks. We’re back to normal, but my normal may be different from your normal. Anyway you can search for posts about SearchCloud, Sprylogics, and of course my favorite SharePoint. Enjoy.
Stephen Arnold, August 10, 2008
Why Microsoft Fears Google Sort of Revealed
July 7, 2008
My trusty news reader delivered this knowledge dumpling to me on July 5, 2008. I scanned it between pitches at the Louisville Bats baseball game. Like most commercial business writing, the essay is good, well-reasoned, and shaped to put major events into an understandable context. You can read “Why Microsoft Will Win Yahoo” here. by David Kirkpatrick, senior editor of Fortune, writing on CNN.com. This business essay has an A at Wharton written all over it: primary research in the form of quotes from a personal discussion with Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer, humor in the form of a left-handed description of Google as owner of the “world’s most powerful and profitable marketplace” with Google technology described as not “the best”, and an analysis pegged to Microsoft’s need to get its transmission in gear in terms of online advertising.
With Mr. Kirkpatrick, I agree on most points, but one passage nibbled at me during the thrill-lacking Louisville Bats’s game:
Google (GOOG, Fortune 500) drives Microsoft crazy for two fundamental reasons. One, Google has developed the fastest-growing new pool of profit in technology with its ad-supported search business. And secondly, it has taken the mantle of “greatest and most powerful tech company” away from Microsoft, with all the associated benefits that go along with that, most notably a very high stock-market valuation.
Here’s why.
Recall that Google is a decade old. It is no start up, but some journalists fall for the crazy college guys charade with astounding consistency.
Today, the company is without a doubt the leader in search. With some inspired me-too borrowing, Google jumped into online advertising and now, after facing minimal competition is these areas controls somewhere between 65 percent and 75 percent of the market for search in North America and Europe. Russia is lagging because of Yandex.
And Google’s search and ad platform was accidentally discovered by Google as able to support a range of applications, services, and functions. Some of these are definitely not-searchy. For about nine years, Google’s engineers have built more than 80 services, created a Google Search Appliance, moved into mapping, probed online database technology, and offered products and services to the education market, commercial enterprises, and government agencies. The telecommunications industry discovered how annoying Google could be with its New Age approach to mobile communications. The video industry is relying on Viacom to put Google in a straight jacket. All told, Google is exploring six or seven industry sectors with products and services. Some of these are only variations of search technology; other thrusts such as online payments just run on the Google super computer.
Microsoft is now trying to “close the gap”, “catch up”, or more colloquially “kill Google” by taking these actions:
- Creating Live.com, expanding cloud or network solutions, and making Google a focal point much as Inquisition worker bees focused on folks who did not follow the desired line of thought
- Announcing investments in data centers and research labs. Both of these initiatives look quite a bit like Google’s approach to data centers and research labs, but Google got its ideas from AltaVista.com engineers and Bell Labs. The problem is that it takes time to get data centers up and running, particularly when you are using systems that require name brand hardware and technical baby sitting.
- Buying search technology.
The leader in collecting search technology is Yahoo. So, Microsoft will buy that company and get licenses and technicians familiar with these search systems: {a} AllTheWeb.com which was originally based on Fast Search & Transfer technology now owned by Microsoft; [b] AltaVista.com, the company whose engineers provided Google with a turbo boost in the the 1999 to 2002 period with some residual kick continuing even now; [c] Inktomi, one of the original Web indexing systems; [d] the Flickr search system; [e] Stata Labs, the email search system in use in Yahoo mail; [f] InQuira, the natural language search system used for Yahoo Help; [g] the various research search engines that range from the moth balled Mindset to the newer and somewhat flaky semantic Microsearch; [h] the moth balled Delicious.com search system; and a handful of others lost in the jumble room of my 64 year old memory.
Add to this collection, the SQL Server search technology, two types of SharePoint search, the search functions in Dynamics CRM, Fast Search & Transfer’s Web search and ESP (enterprise search platform), a couple of flavors of desktop search, the mind boggling awful search in Outlook and Outlook Express, and the search function in the Xbox which at one time was provided by Mondosoft (now part of SurfRay in Denmark). The Powerset search system built on Xerox PARC technology and partially running on Amazon’s Web services platform. Of course, I’m probably forgetting a few.
What I am driving at is that if and when Microsoft buys Yahoo’s search business, the Yahoo.com site really should be part of the bargain. Despite its many flaws and weird America Online approach to information, Yahoo.com gets traffic. And traffic is what Microsoft needs, not more wacky search technology.
Consider this statement by Mr. Kirkpatrick:
So even though Microsoft has with painstaking and expensive effort come near to par with Google on search technology, it still shows little likelihood of competing successfully with it as a search business.
“Par with Google on search technology” is not going to deal with the fact that Microsoft finds itself on the defensive not just in search but in these key areas:
- Brand (generally positive)
- Demographic hooks (moving into education where Apple and Microsoft have long ruled the hen house)
- Business models (Advertisers pay, “pull” sales, not “push” sales the way Microsoft earns money, piece of the action, etc.)
- Velocity of innovation (slowing but still pretty zippy)
- Cheaper operating and infrastructure costs (not understood and overlooked as a competitive advantage by Wall Street analysts)
- Time (Google has a head start and is still moving forward).
When I read business articles, I recognize the care that goes into them. I know from my days at Ziff Communications how much it costs to craft prose that flows.
My concern is that after a decade of Google being Google, no one recognizes that Google represents a fundamental change in the software, services, and systems business. Microsoft is now reacting but I think it is too late to buy aging portals, collect odd ball technologies, and try to use money to buy parity with Google.
The Fortune article does not and can not tackle such issues in a short essay. I am looking forward to Fortune and other publications coverage of Google. I do hope to read something more substantive than Microsoft will keep trying to catch Google (pretty much an impossibility in my little Kentucky sphere of understanding), Google making people stupid (a concept I don’t understand because Google manifests a demographic. Google did not create the demographic’s behaviors), and Google is on the ropes in the telco business.
Google drifts above these particulars. The company does face a grave threat but from attorneys, not software companies or venture capitalists’ bets on “Google killers”.
Information on this perspective on Google is available, just hard to find.
Stephen Arnold, July 6, 2008
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