Arnold’s KMWorld Essay Series
February 19, 2008
the newspaper covering the knowledge management market sector, published the first of a series essays by my hand in its February 2008. Unfortunately I am not permitted to reproduce the entire essay here because the copyright has been assigned to Information Today, Inc.
In each essay, I want to look at Google’s (NASDAQ:GOOG) impact on knowledge management and closed related fields. Many people see Google as a Web indexing and advertising business that has tried to move into other businesses and failed. But Google has disrupted the telecommunications industry with its “open platform” play in the spectrum auction. Now Google is probing shopping, banking, and entertainment sectors. Make no mistake. These probes are not happenstance. Google is a new breed of enterprise, and I want to help you understand it an essay at a time.
Here’s one snippet from my February 2008 KMWorld essay:
If we dip into Google’s more than 250 patent applications and patents, we find more than two dozen inventions related to content, embedding advertising in that content, and manipulating the content to create compilations or anthologies, as well as other “interesting” services… Just as Google disrupted the global telecommunications sector with its open platform and hosted mobile services, enterprise publishing and traditional publishing are now in the path of Googzilla**.
** That’s my coinage to refer the powerful entity that Google has become. Google has the skeleton of a meat-eating dinosaur out side of its Mountain View, California offices. Don’t believe me. Click this Google dinosaur link to see for yourself.
In the February 2008 essay titled “Probing the Knowledge Market” I talk about Google’s growing capability in enterprise content management and publishing. Most traditional publishers haven’t figured out Google’s advertising business. It comes as no surprise, then, for me to assert that Google’s potential impact on traditional publishing and CMS is essentially unperceived. JotSpot? Do you know what JotSpot’s technology can do for Google users? Most don’t. That’s a gap in your knowledge you may want to fill by reading my February column.
I’ve already completed a couple of submissions for this series. You will learn about my views on the GSA (Google Search Appliance). Unlike the GSA bashers, I think GSA is a very good and quite useful search-and-retrieval system. Competitors and pundits have been quick to point out the GSA’s inability to duplicate the alleged functionality of some of the best-known search system vendors. The problem is, I explain, that GSA is one piece of a larger enterprise solution. Unlike the mind-boggling complexity of some enterprise search solutions, Google’s approach is to reduce complexity, the time required to deploy a search solution, and eliminate most of the administrative headaches that plague many “behind the firewall” search system. Flexibility comes from the OneBox API, not a menu of poorly integrated features and functions. You can make a GSA perform most content processing tricks without eroding the basic system’s simplicity and stability.
I also tackle what I call “Google Glue”. The idea of creating a “sticky” environment is emerging as a key Google strategy. Most professionals are blissfully unaware of a series of activities over the last two years that “cement” users and developers to Google. Google is not just a search system; it is an application platform. I explain the different “molecules” in Google’s bonding agent. Some of these are “off the radar” of enterprise information technology professionals. I want to get these facts “on the radar”. My mantra is “surf on Google.” After studying Google’s technology for more than five years, the Google as President Bush phrased it is a game changer.
The “hook” in my KMWorld essays will be Google and its enterprise activities. I don’t work for Google, and I don’t think the management thinks too much of my work. My The Google Legacy: How Search Become the Next Application Platform and Google Version 2.0: The Calculating Predator presented information I obtained from open source about Google’s larger technology capabilities and its disruptive probes into a half dozen markets. More info about these studies here.
What you will get in my essays is an analysis of open source information about the world’s most influential search, content processing, and knowledge management company best known for its free Web search and online advertising business.
Please, navigate to the KMWorld Web site. You can look my essays there, or you can sign up to get the hard copy of the KMWorld tabloid. Once I complete the series, I will post versions of the columns. I did this with my earlier “Technology from Harrod’s Creek” essays that ran for two years in Information World Review. But I don’t post these drafts until two or three years after an essay series closes.
Stephen Arnold, February 19, 2008
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