An Exceptional Rumor: MSFT to Buy Yahoo AOL Combo
September 26, 2008
I saw this post on Venture Beat here. Then I saw a follow on story on Peter Kafka’s write up for Silicon Alley Insider here. I am delighted to point out that these writes up do not a done deal make. I find the notion fascinating, and I hope it comes to pass. Google will probably buy another dinosaur skeleton, reinstate day care, and design more lavish housing for the NASA Moffett Field Google Housing Units to celebrate. Please, read these two posts. The plan, as I understand this speculation, is that Yahoo gobbles up the wheezing AOL. I presume Yahoo will be able to work its technical magic on AOL’s infrastructure just as it did Delicious.com’s. Yahoo took two years to rewrite Delicious.com’s code, thus allowing other social sites and bookmarking services to flourish. Once the dust settles from that MBA fueled explosion, the Bain consultants will shape the package so that Microsoft can swoop in and snap up two hot properties, solve its search and portal problems, and catch up with Googzilla and chop off its tail.
When I worked at Booz, Allen & Hamilton, we called the Bain consultants Bainies. I can’t recall if we used this as a term of affection or derision. I like Bain and the work it did for Guinness just about 20 years ago. You can refresh your memory of that project here.
Let’s walk through the search and content processing implications of this hypothetical deal. I promise that I will not comment about SharePoint search, Live.com’s search, Outlook search, SQL Server search, Powerset search, or Fast Search & Transfer search.
- AOL has search plus some special sauce. At one time Fast Search & Transfer was laboring in the AOL vine yards. Teragram, prior to its acquisition by SAS, was also a vendor. Two vendors are enough for Yahoo to rationalize. Heck, Yahoo is relying on Fast Search technology for its AllTheWeb.com service last I heard. The Teragram technology might be a stretch, but the Yahoo technical team will be up to the challenge. The notion of becoming part of Microsoft will put a fire in the engineers’ bellies.
- AOL has its portal services. Granted these overlap with Yahoo’s. There’s the issue of AOL mail, AOL messenger, and AOL’s ad deals with various third parties. Google may still have a claw in the AOL operation as well. I haven’t followed Google’s tie up with AOL since word came to me that Google thought it made a bad decision when it pumped a billion into the company.
- AOL has a cracker jack customer service operation. Yahoo has a pretty interesting customer service operation as well. I am not sure how one might merge the two units and bring both of them under the Yahoo natural language search system that doesn’t seem to know how to provide guidance to me when I want to cancel one of my very few Yahoo for fee services. Give this a try on your own and let me know how you navigate the system.
I am delighted that I don’t have to figure out how to mesh Yahoo and AOL and then integrate the Yahoo AOL entity with Microsoft. Overlapping services are trivial for these three firms’ engineers. No big deal. If the fix is to operate each much as they now are, I anticipate some cost control problems. Economies of scale are tough to achieve operating three separate systems and their overlapping features.
I think that when I read the stories in my newsreader on Monday, September 29, 2008, I will know more about this rumor. I am still struggling with how disparate systems and the number of search systems can be made to work better, faster, and cheaper. Maybe the owner of the Yahoo AOL property will outsource search to Google. Google is relatively homogeneous, and it works pretty well for quite a few Web users, Web advertisers, and Web watchers. Watch this Web log for clarification of this rumor. For now, the word that comes to mind is a Vista “wow”.
Stephen Arnold, September 26, 2008
TeezIR BV: Coquette or Quitter
September 26, 2008
For my first visit to Utrecht, once a bastion of Catholicism and now Rabobank stronghold, I wanted to speak with interesting companies engaged in search and content processing. After a little sleuthing, I spotted TeezIR, a company founded in November 2007. When I tried to track down one of the principals–Victor Van Tol, Arthus Van Bunningen, and Thijs Westerveld–I was stonewalled. I snagged a taxi and visited the firm’s address (according to trusty Google Maps) at Kanaalweg 17L-E, Building A6. I made my way to the second floor but was unable to rouse the TeezIR team. I am hesitant to say, “No one was there”. My ability to peer through walls after a nine hour flight is limited.
I asked myself, “Is TeezIR playing the role of a coquette or has the aforementioned team quit the search and content processing business?” I still don’t know. At the Hartmann conference, no one had heard of the company. One person asked me, “How did you find out about the company?” I just smiled my crafty goose grin and quacked in an evasive manner.
The trick was that one of my two or three readers of this Web log sent me a snippet of text and asked me if I knew of the company:
Proprietary, state-of-the-art technology is information retrieval and search technology. Technology is built up in “standardized building blocks” around search technology.
So, let’s assume TeezIR is still in business. I hope this is true because search, content processing, and the enterprise systems dependent on these functions are in a sorry state. Cloud computing is racing toward traditional on premises installations the way hurricanes line up to smash the American south east. There’s a reason cloud computing is gaining steam–on premises installations are too expensive, too complicated, and too much of a drag on a struggling business. I wanted to know if TeezIR was the next big thing.
My research revealed that TeezIR had some ties to the University of Twente. One person at the Hartmann conference told me that he thought he heard that a company in Ede had been looking for graduate students to do some work in information retrieval. Beyond that tantalizing comment, I was able to find some references to Antal van den Bosch, who has expertise in entity extraction. I found a single mention of Luuk Kornelius, who may have been an interim officer at TeezIR and at one time a laborer in the venture capital field with Arengo (no valid link found on September 16, 2009). Other interesting connections emerged from TeezIR to Arjen P. de Vries (University of Twente), Thomas Roelleke (once hooked up with Fredhopper), and Guido van’t Noordende (security specialist). Adding these names to the management team here, TeezIR looked like a promising start up.
Since I was drawing a blank on getting people affiliated with TeezIR to speak with me, I turned to my own list of international search engines here, and I began the thrilling task of hunting for needles in hay stacks. I tell people that research for me is a matter of running smart software. But for TeezIR, the work was the old-fashioned variety.
Overview
Here’s what I learned:
First, the company seemed to focus on the problem of locating experts. I grudgingly must call this a knowledge problem. In a large organization, it can be hard to find a colleague who, in theory, knows an answer to another employee’s question. Here’s a depiction of the areas in which TeezIR is (was?) working:
Second, TeezIR’s approach is (was?) to make search an implicit function. Like me, the TeezIR team realized that by itself search is a commodity, maybe a non starter in the revenue department. Here’s how TeezIR relates content processing to the problem of finding experts:
Sisense Update
September 26, 2008
Back in August, Beyond Search wrote about Sisense, a business intelligence start up dealing in software solutions. They’ve been working on software that taps Google spreadsheets holding customer data, runs the information through pre-defined intelligence schemes, and crunches away. You can review the basics here.
That software, called Prism, is now on the market. Licensing starts at $50 per month for a workgroup and $10-20 a month for additional users. There’s also a free (hey!) version and a personal option ($100) out there too.
According to a Sisense press release, Prism is desktop-based product with strong analytics and reporting and graphing capabilities. They also promote that it’s the only business intelligence software that doesn’t need IT support. Not a bad plan for users on the road like advertising or distribution personnel.
You can get a trial version at https://www.sisense.com/register.aspx.
Jessica Bratcher, September 26, 2008
Eaagle Text Processing Swoops In
September 26, 2008
Eaagle Software announced the availability of Full Text Mapper (FTM), a desktop software program that provides analysis of unstructured data. Eaagle Software brings together advanced text mining technology and desktop computing. ‘Our philosophy is that text mining and data analysis tools should be easy-to-use and not require any particular skills,’ states Yves Kergall, president and CEO of Eaagle. ‘Our software doesn’t require any setup or predefinition to begin discovering knowledge. Simply highlight the information, launch FTM, and instantly visualize your data to begin your analysis…it is that easy.’ You can read the full news story here. For more information about Eaagle, navigate to the company’s Web site here. A single user license is about $4,000.
Stephen Arnold, September 26, 2008
Whither Oracle SES10g
September 26, 2008
Oracle sent me summaries of the daily news announcements from its Oracleworld held earlier this week of September 22, 2008. You can find most of these announcements on the Oracle Web site here. I scanned the summaries Oracle emailed me and noticed a curiosity. There were no references to Oracle’s enterprise search system SES10g (Secure Enterprise Search). In May 2007, the SES10g unit gave a lunch talk punctuated with hints of a resurgence of Oracle in this market. Based on the announcements I have seen, SES10g seems to be playing a lesser role. Enterprise search is a tough market, and it takes more than a strong security model to win deals against the fierce competitors prowling this sector. Maybe SES10g is on life support? Could Oracle be shopping for an alternative? What are your thoughts?
Stephen Arnold, September 26, 2008
Microsoft: The Future and a Key Admission of Weakness
September 26, 2008
A Microsoft wizard shared Microsoft’s view of the future of computing. CNet’s Dan Farber does a very good job summarizing the key points. Mr. Farber has included some interesting screen shots. You can read his story “Microsoft’s Mundie Outlines the Future of Computing” here. Tucked away deep in the write up was a comment attributed to Mr. Mundie that caught my attention. Here’s the statement:
Programming tools, which have been a strength of Microsoft, will play a crucial role in the emergence of spatial computing. To create a kind of parallel universe–a cyberspace version of the physical world–everyone has to contribute on a continuous basis, Mundie said. Sensors and users will be generating trillions of bits of data, which requires addressing concurrency and complexity in a more loosely coupled, distributed and asynchronous environment, he said. “Our tools are not designed to address this level of system design,” Mundie explained. “We have to see a paradigm change in the way we write applications.” [Emphasis added]
My research suggests that Google has invested in programming tools. One interesting patent document discloses that JavaScript can be automatically generated. The idea is to free up talented programmers to tackle more substantive tasks. Google’s janitor technology can clean up certain ambiguities by checking methods out of a library, trying them out, and remembering which method worked better. No human programmers required.
Microsoft needs to shift from catch up to leap frog mode. Is it possible that Microsoft is so far behind that despite its best efforts it will be Fox Rental Car to the Hertz of cloud computing? Share buy backs won’t address this value issue in my opinion.
Stephen Arnold, September 26, 2008
Battle of the Business Models: The Mobile Front
September 26, 2008
Fresh from the victories in online advertising and Web search, Google is using its auction business model to disrupt the mobile telephony sector. Now patent documents are not products. Compared to IBM or Intel, Google does not run a high output patent factory. Furthermore, some of Google’s several hundred patent documents are interesting but not particularly substantive; for example, the cooling gizmos for Google’s servers.
On September 25, 2008, the USPTO published US20080232574, “Flexible Communication System and Methods.” The abstract for the invention, filed in March 2007, states:
A method of initiating a telecommunication session for a communication device include submitting to one or more telecommunication carriers a proposal for a telecommunication session, receiving from at least one of the one or more of telecommunication carriers a bid to carry the telecommunications session, and automatically selecting one of the telecommunications carriers from the carriers submitting a bid, and initiating the telecommunication session through the selected telecommunication carrier.
In a nutshell, Google has applied its auction methods to mobile telephony. Carriers bid to handle your call. You can read Wired Magazine’s discussion of this invention here. Let me offer several observations:
- The notion of a battle of business models, for me, is quite important. Telcos may find themselves innovating within a closed room. Google innovates outside those boundaries. Those in the room may find themselves conceptually unable to break of their confines. Could this trigger a replay of what’s happening in newspaper advertising?
- The computational infrastructure required to handle mobile call auctions is going to get a work out. Based on my research, no telco has a Google-killing infrastructure in place and on line. Will one or more telcos have the cash to match Google’s ability to compute at scale.
- In my briefings to selected telcos earlier this year, I recall the easy dismissal of Google’s telco dreams. I wonder if those executives are rethinking their earlier position?
With online advertising and Web search in the bag, Google is moving into another business sector with more to come.
Stephen Arnold, September 26, 2008
hakia: A Cloudsourcing Twist on Semantic Search
September 25, 2008
hakia [www.hakia.com], a semantic search engine, recently announced that it’s adding a new program designed to mine more resources for users, specifically information professionals who need to tap more than the usual 10 percent of web content.
Users can enter URLs now, not just search terms, to target credible content, not just popular results. hakia will process the URL with its semantic technology to make concept and meaning matches.
A hakia rep told me “this is the first time a search engine has channeled the collective knowledge of these expert groups to generate credibility-stamped results using semantic technology.” They’re promoting it as “Trusted Results” – returned information is run through peer review and professionals are invited to submit web sites. hakia is now expanding its content by making an open call for those submissions.
The project is in beta phase, focused on health and medical resources. For instance, results returned will come from the World Health Organization or the Mayo Clinic instead of WebMD or Wikipedia. I hope they work on expanding soon, because it’s a great idea. There’s so much popular information on the Internet, it’s really difficult to search and sort through all the MedicalNet resources when I need serious bibliography material.
You can get more information at Club hakia [http://club.hakia.com/], you just need to do a free registration. They’ve got a really nifty setup where you can enter search terms in both hakia and Google side-by-side. I entered “search engine optimization.” Google’s top returns were from Wikipedia, Google search support, SEO Chat, and then news results. hakia’s top returns included Turks Daily World News, Wikipedia, SEO.com, and Search Optimization Journal.
Jessica Bratcher, September 25, 2008
Content Management and Search
September 25, 2008
On the wonderful USAir red eye from San Francisco to Charlotte, I did some thinking about the SharePoint content managment information I picked up at the Information Today three-for-one conference in San Jose, California, tihs week. A number of vendors were offereing systems that would help users create Web content, management digital media, and locate information regardless of where it was stored in an enterprise.
I don’t want to single out any vendors. Most of the people manning the exhibits were uniformly happy. I found myself confused because since the 2007 show I saw familiar faces working in competitors’ booths. What had happened was that sales professionals changed jobs. I found myself trying to get my mind around the revolving doors at some of the CMS industry’s largest companies.
Here are the thoughts that stuck in my mind as I relaxed in the lavishness of USAir’s coach class seat:
- We’re back to portals. A number of vendors focused on providing a dashboard interface to content. The idea was that if you did a key word search and drew a big fat zero, you could look at a list of suggestions, charts, and categories. I thought the portal craze had burned itself out, but I was looking at 2001 interfaces with jazzier graphics and no significant improvement in functionality.
- Indexing without the benefit of subject matter experts. I saw many systems that purported to process SharePoint content, assign what’s called “rich metadata”, and make it easy to locate the document a user needs within a SharePoint system. I watched demonstrations that worked, but when i tried my queries, the results “sort of” worked. For me, “sort of” is a marginal improvement over “does not” work. Most of the systems on offer remain works in progress.
- Desperate sellers, desperate buyers. Someone tried to get me to take a CMS map. I don’t need a map to document how N-compass became the finely crafted wackiness of SharePoint. My queries did not work, so I don’t have too much interest in history. I want relevance. The impression I formed was that desperate sellers were trying to woo desperate buyers. The buzzwords ripped through the air with such ferocity that I was mesmerized.
CMS is broken, possibly irreparably. CMS joins “enterprise search” as an enterprise application that once seemed essential, yet has proved to be expensive to implement and deeply dissatisfying. The ranks of the CMS vendors and the CMS systems managers are likely to be thinner in 2009. Consultants are doing their level best to squeeze dollars from the desperate. But the software category looks uncertain to me. Agree? Disagree? I want to hear from alleged CMS gurus. Help me learn.
Stephen Arnold, September 25, 2008
Improving the Search Function in Photoshop
September 25, 2008
Once it was Verity. Then it was Lextek International. Now it is Autonomy.’s turn Adobe’s Help system has embraced the Cambridge firm’s IDOL or Integrated Data Operating Layer to bring some relief to Photoshop users who need help with a Photoshop function. I gave up on Adobe products’ Help search feature in Photoshop Version 4.0. When Adobe took over the Framemaker product, I cannot recall hitting F1, entering the function’s name, and launching a Help search. The reason is that Adobe’s writing style, its word choice, and the non existence relevance almost never worked. I bought books or prowled the Internet for answers to my questions.
Autonomy, the $350 million search superstar, will face a tough challenge–Adobe’s word choice and its own almost opaque explanations of how to perform certain operations. Photoshop gurus think nothing of tapping three to 10 keystroke sequences to obtain a particular effect. Add to that Adobe’s word choice and you have a stiff test for almost any search system now in the channel.
You can dig into more details of this deal by clicking here and reading “Autonomy Adds Meaning to Adobe’s Creative Suite 4. When I get my copy, I will exercise the new system with this query: “transparency”. The first hit in my Photoshop CS is a weird explanation of “Mapping colors to transparency”. The Help I wanted * does not appear in the results list *. I will let you know my experiences with IDOL.
The good news is that Adobe is making an effort to improve what is an almost useless Help system. What took so long? Might it be that Adobe was so busy creating a Microsoft Office style application of gargantuan size and complexity that it lost site of a user who wants to know how to perform one simple operation?
Stephen Arnold, September 25, 2008
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