Judge Dings Microsoft for Trial Misconduct
August 21, 2009
Short honk: I don’t have much to add to Slashdot’s “Microsoft Trial Misconduct Cost $40 Million.” In my opinion, if the story is accurate and the judge does not reverse himself, the action provides some useful information about how Microsoft approaches certain issues. In the aftermath of Enron and Bernie Madoff, I was hoping that these types of disturbing actions would decrease. The addled goose was incorrect once again.
Stephen Arnold, August 21, 2009
Last Gasp or Blast of Insight: Video in a Hard Copy Magazine
August 21, 2009
Short honk: I made notes for a longer write up. I decided that my two or three readers do not need me making observations about the problems traditional magazine publishers face. The bankruptcy of the Readers Digest speaks more eloquently than this goose can honk. Navigate to the Slashdot post “A Video Ad, In a Paper Magazine”. Read the story and answer these questions:
- Will those who do not buy traditional paper magazines buy a magazine with a video insert AND like the experience enough to subscribe?
- Will the magazine be able to recoup the costs of producing content in a non print form and generate sufficient cash from the adverts to pay for development, production, and public relations?
- Will the new hybrid become the method for pumping up revenue in a traditional media sector under duress for 18 months or more?
- Is the content repurposed electronically and, thus, a lower cost output or is the content new and a cost multiplier?
- How will the environment first crowd react to a print publication with its non green inks, tree cutting, and old fashioned distribution method enhanced with electronics, a battery, and plastic?
I did not buy the Esquire with the plastic rich content gizmo. Will this bold new play work? I am not a betting goose. I think I will sit on the fence and let the quarterly reports whether this video play is a last gasp or a blast of insight.
Stephen Arnold, August 21, 2009
Barnes & Noble Search Pay Off
August 21, 2009
I noted the article “Second Quarter Web Sales Rise Slightly for Barnes & Noble.” On one hand, the increase in Web sales may suggest that the company’s ecommerce service is reflecting an uptick in the dismal financial climate. In my archive of search vendor information which my son had me dig through this afternoon for a particular item I wrote four years ago I noted that Endeca listed Barnes & Noble as a customer. The item I noticed by sheer happenstance was this comment in an Endeca news release dated March 2009. The question that raced through my mind: “Was the Endeca system responsible for the uptick?” I hope it was because search vendors have a devil of a time “proving” return on investment. Large scale installations can easily hit $2.0 million before the client realizes that search is indeed an application that requires significant resources. Here are some highlights from the write up in Internet Retailer:
- Q2 web sales of $102 million, an increase of 2.2% from $99.8 million in the second quarter of 2008.
- For the first six months of the year: E-commerce revenue decreased 2.2% to $195 million from $199.4 million.
Okay.
I am not going to draw any conclusions or make any goose like sounds. I am no MBA, but it seems as if the time value of money for ecommerce search could make an interesting business school project for someone.
Stephen Arnold, August 21, 2009
Kentico: Muddies Search Waters
August 21, 2009
In my corner of the search and content processing world, there are distinct types of search. The simplest distinction I make is between a company that wants to search content behind its firewall. This is the type of search I call “behind the firewall search”. The second type of search is a system that allows either an employee or a non employee to search a public Web site owned by the employee’s employer. This is Web site search. The third type of search is Internet search. Martin White and I explain these basic distinctions in our January 2009 Successful Enterprise Search Management. There are other variants of search and I won’t detail these in this short Web log post. Suffice it to say that much confusion comes about when anyone refers to “enterprise search” and a “Web site search” without providing a listener or reader with context, color, and concrete examples.
I almost honked myself to death when I read “Kentico CMS for ASP.NET Gets Enterprise-Class Search Capabilities.” An outfit with which I am not familiar happily uses “enterprise search,” “Web content”, and search for structured data in one big stew. I am sure the energetic news release writer received much input about buzz words and Kentico marketing lingo.
In my opinion, Microsoft centric systems are sufficiently confusing as they are. A vendor who adds to this confusion gives the addled goose a headache. You may be happy as a newly minted consultant with this type of search fuzziness. Not me.
Stephen Arnold, August 22, 2009
Local: Hyper, Meta, and Loco
August 21, 2009
For years, local information meant one of three things:
- The Yellow Pages for the city in which one found oneself in the US (an endangered species)
- Suburban papers such as the Gaithersburg Gazette (dog paddling in red ink)
- Asking a female who was hooked into a fancy women’s club like Rockville’s Club 100 (you have to know one to ask one).
Asking a taxi driver, reading the Washington Post or Newsday, or pulling into a gas station would produce mixed up directions and garbled information. Listening to a local radio station like WGN in Chicago provided zero info about DeKalb. The DeKalb radio station was a mess with reverb and dial in shows. Now big companies like NBC want to crack the code. What is interesting is that there are quite a few local Web sites. I live in rural Kentucky and the highly motivated can locate Louisville Mojo (a unit of Tasty Mojo) and check out the local action. if you can remember to put the hyphen in the url, you can read the Courier-Journal online. You can check out the local blogs, local free newspapers, and read the public grade school bulletin board in the Kroger’s or Giant Eagle near you. Local information is a mess. The Business Dateline database, a product with which I was involved from inception to its sale to the dinosaur University Microfilms / Bell+Howell aggregated business information from regional business publications. That experience taught me that local Chambers of Commerce, state and Federal agencies providing business information, and the local colleges and universities were clueless when it came to local information. Even today, with a wealth of electronic tools at my fingertips, I don’t know where and when the collector car meet up will be in New Albany, Indiana. I have to make phone calls to find out about these venues. Navigate to “MSNBC Buys “Hyper-local” EveryBlock.com” and read the announcement. Quite a bit of cheerleading leaks between the punctuation marks. What is missing from the write up are answers to these questions:
- Assume that MSNBC is really successful. How will MSNBC handle the scaling for increased traffic?
- Assume that MSNBC recruits bloggers to provide local information. How will MSNBC prevent another, larger aggregator from sucking up the best and brightest? Pay contributors? How will those costs match up with the costs for item one above?
- Assume that MSNBC pulls a Hulu for local information? How will that consortium scale, monetize, and innovate? Committees are the groups producing camels when the objective is a camel.
Have You Checked Out Google Local Lately?
My suggestion is that you navigate to Google Local at http://local.google.com. Now select a city with a modest population of nerds and run a query for “Web developer”. Here are the results of my query for Des Moines, Iowa and Web developer.
The screenshot below shows the “more info” for Cargocultdesign.com, a Web development company. Notice that there are four tabs: Overview, which is a description of the company, including a snippet of text from the firm’s Web site, a details tab which provides a mailing address for snail mail and an email address for the non-Facebook set, a Reviews tab (Cargo Cult may want to get a “friend” to write a review, and links to two Cargo Cult Web pages.
Google and a Digital Little Big Horn
August 20, 2009
Short honk: Lookin’ gloomy, dude. The Google faces the new three amigos: Amazon, Microsoft, and Yahoo. You will want to read the Thomson Reuters’ story “Amazon, Microsoft, and Yahoo Join Coalition Against Google Book Settlement” which originated at PaidContent. After 11 years of watching Google’s roaming the open prairie, the forces of right have decided enough is enough. For more on this epic, The Wall Street Journal helps leads the traditional media forward.
Stephen Arnold, August 21, 2009
Wall Street Journal Spam Update August 20, 2009
August 20, 2009
The Wall Street Journal continues to spam me. This deal is for two weeks free. As a subscriber, I find this type of bush league, stock pushing approach amusing. I have concluded that the Wall Street Journal, like many traditional newspaper and magazine publishers, are unaware of the impact of their marketing to * paying customers *. If you start getting these WSJ emails with the headline “To lock in this special rate”, you may want to follow my lead and [a] call attention to the spam as a nuisance and [b] contact appropriate state and Federal consumer protection agencies. I think that some governmment entities may struggle with their tasks, but you never know. So far I have called, emailed, sent snail mail to the Wall Street Journal, and posted notices in this Web log which is — alas! — read by two or three people. I hope to meet with a WSJ executive at some point in the near future and ask about governance, marketing methods, and customer service. My hunch is that I am going to get a blank stare and a nervous smile. Par for the golfers at that outfit I suppose.
Stephen Arnold, August 20, 2009
Google Search Appliance Does a Two Step
August 20, 2009
The enhancements to Google’s three pronged thrust into enterprise search will come faster and faster. The prongs are the Google Search Appliance (GSA), Site Search, and various search APIs that make it possible to knit together various Google functions to put information access in front of enterprise users. Over the years, I have written about the Google’s incremental improvements which are often taken slowly and without much fanfare. A change is taking place in what I call “Google velocity”. By 2010, the Google enterprise search team will be doing the boog-a-loo in the enterprise and on several fronts in this significant push to build market share.
Two observations:
First, you can read the mainstream media’s version of the most recent GSA announcement in the Washington Post. The story is an interesting attempt for traditional newspapers to stay current. The story, originally from TechCrunch, appears as Washington Post certified prime rib as “Google Updates Enterprise Search.” I was puzzled why an intrepid Post reporter did not visit with some of the Googlers either in the government nerve center or in the Virginia research lab. Heck, superstar Vint Cerf is within phone distance.
A couple of quick comments:
- The key point is that Google is applying choice to the interface. This is important because most enterpriser search teams get tangled in the confusion between a portal type presentation of the information and the actual search results. Google cuts this problem down to size by putting choice in front of the user. Nice touch because committees almost have a perfect record in creating poor search experiences for actual users.
- The second point is that the GSA and Site Search are beginning to show overt signs of reinforcement. At Beyond Search, the goslings think this is a very important and clearly expressed development. The reason is that more organizations are finding themselves with a need to have an onsite solution and a hosted option for certain content. The new announcements described by Leena Rao made this option clear to the geese in Harrod’s Creek.
Now, what’s * not * in the many write ups we reviewed about this announcement. Two observations:
First, the Google is not longer overhauling the GSA with each innovation. The product is sufficiently mature to allow significant feature to be added without the original 12 to 16 month delays between upgrades.
Second, the complexity of search continues to baffle procurement teams. Some vendors are in the process of adding even more complexity to search. For examples of this approach, read my recent posts about the forthcoming Microsoft FAST ESP search system. There are different technical systems in the Microsoft solution and the complexities of delivering a high performance, flexible system are about to be made clear to many SharePoint licensees. Google takes a different approach—a very different approach.
Is this GSA the big announcement in search this week? Nope, the Google has made some important changes in its other search systems. Beyond Search will comment on these in a day or two. In the meantime, changes will come more and more quickly as the GSA becomes more robust without losing its ease of deployment.
No wonder more and more search vendors are exploring business intelligence, customer support, sentiment analysis and ediscovery. Those are sectors where Google, at the present time, is not exerting significant pressure.
Stephen Arnold, August 20, 2009
Google Myths and Misses
August 20, 2009
Short honk: How Stuff Works published a most remarkable article– “Top Five Myths about Google Inc.” I am not going to deprive you of the thrill you will get to read the five myths. One this the article accomplished. It disproved my assumption that How Stuff Works knows something about Google.
Stephen Arnold, August 20, 2009
Yahoo BOSS to Push Around Bing
August 20, 2009
Quite a headline this: “Yahoo BOSS Might Be Bigger Than Bing”. Eric Schonfeld reported that Yahoo’s Build Your Own Search engine racked up:
At 30 million queries a day, that comes out to about 900 million queries a month, which would make Yahoo BOSS the fourth largest search engine in the U.S. with about a 6 percent share. That is just below the 9 percent share (and 1.2 billion queries a month) comScore estimates for Bing.
The article provides data galore and a number of useful links. My question: “With this type of success how will Yahoo leverage this advantage?” If the Microsoft Yahoo deal is approved, will BOSS push Bing around or will Microsoft shunt BOSS aside with a lateral arabesque?
Stephen Arnold, August 21, 2009
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