Open Source Flashes Its Canines
August 26, 2010
We’ve already established that open-source technology is entering the mainstream. There are naysayers, and they’re concerned about licensing compliance. An article at zdnet.co.uk entitled “Compliance Scheme Aims to Dispel Open-Source Concerns” outlines the ‘Open Compliance Program.’ The Linux Foundation launched the program to help companies comply with open-source licenses, partly due to the increasing use of Linux in mobile devices. Foundation Chief Jim Zemlin says the program is backed by “virtually every major player in the world of enterprise and mobile computing,” including Adobe, AMD, Cisco, Google, HP, Intel, Novell, Samsung, and Sony. Even with a few doubts raised, the OCP assures that open source technology has a solid future and is backed by virtually every major player in the world of enterprise and mobile computing.
Bret Quinn, August 26, 2010
Gartner Demystifies Story Telling
August 26, 2010
Gartner is going to teach effective marketing storytelling. That’s according to an article posted on Taume.com. The article, entitled, “Gartner Highlights Four-Step Process for Technology Providers to Communicate Effective Marketing Stories.” The article quotes Gartner exec Richard Fouts as saying, “We tend to remember a good story, even years after we’ve heard it. We tend to forget lists of bullet points.” By beginning with the “end of the Story,” Fouts says, effective marketers reveal the ultimate business outcome they deliver for customers. This motivates the audience to keep listening. It also forces marketers to make a link between what they do, and the results they produce. The gist of the article is to put the customer first, and support your products with validating, real success stores. Quite an insight.
Bret Quinn, August 26, 2010
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Web Pundit Is Disenchanted with Google Buzz
August 26, 2010
Short honk: Point your browser thingy at “Buzz Kill.” High profile Web pundit Leo LaPorte seems to be learning about the risks of some Google technology. He wrote:
Social media, I gave you the best years of my life, but never again. I know where I am wanted. Screw you Google Buzz. You broke my heart.
Mr. LaPorte has been an ardent supporter of Google. He and co-hosts cover Google in a weekly net cast. What happened? Perhaps Googzillaness has crushed an ardent supporter’s enthusiasm for an outfit that won’t advertise, return a worshiper’s devotion, or behave in a consistent way?
Stephen E Arnold, August 26, 2010
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More Content Experimentation
August 26, 2010
It seems that each time we’re presented with new media technology, the content industry cries that the sky is falling. In reality, the sky never falls. A fascinating article by Michael Scott in Techdirt.com entitled “How Many Times Will Content Industries Claim The Sky Is Falling Before People Stop Believing Them?” outlines a paper by respected intellectual property lawyer/scholar Mark Lemley. The article outlines the pattern we’ve seen repeatedly. In the end, the new technology increases the market and creates new opportunities.
Scott asks, “Isn’t it about time that politicians, judges, and the press stopped just believing the industry every time they make this claim?” Admittedly, many of the technologies did require changes to the business models. Some legacy players went out of business. Scott emphasizes the big picture: “Failing companies and failing industries are two totally different things.”
Brett Quinn, August 26, 2010
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Autonomy IDOL and Liquid Office
August 26, 2010
A happy quack to the reader who alerted me to the video “Autonomy IDOL Indexer for Liquid Office” provides a useful look at Autonomy’s configuration interface. The graphical approach makes the set up mostly a matter of filling in the blanks. The video focuses on Liquid Office, a business process management software from Cardiff. In four minutes you get a look at the steps necessary to index static and dynamic content into Autonomy IDOL. With more than 20,000 customers, Autonomy has a big footprint in the search and content processing market. Using the method presented in the video, users to easily export content/data into IDOL. The graphical interface supports $Field(x) or $Attribute(x) substitution syntax to fetch the dynamic value of Form Field or Process Attribute at run time. For more information, visit the Autonomy Web site.
Stephen E Arnold, August 26, 2010
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Is Bing Banging on the Google Guardhouse Gate?
August 25, 2010
While not exactly a bullet through Google’s heart, Microsoft’s Bing search engine posted some interesting numbers for July. These numbers, combined with the engine’s upcoming partnership with Yahoo!, should make Google a little nervous. Appearing in a recent EWeek article, “Microsoft Bing’s Search Share is Flat Against Google,” the relative search newcomer saw its rising usage numbers table off. “During that month-long period [June, 2010], Bing’s market share increased from 9.85 percent to 9.86 percent…Google dipped marginally from 71.65 percent to 71.43 percent.”
This is exciting news, because Bing seems to be digging in its heels. Combine this with its deal with Yahoo!, expected to take off soon, in which:”Yahoo take[s] over worldwide sales force duties for both companies’ search advertisers, while Bing took over backend search,” and Google has problems.
In a world where Google seems to make all the right moves, they might be outfoxed in this chess match if Microsoft has its way.
Pat Roland, August 25, 2010
Digital Information and Progress?
August 25, 2010
Progress is an interesting idea. I read the “A Smartphone Retrospective” and looked at the pictures on August 19, 2010. To be candid, I didn’t give it much thought. Math Club types, engineers, and Type A marketers have been able to cook up the progress pie for many years. In fact, prior to the application of electricity, life was pretty much unchanged for millennia. A hekatontarch in Sparta could have been dropped into the Battle of Waterloo and contributed without much effort. Drop that same grunt into a SOCOM unit, and he wouldn’t know how to call in air cover.
Let’s take a trip down memory lane.
Most people in Farmington, Illinois, not far from where I grew up, believed that the world got better a little bit at a time. The curves most people believed and learned in grade school went up.
Well, most people believed that until the price for farm output stagnated. Then the strip mining companies made life a little better by pushing some money into the hands of farmers. Well, the money dried up and the land was not too useful for much after the drag lines departed.
Then the price of chemical fertilizer climbed. Well, then the government paid farmers not to farm so things looked better. Each year the automobiles got bigger and more luxurious and those who wanted the make the American dream a reality left for the big city. Now Farmington, Illinois, is a quiet town. Most of the stores are closed, and it is a commuter city for folks lucky enough to have a job in the economically-trashed central Illinois region about one hour south of Chicago.
Progress.
What’s happening in online and digital information is nothing particularly unusual. The notion of “progress”, at least in Farmington, is different today from what it was in 1960. Same with online, digital information, and technological gimcracks. I realized that most folks have not realized that “progress” may not be the bright, shiny gold treasure that those folks in Farmington accepted as the basic assumption of life in the U. S. of A.
Adobe and Its Digital Clay Bricks: No Search Needed
August 25, 2010
Former Ziffer John C. Dvorak (the real Dvorak and podcast personality) posted “Adobe Has the Right Stuff.” In the write up, Mr. Dvorak points out that Adobe has some competition-killers like Photoshop and the company has an opportunity to roll out some interesting new money makers such as a Linux-centric content creation center.
I don’t agree.
I am not too interested in graphics, although I know that is Adobe’s cash cow. I do know that Adobe has been unable to deliver acceptable search and retrieval across its own content for as long as I can remember. The company has floundered from search vendor to search vendor and still seems unable to make a snappy, intuitive search system available. Federation across Adobe’s wacky line up of sites is not working for me. Anyone remember Lextek International in Acrobat 6? Didn’t think so?
Adobe’s patent application US2010/0185599 underscores how Adobe’s own approach to content is designed to allow other vendors to index content created by an Adobe application. Adobe has worked hard to convince publishers to standardize on the Adobe platform, not the evil empire’s Quark system or even more expensive, bespoke solutions from specialist firms.
Adobe is rooted in print production and approaches many problems from the print angle of attack. Our tests of Adobe’s rich media applications reveals unstable, buggy and unpredictable behavior. Performance problems plague Adobe products even when the applications run on zippy, multi-core processors.
How’s that Adobe Premier interface grab you? At my age of 66, I can’t read the darned labels. What happened to black text on white background. I sort of can see the color video content. I don’t need it to “jump” at me. And the state shifting controls? Those are a wonder to behold. When Sony Vegas is easier to use that an Adobe product, I know something is off center.
Our view is that Adobe is trying to maintain its position in the market, and it is going to have an increasingly difficult time. Here are the points we noted in our recent review of Adobe:
- Security. Adobe products are potential challenges for enterprise system administrators. I love PDFs with embedded excutables but after a decade no control to permit a specific number of PDF openings by a user in a password protected PDF.
- User experience. Sure, a Photoshop or Illustrator professional can use Adobe products, but this is the equivalent of learning that Oracle’s database is a piece of cake from an Oracle system administrator. Ordinary folks may have a different view of usability. I can’t even read the interface for Adobe’s new products with its wacky gray background and tiny white type. Am I alone?
- Stability. Maybe Photoshop doesn’t crash as often, but there are some exciting moments with Adobe’s video production software. Lots. Of. Exciting. Moments.
- Focus. Adobe has kicked Framemaker under the bus. I abandoned Version 9.0 for Version 7.0. Adobe has lost track of who uses what products for what purpose. The Linux version of Framemaker sucked, and Framemaker once ran natively on Solaris.
- Production. Professionals from magazine make ready shops to printers have learned to live with Postscript, InDesign, and PDFs. I am not sure I am happy with my hard won knowledge because quite a few of the issues have to do with careless programming by contractors or staff in far off lands than what is required to create a content object. Let me give one example that bedeviled me yesterday: Color matching across Adobe’s own products and into whizzy digital printers. Hello, hello. Anyone at Adobe actually do this type of work for real?
In short, search is a core function. Adobe has never gotten it right either on its Web sites, in its products Help function, or in its “content objects”. If you can make information findable, that’s sort of a core weakness, and it is a key indicator of how many “content” issues Adobe has not handled in an elegant, effective manner.
Bottom-line: Revenue growth will be an interesting challenge for Adobe’s management team. I just rolled back to Photoshop Version 7.1 on one production machine. The interface is usable, not logical, but closer to the real world in which I work. Search. Long walk ahead. Linux support. Adobe has to spend a lot of money to keep its sail boats in trim. I don’t think the company has the cash or the technical resources at this time. In short, Adobe is more vulnerable than some perceive.
Stephen E Arnold, August 25, 2010
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Google and Its Yahoo Style Acquisitions
August 25, 2010
I don’t want to beat a dead Googzilla. But Google had a product search service that involved scanning catalogs. That went away, but I interpreted the effort as a way for the Google to learn about scanning, page fix ups, and indexing to an acceptable level of accuracy a page image. Google rolled out Froogle, which I thought was pretty clever. Not as good as the services from Pricewatch.com or Amazon.com, but I found it helpful for certain types of product research. Froogle was deemed too frisky, so the shopping product was renamed Google Shopping. Along the path of Catalog to Shopping, the Google integrated a shopping cart, which I like more than Amazon’s “one click” approach. Poor Amazon keeps forgetting that I like the one click approach. I get the privilege of going through a bunch of screens, clicking and entering items of data, in order to turn on one click. Then, without further ado, Amazon turns off one click for me. How thoughtful? Google figured out how not to annoy me with its Checkout. In my three Google monographs, I mentioned other features of Google’s shopping capabilities. These ranged from the bar code function to the predictive cuteness disclosed in Google’s open source documents.
I believed and still believe that Google’s in-house technology is available for the Google to convert the Google Shopping service into a world beater.
Apparently I am wrong.
Google bought Like.com which is – care to guess – a shopping service. Point your browser thingy at “Google Buys Like.com” for the received wisdom about this deal from Fortune Magazine. Time Warner sure does understand online information, right? Here’s the key passage from the Fortune write up:
I [Fortune’s author] think the ~$100 million+ Like.com pick-up is an even bigger indication that Google wants to be an eCommerce platform. Google won’t be a fulfillment house but they’ll happily take an affiliate cut of links they send to vendors. And, even if Google casts aside Like.com’s affiliate business, Google still stands to make a lot of money advertising against the (30%) higher CPC rates that shopping sites can pull in. From a technology standpoint, Like.com’s image recognition/comparison engine can not only power shopping, it can also help in its Image Search product, which just recently saw a significant update. Google has other experimental products like Goggles that could also benefit from the technology.
Okay.
My take is different:
- Google seems to be buying companies in the hope that the technology, customers, and staff will give Google a turbo boost in a sector in which Apple and Amazon, among others, are doing a darned good job getting my money. I don’t turn to Google’s Shopping service as frequently as I used to. Am I alone? Well, this deal seems to hint that I am not the only person ignoring Mother Google for products.
- In the eCommerce sector, Google has not mounted much of a product offering. Google hired an expert in eCommerce, but so far not much except this acquisition. I have seen zero use of the product functionality disclosed in the Guha Programmable Search Engine patent documents. Lots of weapons, no attack of significance that I have experienced.
- Google’s in house engineering teams may start to get the idea that their work can’t cut the mustard. Edmond Fallot’s black currant mustard, please! Google’s acquisitions seem to duplicate, not complement, technology Google has disclosed in its technical papers and patent applications. Maybe this stuff Google invented does not work or work in today’s market? Scary.
- Google’s customers may be tired of waiting. I know that I don’t think of Google when I am looking for network cables. I go to Amazon, check out its prices, and then run a query across deal sites. A cable is a cable no matter what Monster insists is true.
Bottom-line: Google has cash and has not yet diversified its revenue streams. The old saw no longer cuts for me. The notion that these acquisitions increase Google’s ad revenue does not get the job done. If the online ad market softens due to a bold action from Facebook or a less clumsy offering from Apple, the Google may have to do more than collect companies Yahoo style. Google has to do something. Microsoft Yahoo are now up and jogging.
Maybe Google is a hybrid of the “old” Microsoft and the “pre-Semel” Yahoo? Interesting thought in my opinion.
Stephen E Arnold, August 25, 2010
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Marketer Links Open Source and Autonomy for Shock and SEO
August 25, 2010
I saw a link that someone sent me from a post on LinkedIn. I have a person pay attention to LinkedIn for me because I am not particularly social nor am I interested in looking for a “real” job. The write up pointed me to a blog post called “What Exactly is IDOL, Anyway?” The blog post is “real”; that is, part of the new positioning from the Silver Spring based content management information service called CMSWatch. You can read the original post “What Exactly is IDOL, Anyway?” and decide if my observations are on track or off track.
Interestingly, the write up cites an open source search vendor’s definition of Autonomy IDOL. I think the snippet is okay, but the snippet comes from a firm that is looking at commercial services in a particular way. There is nothing wrong with the viewpoint, but I think it is often useful to acknowledge that there are other angles from which to examine a technology or a company. For example, I think that a link to Lucid Imagination would have been helpful, but, hey, that’s my opinion. I am beavering away on the open source search conference, The Lucene Revolution, and I know how challenging it is to maintain a balance between the community-centric model and the commercial model. I have tried to create an endnote session that allows both commercial vendors and open source supporters an opportunity to discuss the market as open source becomes more of a force. On the panel are open source experts, the president of a commercial search vendor who used to run an open source company, and a UK-based open source vendor’s president. I hope to make the endnote an engaging, interactive discussion about this very issue: open source search and commercial search.
What caught my attention, however, is the consulting firm’s use of an open source vendor to help pitch a new, for-fee study about search and information access. This is a marketing technique that I wanted to document in my Web log.
Is the method clever?
On one hand, the notion of using an open source vendor to describe one of the best known, most widely used company’s products stopped me in my tracks. I don’t know too much about open source and I probably know even less about commercial companies, but I expected a description of Autonomy IDOL from [a] either Autonomy’s own Web site, [b] a person who has experience working with IDOL in one of Autonomy’s tens of thousands of installations, or [c] a competitor who has had to cope with Autonomy eyeball-to-eyeball.
On the other hand, this juxtaposition is sound search engine optimization type writing.
Here’s a passage that I found particularly interesting:
Now, there are plenty such cowboys around, and they’re perfectly happy with the software. But unfortunately, quite a few of Autonomy’s other customers weren’t quite prepared for it, and ended up unhappy with what they bought. Of course, it’s tempting to blame the vendor’s marketing and sales force for this; but that’s a bit like accusing a tiger of hunting deer. You can’t really blame them for trying.
With open source now gaining momentum, I find it amusing that a consultant is looping open source into a discussion of Autonomy. My hunch is that this type of blog post is a way to get traffic to a Web site and probably make sales of a study about a market sector that is no longer “about” search and information access.
Search has moved on. Information access has changed. The enterprise is a vastly different place from what it was when I wrote the first three editions of “The Enterprise Search Report.” The top five vendors have undergone considerable change. Convera is history. Fast Search & Transfer is a SharePoint component.
Most traditional search vendors struggle to get Web traffic. In my opinion, many consultants are concerned first about generating revenue for themselves and secondarily about helping organizations cope with the business issues tied to digital information. I learned the other day that one of the second tier consulting firms has pulled the plug on its somewhat crazy “map” of enterprise search vendors. This consultant’s efforts reminded me of a knock off of Boston Consulting Group’s work, but maybe I am just confused. Why did the second tier vendor’s map of enterprise search get nuked? The map did not make sense and did not yield what consulting firms need to keep the ship in shape.
My observations are:
- Hooking open source into commercial content processing is an important analytic task and one that warrants additional research and study. The world will no longer be one color. Think Joseph’s Technicolor dream coat.
- The sources of information for such a study are the companies’ own documentation, individuals with hands on experience using the companies’ systems, and observations from clients. Comments from competitors about another company’s products are interesting, but not the “meat and potatoes” which I seek. The “hands on” part is particularly important because technical expertise is needed, not the blathering of the azurini. Sponsored research is lucrative, but I wonder about its objectivity. Most “white papers” are printed on sheets of paper of different colors.
- Marketing presented as “real” information is fine. Weaponized information is something I know a bit about. If one wants to use information to put digital bullets into another company, no problem from me. But more than blanks are needed. Fluffy marketing and odd juxtapositions are digital misfires in my opinion, contributing to the confusion about search and content processing.
To wrap up, the economic pressure on publishing and search vendors is going to go up in the period between September 1, 2010, and March 31, 2011. In this period, I anticipate many interesting marketing methods, new products and services from the azurini, and even greater churn in the search sector. You may see the search world differently. My blog documents my point of view, and the blog is free unlike some of the work from second and third tier consulting firms.
Stephen E Arnold, August 25, 2010
Freebie. This means that no one paid me to write my thoughts into this blog. I am not even selling a report. Ads appear at the top of this blog above the masthead. I am working on a search conference for open source systems and at the same time I am working on a conference for commercial vendors. Works for me because the addled goose makes explicit what provides bread crumbs for the goslings. Irritating, right?
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