SiSense: Shows Good Sense
August 6, 2008
I am gathering information about Google’s slow but steady progress in the enterprise software sector. My research indicates that the tasty Gummy Bear that lures people to Googzilla is maps, satellite imagery, and the nifty overlays that a licensee can plop on a Google map. You may want to look at what SiSense–a business intelligence start up–is doing with the oft-reviled Google Spreadsheets. SiSense is in the business intelligence software business. A SiSense customer can navigate to http://www.sisense.com, learn about the tight integration between the SiSense software and Google spreadsheets as a data source, and download a software widget.
SiSense has concluded that some of its customers use Google spreadsheets to hold data which can then be crunched using SiSense’s business intelligence routines. One application is for a distributor with seven sales reps who use Google spreadsheets to hold various data. The SiSense licensee can such data from these spreadsheets, roll it up, and crunch away. SiSense hit may radar because it uses the Amazon S3 service as well.
Prices are not available. SiSense is gearing up. My hunch is that if Amazon introduces a spreadsheet, SiSense may jump from Google to Amazon. Conversely, if Google makes public its remarkable data management ecosystem, SiSense may say “Sayonara” to Amazon’s pretty darned exciting Web services.
Here’s my take on how Google is attacking the enterprise. In the hospital where my mother is recovering from a heart attack, there’s a sign in the elevator to the cardiology unit. It says, “Don’t stack boxes on the floor. In case of fire, the box may continue to burn. Water will also damage the contents of the cartons.”
Google is entering into deals that work like the fire in a carton. Once the base has been penetrated, top down efforts might not extinguish Google. Once the little Google flame starts to burn the entire box is at risk. IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle are quite happy with their big fire hoses. These hoses can put out any annoying Google fires, or so the assumption goes. I am not so sure. One part of Google’s enterprise strategy is to set a bunch of small boxes on fire with the excitement of Google functionality. Google can then sit back and wait for the heat to build and then cook some goose–hopefully not this Web log’s logo.
Stephen Arnold, August 6, 2008
Search Options: Betting in a Down Economy
August 5, 2008
Paula Hane, who writes for Information Today, the same outfit paying me for my KMWorld column, has a very interesting run down of search engine options here. I agree with most of her points, and I think highly of the search systems which she has flagged as an option to Google.
But I want to take another look at search options and, true to my rhetorical approach, I want to take the opposite side of the argument. Ms. Hane who knows me has remarked about this aspect of my way of looking at information. Keep in mind I am not critical of her or Information Today. I want to be paid for my most recent column about Google’s geospatial services, the subject of the next column for KMWorld.
Here goes. Let’s get ready to rumble.
First, search is no longer “about search”. Search has become an umbrella term to refer to what I see as the next supra national monopoly. If you are looking for information, you probably use search less than 20 percent of the time. Most people locate information by asking someone or browsing through whatever sources are at hand. Search seems to be the number one way to get information, but people navigate directly to sites where the answer (an answer) may be found. I routinely field phone calls from sharp MBAs who prefer to be told something, not hunt for it.
Second, fancy technology is neither new nor fancy. Google has some rocket science in its bakery. The flour and the yeast date from 1993. Most of the zippy “new” search systems are built on “algorithms”. Some of Autonomy reaches back to the 18th century. Other companies just recycle functions that appear in books of algorithms. What makes something “new” is putting pieces together in a delightful way. Fresh, yes. New, no. Software lags algorithms and hardware. With fast and cheap processors, some “old” algorithms can be used in the types of systems Ms. Hane identifies; for example, Hakia, Powerset, etc. Google is not inventing “new” things; Google is cleverly assembling bits and pieces that are often well known to college juniors taking a third year math class.
Third, semantics–like natural language processing–is a hot notion. My view is that semantics work best in the plumbing. Language is slippery, and the semantic tools in use today add some value, but often the systems need human baby sitters. No one–including me–types well formed questions into a search box. I type two or three words, hit enter, and start looking at hits in the result list.
Fourth, social search sounds great. Get 200 smart people to be your pals and you can ask them for information. We do this now, or at least well connected people do. As soon as you open up a group to anyone, the social content can be spoofed. I understand the wisdom of crowds, and I think the idea of averaging guesses for the number of jelly beans in a jar is a great use of collective intelligence. For specialized work, let me ask a trusted expert in the subject. I don’t count jelly beans too often, and I don’t think you do either. Social = spoof.
Fifth, use a search system because a company pays you. Sorry, I don’t think this is a sustainable business model. Search is difficult. Search requires that a habit be formed. If the pay angle worked, the company would find that it becomes too expensive. The reason pay for search works is that not too many people search to get paid. When a person searches, there’s a reason. Getting a few pennies is not going to make me change my habits.
What’s this mean for Google competitors?
My contrarian analysis implies:
- Competitors have to leap frog Google. So far no one has been able to pull this off. Maybe some day. Just not today or for the foreseeable future.
- Google is not a search system. It’s an application platform. Search with the search box is just one application of the broader Google construct.
- Google will be lose its grip on search. As companies get larger, those companies lose their edge. This is happening to Google now. Look at how many of its services have no focus. Talk to a company that wants to get customer support. Google is losing its luster, and this means that the “next big thing” could come from a person who is Googley, just not working at Google.
So, Ms. Hane, what are we going to do with lame duck search solutions in a world dominated by a monopolistic supra national corporation that’s working on its digital arteriosclerosis. Dear reader, what do you say? Agree with me? Agree with Ms. Hane? Have another angle? Let me know.
Stephen Arnold, August 5, 2008
Intel: Cloud Factoid
August 4, 2008
I tracked down an Intel presentation from 2006 and also used in 2007. The link is to ZDNet here. The presentation offers some interesting insights into Intel’s data center problem or opportunities in mid 2006; namely:
- Intel has 136 of these puppies with an average cost pegged in the $100 million to $200 million range
- Average idle capacity was about 200 million CPU hours with capacity at 900 million CPU hours, give or take a few hundred thousand hours
- In 2006, 62 percent of the 136 data centers were 10 years old or older.
- Plans in 2006 were to move to eight strategic hub centers.
My initial reaction to this 2006 presentation was that Intel’s zippy new chips might find a place in Intel’s own data centers. It would be interesting to calculate the cost of power across the old data centers with the aging chips versus the newer “green” chips. I expect that the money flying out the air conditioning duct is trivial to a giant like Intel.
More on this issue appeared in Data Center Knowledge in 2007 here. In 2007, according to Data Center Knowlege Google had about 93,000 servers in its data centers.
In April 2008, Travis Broughton, Intel, wrote here:
Our cost-cutting measures tend to be related to at least two of the three “R’s” – reducing what we consume, many times by reusing what we already have.
I’m not sure what this means in the context of the Cloud Two initiative, but I will keep poking around.
Stephen Arnold, August 4, 2008
Knol: A Google Geologic Hillock with an Interesting Core
August 3, 2008
I am heading to Illinois, and I vowed I would hit the road and post a comment upon arrival in America’s most scenic area: the prairie between Bloomington and Chillicothe, Illinois. Breathtaking. Almost as stunning as the discussion about Knol, Google’s alleged Wikipedia “killer”. Apophenia here weighs in with the “standing on the shoulders of giants” argument. The idea is that Google should have done more with Knol. For me the key point in his write up was:
What makes me most annoyed about Knol though is that it feels a bit icky. Wikipedia is a non-profit focused on creating a public good. Google is a for-profit entity with a lot of power in controlling where on the web people go. Knol content is produced by volunteers who contribute content for free so that Google can make money directly from ads and indirectly from search traffic. In return for ?
The challenge is valid if Knol were designed to generate revenue from ads. At the risk of being accused of recycling information that I have been speaking and writing about for six years, let remind myself that Google has a voracious hunger for information and data in any form. Knol fits into this Google-scape. I will return to this point after I refer you to iAppliance Web here. Bernard Cole’s “Google Knol Takes on Wikipedia’s Online Encyclopedia. The key point for me in this good article was:
Knol’s collaboration model is also more hierarchical. Article collaborators can suggest changes but cannot make them without the author’s approval. While this bottleneck may lead to Knol being less timely than Wikipedia, it should prevent the revision wars that plague controversial Wikipedia articles.
I absolutely agree that Google will get something for nothing when people contribute. A Knol article, as Mr. Cole notes, will have an “owner”, a person who has met some Googley criterion as an individual qualified to write a Knol essay.
Let’s step back. When I worked my way through Google’s patent documents and the publicly available technical papers here, I noticed that a great many of these Google writings refer to storage and data management systems that hold a wide range of metadata. Google wants data about the user’s context. Google wants data about user behavior. Google wants data from books in libraries. In its quest for data, Google has been the focal point of a firestorm about copyright. Google knows that for many queries, Wikipedia with its faults pops up at the top of various Google reports listing “important” sites.
Google is a publisher and has been for a long time. The company has a wide range of mechanisms to obtain “content” from users. With the purchase of JotSpot, Google gained access to a publishing system, not a Web log tool, but a system that allowed users to input specific items in a form. The resulting information is nicely structured and ready for additional Google massaging.
When I learned about Knol, my research gave me the foundation to see Knol as a typical Google Swiss Army knife play. Let me highlight a few of the functions that I noted. Keep in mind that Google keenly desires that a coal mine explosion under my log cabin in rural Kentucky explodes and coverts me to assorted quarks and leptons:
- Knol has an author, so Google can figure out that anything a Knol author posts has some degree of “quality”. Knowing the author, therefore, provides a hook to add a quality score to other writings by a Knol author. Google doesn’t have legions of subject matter experts. Knol provides a content source that can help with the “quality” scoring that Google does and sometimes in an unsatisfactory manner.
- Knol gives Google a hook to get copyrighted material that it owns, not some Jurassic publisher who sees Google as the cause of the pitiful condition of book, magazine, and journal publishers. Once a Knol author gets some content in the system and maybe a stroke from Google or a colleague, Katie, bar the door. I would publish my next monograph on Google in a heartbeat. The money would be okay if Google used its payment system to sell my work, but the visibility would be significant. In my business, visibility is reasonably important.
- Know gives Google a clump of information to analyze. Google wants to know the type of things that a company like Attensity or SAS can ferret out of text. These “nuggets” provide useful values to set threshold in other, separate or dependent processes within Google.
Notice that I did not focus on Wikipedia. Google, as I understand the company, floats serenely above the competition. The thrashings of companies threatened by Google are irrelevant to Google’s forward motion. I think Wikipedia needs some fixes, and I don’t think Knol will rush to do much more than what it is now doing. Knol is sitting there waiting to see if its “magnetism” is sufficiently strong to merit additional Google effort. If not, Knol’s history. If there is traffic, Google will over time nudge the service forward.
I also ignored the ad angle. Google’s patent documents contain scores of inventions for selling ads. There’s a game-based ad planning interface that to my knowledge remains behind closed doors. Everything Google does can have an ad stuck in it. So Knol may or may not have ads. Knol is not purpose built to sell more ads, but that’s an option for Google.
Based on my research, Google has a good sense of video content. Google has not figured out how to monetize it, but Google knows who makes hot videos, the traffic a hot video pulls, and similar metrics. Google knows similar data about Web logs. Now Google wants to know about individual authors’ willingness to generate original content and how the users will behave with regard to that content.
Scroll forward two years and think about Google as a primary publisher. Knol is one cog in a far larger exploration of the feasibility of Google’s becoming a combination of the old newspaper barons and the more financially frisky Robert Maxwells of the publishing world. Toss in a bit of motion picture studio and you have a new type of publishing company taking shape.
Granted Google Publishing may never come into being. Lawyers, Google’s own management, or a technical challenge from Jeff Bezos or a legal eagle could bring Googzilla down. But narrowing one’s view of Knol to a Wikipedia killer is not going to capture Knol, what it delivers, and where it may lead.
Knol is exciting for these reasons not because it is an ersatz Wikipedia. Okay, tell me I’m recycling old information, living in a dream world, or just plain wrong. Any of these is okay with me. Remember the disclaimer for this personal Web log.
Stephen Arnold, August 3, 2008
Microsoft IBM: Claim and Counter Claim
August 3, 2008
I get a kick out of companies dressed in inflatable sumo suits whacking each other. I chuckle when both combatants swing and end up sitting on the ground looking at one another. That’s what Microsoft and IBM seem to be doing in the group ware and collaboration market. John Fontana does a good job of explaining this inflatable sumo face off in his essay “IBM Counters Microsoft’s Seat Stealing Boast”. You can read the full text of the Network World story here.
The dust up concerns a Microsoft assertion to the effect that Redmond’s SharePoint would capture five million Lotus Notes’ seats, a euphemism for users. IBM asserts this will not happen. IBM just closed a 300,000 seat deal in Asia as evidence to support Lotus Notes’ hegemony.
What must irritate IBM is that Microsoft’s SharePoint is getting quite a bit of public relations traction. To make the SharePoint product more annoying, Ray Ozzie–the inventor of the software category–works for Microsoft.
More on this struggle of the titans in inflatable sumo suits to come. Film at 11.
Stephen Arnold, August 3, 2008
IBM: Mammatus Clouds Are Us
August 2, 2008
G.K. Chesterson’s statement “There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds” came to mind when I read Richard Martin’s article “IBM Brings Cloud Computing To Earth With Massive New Data Centers.” The write up is full of interesting information, and you will want to read it here.
Two points leapt from my flat panel display to my addled goose mind; to wit:
- IBM’s data centers cost about $400 million each. That’s a bargain compared to Microsoft’s San Antonio data center which cost about $650 million.
- IBM has opened centers in Dublin, Ireland; Beijing and Wuxi, China; and Johannesburg, South Africa. Mr. Martin does not tell us how many data centers IBM has.
For a company with $100 billion in revenue, IBM can build lots of data centers.
Mr. Martin reveals this juicy factoid:
IBM first opened a high-performance on-demand computing facility in New York in 2005. One advantage it enjoys over other cloud rivals like Google and Amazon, which essentially offer a do-it-yourself approach, is its army of system engineers and consultants who can assist companies in harnessing and deploying resources in the cloud.
I think of these as computing cloud type mammatus; that is, ominous looking but harmless. You can read more about mammatus clouds here. Better yet, take a gander at a mammatus and remember these clouds are toothless:
My recollection is that IBM has dipped in and out of the mammatus business a number of times. In 1996, IBM had a cloud-based Internet business. IBM sold this business to AT&T. IBM retooled and built a “grid” with a node in West Virginia. I don’t recall the details because the “grid” push drifted to the background at IBM. Now, like Hewlett Packard, IBM’s in the mammatus business–Big Blue mammatuses.
Telco Think: Nah, Google Does Not Matter
August 2, 2008
Telephony Online ran an interesting article by Alex Liu “Does Google Matter?” You can read Mr. Liu’s analysis here. The point of the article is a variant of Microsoft’s “one-trick pony” description of Google. Google sells ads. Its other initiatives have gone nowhere. Therefore, Google does not matter. The statement in Mr. Liu’s analysis that I found most interesting was:
Basically, Google has a materiality problem. Consider this: if the global advertising market is $600B, the online piece of that is $60B and the mobile portion of that is expected to be $6B (tops), that’s a lot of industry crowding out that Google has to win, even assuming differential segment growth—much less venturing into wireless communications services, another inevitable march. This journey into wireless will surely unfold, but it will take longer than most expect.
The author–a partner at prestigious A.T. Kearney and Alexander to the army in Kearney’s Communications, Media and High Technology practice in North America–has lost me. I don’t have a clue what “materiality” means. I’m not sure what “industry crowding out” means. I think I agree with the point that Google’s “journey into wireless” will take some time.
Stepping back from the glittering brilliance of this article, my view of Google and telecommunications is that it is one of five or six sectors that Google is probing. Unlike a telco, Google is not a one-trick pony when it comes to technology. Google has a business model that works just as well as Ma Bell’s coin operated telephones did for decades. I recall sitting in a meeting before the break up listening to chuckles about the shortage of rail cars in upstate New York to move nickels, dimes, and quarters to Manhattan. Google’s business model is not much more sophisticated than Ma Bell’s monopoly over pay phones. In fact, today’s telcos face a digital monopoly that shares some DNA with the old, beloved Ma Bell.
Will Google succeed in the telco sector? What about banking, back office services, entertainment, publishing, or enterprise software? Google’s “goal” of becoming a $100 billion company does not require success in its various initiatives. Google only has to make a reasonable showing in a couple of these sectors and work to keep its business model working.
My research suggests that Google could walk away from telco entirely and experience no material change in its financial performance. Telco, like Google’s financial services or publishing probes, are nothing more than applications running on Google’s infrastructure. I wish to remind Mr. Liu that Google has an infrastructure in place, working, and purpose built for massively parallel applications. Telcos don’t. Furthermore, telcos lack the vision, the money, and the time to duplicate the Google “as is” infrastructure.
Google enjoys more degrees of freedom than telcos. Google is largely unregulated. Telcos are regulated. Google is applications centric. Telcos are earnings centric. Google is experiencing a nice lift across its operations. Telcos are struggling to keep the blimps airborne. Google has nothing to lose probing telco land. Telcos have a great deal to lose whether the companies ignore Google or challenge Google. Google is a master of what I call Goo-jitsu; that is, minimum effort and cost yields maximum reaction and cost for its opponents.
I am delighted that I am no longer in the consulting game. My blood pressure is rising just thinking about the argument Mr. Liu has advanced. I think its lacks “materiality”, but that’s just an addled goose’s opinion.
Stephen Arnold, August 2, 2008
SearchCloud: Term Weighting Arrives
August 1, 2008
Yahoo’s BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service) has caught the attention of a number of companies in the information retrieval sector. A happy quack to the reader who alerted me to SearchCloud.net, a BOSS user.
SearchCloud.net, according to KillerStartUps, allows the user to weight certain terms:
The hook used by SearchCloud is providing users with the ability to weight the importance of keywords by changing the size of the fonts. Theoretically, this should allow for more accurate search results and the ability to search within given Web sites by simply placing the site name in a big font and the topic in a smaller one. While it is a great idea with a lot of potential, testing of the engine brought back very mixed results and the interface is not very well-designed. Searching for “Killerstartups” in a large font and “Cuil” in a smaller one did bring back a number of Killerstartups related pages but none with “Cuil” referenced.
You can read the KillerStartUps review here. In talking with the developers of SearchCloud.net, the SearchCloud.net team pointed out that KillerStartUps search would have returned better results had KillerStartUps reverse their weightings. The most specific search terms should be weighted higher by using larger letters. Here’s an example:
You can see the weights I assigned to each of my query terms. A larger font means the term has more weight in the query.
You can see that the terms that I wanted to emphasize I put in larger letters using the selector button above the cloud. And you may be interested in a contrarian review of SearchCloud.net on TechCrunch review here. I am tipping toward the positive with regard to this new service.
I found SearchCloud.net intuitive, and the system allows me to control the importance of certain terms in my query. For example, let’s take a query I ran this morning for a client about Google’s mobile search results.
I saw a report from South Africa that suggested Google was delivering a “mash up” of results from different Google indexes. I needed to locate information about this alleged Google function. You can read about what I learned here. I found SearchCloud.net–despite some start up rough edges–quite useful.
The tag cloud appears to the left of the results list. I have selected the grid display of results. I can scroll through a large number of relevance ranked hits very quickly. This is a useful interface option.
SearchCloud.net, like Kartoo.com, exploits Adobe technology to good effect.
There are some functions that I would like to see the SearchCloud.net team add; for example, in the results view, I want to be able to fiddle with the term weights and see the results rerank themselves. My hunch is that this function will be implemented, but like most start ups, SearchCloud.net must husband its resources.
When I spoke with the young-at-heart owners of SearchCloud.net, I was impressed with their candor and willingness to listen to my questions and suggestions. Right now, the company is self-funded and based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Ads are one of the revenue sources the team is discussing at this time.
Steven Eisenhauer, president, told me:
We would like to see the major players in the industry realize that the user is smart enough to control the parameters of their searches. It would be nice too see Google or Yahoo integrate our technology as an option for their users.
Milwaukee is known for beer, not investment banks. If you want to own a piece of a search company, maybe you could contact SearchCloud.net at info at searchcloud dot net?
SearchCloud.net shows considerable promise, and I have long been skeptical of Adobe’s Web technology. I may have to soften my stance based on what the SearchCloud.net wizards have been able to accomplish with Flex. I have added this company to my watch list.
Stephen Arnold, August 1, 2008
Google and Privacy: Usage Data Model
July 31, 2008
I’ve been sitting on the sidelines watching the Google privacy articles, posts, and arguments. The Smoking Gun’s essay here hooked my attention. I wanted to flag the comment that caught my attention:
Arguing that technology has ensured that “complete privacy does not exist,” Google contends that a Pennsylvania family has no legal grounds to sue the search giant for publishing photos of their home on its popular “Street View” mapping feature.
WebProNews’s David Utter also has a useful comment about the problem. His July 31, 2008, article “Company Responds to Street View Photo Lawsuit” here picks up the theme that the aggrieved party “as being out of touch with reality.” Mr. Utter reminded me of Scott McNealy’s comment “You already have zero privacy. Get over it.”
If you are interested in privacy, you may want to look up US20060224583, “Systems and Methods for Analyzing a User’s Web History.” I mention this invention in my KMWorld feature “Cloud Computing and the Issue of Privacy”, pp. 14 ff in the July/August issue.
Here’s the abstract for this invention by Andrew Fikes, Jeff Korn, Oren Zamir and Christine Irani:
A user’s prior searching and browsing activities are recorded for subsequent use. A user may examine the user’s prior searching and browsing activities in a number of different ways, including indications of the user’s prior activities related to advertisements. A set of search results may be modified in accordance with the user’s historical activities. The user’s activities may be examined to identify a set of preferred locations. The user’s set of activities may be shared with one or more other users. The set of preferred locations presented to the user may be enhanced to include the preferred locations of one or more other users. A user’s browsing activities may be monitored from one or more different client devices or client application. A user’s browsing volume may be graphically displayed.
If you have not made a connection among the geographical data, the usage data, and the information a user or cluster of users examines, you may want to read this document. Remember, I don’t want to imply that Google is using the technology disclosed in a patent document. I do think these documents provide a glimpse inside the engineering “factory” at Google.
Stephen Arnold, July 31, 2008
Google: Universal Search on Mobile Devices
July 31, 2008
My earlier post here about Google in South Africa contained a reference to universal search on mobile devices. I had two incoming messages asking about this functionality. One person asserted that universal search on a mobile device was not possible and that the South Africa source I cited was out to lunch. To offer some additional information, I would like to direct everyone’s attention to US20080183699, “Blending Mobile Search Results.” This patent document discloses an invention by Ning Hu and Vida U. Ha. You can snag a copy at the wonderful USPTO here. The abstract for this invention is:
Methods, systems, and apparatus, including computer program products, for blending mobile search results. A method includes receiving a search query and multiple search results. The search results each satisfy the search query and have a respective search result quality score. The search results include generic and mobile search results. The generic and mobile search results each identify a generic and mobile resource, respectively. The search result quality scores include mobile and generic search result quality scores for the mobile and generic search results, respectively. The mobile search result quality scores and the generic search result quality scores were generated according to different scoring formulas. Based on one or more terms in the search query, the search query is classified as a mobile query. As a consequence, one or more search result quality scores are modified to improve the sorting of search results that include both mobile and generic search results.
My reading of this patent document suggests that Google indeed has some Universal Search tools on its digital workbench.
Stephen Arnold, July 31, 2008
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