Google: Business Intelligence, Its Next Ad Business
October 11, 2022
Google has been a busy beaver. One example popped out of a ho hum write up about Google management’s approach to freebies. The write up “Google’s CEO Faced Intense Pushback from Employees at a Town Hall. His 2-Sentence Response was Smart Leadership” contains a rather startling point, if the article is accurate. Here’s the passage which is presumably a direct quote from Sundar Pichai, the top Googler:
Look, I hope all of you are reading the news, externally. The fact that you know, we are being a bit more responsible through one of the toughest macroeconomic conditions underway in the past decade, I think it’s important that as a company, we pull together to get through moments like this.
Did you see the crazy admission: “being a bit more responsible”. Doesn’t this mean that the company has been irresponsible prior to this announcement. I find that amusing: More responsible. Does responsibility extend beyond Foosball and into transparency about alleged online ad fraud or the handling of personnel matters such as the Dr. Timnit Gebru example?
But to the business at hand: Business intelligence. Like enterprise search and artificial intelligence, I am not exactly sure what business intelligence means. To the people who use spreadsheets like Microsoft Excel, rows and columns of data are “business intelligence.” But there must be more than redos of Lotus 1-2-3?
Yes, there are different ways to “do” business intelligence. These range from listening in a coffee shop to buying data from a third party provider and stuffing the information into Maltego to spot previously unnoticed relationships. And there are, of course, companies eager to deliver search based applications to make finding a competitor’s proposal to a government agency easier than figuring out which Google Dork to use.
“Google Days It’s Cracked the Code to Business Intelligence” explains that the Google is going to make BI as business intelligence is known to those in the know the King of the Mountain. I noted this passage:
In business intelligence [BI], “there was always this idea of governing BI and of self-service, and there was no reconciliation of the degree of trust and the degree of flexibility,” Google’s Gerrit Kazmaier told reporters last week, ahead of the Google Cloud Next conference. “At Google, I think we have cracked that code to how you get trust and confidence of data with the flexibility and agility of self-service.”
This buzzword infused statement raises several fascinating ideas. Let’s look at a couple of them, shall we?
First, the idea of “governance.” That’s a term to which I can say I don’t know what the heck it means. But the notion of “governance” and “trust” is that somehow the two glittering generalities are what Google has “cracked.” I must say, “What’s the meaning, Gerrit Kazmaier?”
Second, I noted three buzzwords strung together like faux silver skulls on a raver’s necklace: Trust, confidence, flexibility, and agility. To me, these words mean that more users want a point-and-click solution to answer a question about a competitor or the downstream impacts of an event like sanctions on China. The reality is that like the first buzzword, these don’t communicate, they evoke. The intention is that Mother Google will deliver business intelligence.
The solution, however, is not one Google crafted. The company’s professionals could not develop a business intelligence solution. Google had to buy one. Thus, the code cracking was purchased in the form of a company called Looker. The appeal of the Looker solution is that the user does not have to figure out data sources, determine if the data are valid, wrestle to get the data normalized, run tests to determine if the data set meets the requirements of a first year statistics class problem, and figure out what one needs to know. Google will make these steps invisible and reduce knowledge work to clicking an icon. There you go. To be fair, other companies have similar goals. These range from well known US companies to small firms in Armenia. Everyone wants to generate money from easy business intelligence.
Google is an online advertising business. The company wants to knock Microsoft off its perch as the default vendor to business and government. The Department of Defense is going to embrace the Google Cloud. I am not sure that some DoD analysts will release their grip on Microsoft PowerPoint, however.
Can a company trust Google? Does Google have a mechanism for governance for data handling, managing its professional staff (hello, Dr. Gebru), and ensuring that automated advertising systems are straight and true? Does Google abandon projects without thinking too much about consequences (hello, Stadia developers and customers)?
My hunch is that reducing business intelligence from a craft to a mouse click sets the stage for:
- Potential embedded and intentional data bias
- Rapid ill-informed decisions by users
- A way to inject advertising into a service application and personalization.
Will the days of the free car washes return to the Google parking lot? Will having meetings in a tree house in the London office become a thing again? Will Google displace other vendors delivering search based applications which engage the user in performing thoughtful analyses?
Time will provide the answer or rather Looker will provide the answer. Google will collect the money.
Stephen E Arnold, October 11, 2022
Gmail Is for the Googley
October 11, 2022
I spotted an interesting Twitter thread about Google and its beneficial two factor authentication system. You can in theory view the sequence of tweets at this url. The prime mover is Twitter user @chadloder.
The main point is that the Google requires account verification several times a year. Individuals who are in a life condition that pivots on free phones called Obamaphones in the string of tweets lose their account. The phones are lost, broken, stolen, and replaced in many cases. However, these phones often come with a different phone number.
The result is that these individuals cannot provide the “verification” that Google requires. One of @chadloder’s tweets states:
Not only do many of these benefits sites fail to function properly on mobile devices, but if you lose access to your GMail account, your caseworker will close your case for non-response and you have to start all over again.
Let’s look at this issue from a different point of view. I hypothesize the following:
- Google’s executives did not think about homeless Gmail users as individuals
- The optimal Gmail user consumes Google advertising
- Individuals who do not have a home are not the targets of Google’s advertising system
- Those who cannot verify are not part of the desired user cluster.
To sum up, when one is Googley, these problems do not manifest themselves. Advertisers want the plump targets with money to spend.
Stephen E Arnold, October 11, 2022
Amazon: An Ecosystem in Which Some Bad Actors Thrive
October 6, 2022
Wow! Who knew? I must admit that I have developed what I call a “Hypothetical Ecommerce Crime Ecosystem.” Because I am an old, dinobaby, I have not shared my musings in this semi entertaining Web log. I do relatively few “public” talks. I am careful not to be “volunteered” for a local networking meet up like those organized by the somewhat ineffectual “chamber of commerce” in central Kentucky. Plus, I am never sure if those with whom I speak are “into” ecosystems of crime. Sure, last week I gave a couple of boring lectures to a few law enforcement, crime analysts, and government senior officials. But did the light bulbs flashing during and after my talk impair my vision. Nah.
I did read a write up which nibbles around the edges of my diagram for my hypothetical crime ecosystem. “There’s an Underground Market Where Secondhand Amazon Merchant Accounts Are Bought and Sold for Thousands of Dollars” asserts as 100 percent actual factual:
An Insider investigation revealed a thriving gray market for secondhand Amazon seller accounts. On Telegram and forums like Swapd and PlayerUp, thousands of brokers openly sell accounts, with prices ranging from a few hundred bucks for a new account to thousands of dollars apiece for years-old accounts with established histories. … The accounts sometimes steal random people’s identities to disguise themselves, and sellers are using these fake credentials to engage in questionable behavior on Amazon, Insider found — including selling counterfeit textbooks. The people’s whose names and addresses are being stolen are sometimes then sent hundreds of returns by unhappy customers.
Is there other possibly inappropriate activity on the Amazon giant bookstore? The write up says:
Merchants have used shady tactics like submitting false fraud reports targeting rivals, or bribing Amazon employees to scuttle competitors. Others peddle counterfeit or shoddily produced wares. Amazon bans fraudulent sellers, along with other accounts they’re suspected of owning, and blacklists their business name, physical location, and IP address.
Okay, but why?
My immediate reaction is money. May I offer a few speculations about such ecosystem centric behavior? You say, No. Too bad. Here are my opinions:
- Amazon does basic cost benefit analyses. The benefit is the amount of money Amazon gets to keep. The cost is the sum of the time, effort, and direct outflow of cash required to monitor and terminate what might be called the Silicon Valley way. (Yeah, I know Amazon like Microsoft is in some state in the US Northwest, but the spirit of the dudes and dudettes in Silicon Valley knows no geographic boundaries. Did you notice the “con” in “silicon.” Coincidence?
- Bad actors know a thriving ecosystem when they see one. Buy stolen products from a trusted third party, and who worries to much about where the person in the white van obtained them. Pay the driver, box ‘em up, and ship out those razors and other goods easily stolen from assorted brick-and-mortar stores in certain US locations; for example, the Walgreen’s in Tony Bennett’s favorite city.
- The foil of third party intermediaries makes it easy for everyone in the ecosystem to say, “Senator, thank you for the question. I do not know the details of our firm’s business relationship. I will obtain the information and send a report to your office.” When? Well, maybe struggling FedEx or the Senate’s internal mail system lost the report. Bummer. Just request another copy, rinse, and repeat. The method has worked for a couple of decades. Don’t fix it if the system is not broken.
What’s interesting about my “Hypothetical Ecommerce Crime Ecosystem” in my opinion is:
- Plausible deniability is baked in
- Those profiting from exploitation of the Amazon money rain forest have zero incentive or downside to leave the system as it is. Change costs money and — let’s face it — there have been zero significant downsides to the status quo for decades. Yep, decades.
- Enforcement resources are stretched at this time. Thus, what I call “soft fraud” is easier than ever to set up and embed in business processes.
Is the cited article correct? Sure, I believe everything I read online, including Amazon reviews of wireless headphones and cheap T shirts.
Is my analysis correct? I don’t know. I am probably wrong and I am too old, too worn out, too jaded to do much more than ask, “Is that product someone purchased on Amazon an original, unfenced item?”
Stephen E Arnold, October 6, 2022
Standards: Just Lower Them Already
October 5, 2022
Snow flurries? Cancel grade school and high school classes. Covid? Cancel in person classes and shift to the “tech will solve it” approach to education. Algebraic identities? Talk about TikToks.
The clash of the dinobabies is illustrated in “NYU Chemistry Professor Fired After Students Said His Class Was Too Hard.” The subtitle to the article identifies one issue:
Students were misreading exam questions at an astonishing rate
The idea is an important one: Reading with comprehension.
A college professor expected students to read the course material, do the required exercises, read examination questions, and answer them. A failure to understand what one reads means that one does not ingest information, understand it, and explain what one has learned.
That seems to have been a problem at New York University, a school distinguished by its proximity to a thriving informal market in controlled substances.
How did the students react to the professor who expected the students to learn chemistry? The TikTok aficionados protested.
How did the university respond to the bleating students? The institution fired the professor. No tenure; therefore, no problem.
Several observations seem to be warranted:
- Learning can be fun, even easy, but in most cases, learning requires carving new pathways in the brain and forcing new connections therein. Focus, effort, are commitment required. TikTok learning and YouTube short cuts may not do the job.
- Reading is FUNdamental. Was, is, and will be. Can’t read? Flashing warning lights.
- Institutions tossing standards in the dumper ensure an accelerating decline in decision making, understanding, and sticking to a difficult task. Lose these skills, lose trust in education, government, people, and probably most touch points in life.
- Discipline is a valuable trait. No discipline and one’s life may wobble.
Who cares? TikTok and YouTube don’t. Why are falling standards in vogue? Ah, that’s an interesting question. Let’s Google it.
Stephen E Arnold, October 4, 2022
Seagal and Snowden: Pets of the Russian Federation or Just Pals?
October 5, 2022
I have not be a fan of Mr. Snowden since he leaked classified US government PowerPoints. I am less of a fan now that he has seen the Red Dawn like the now chubby, somewhat overwrought former movie star Steven Seagal. One of his cinematic achievements is “Above the Law.” Perhaps a remake is in the works starring two Eurasian brown bears. Baited and chained, the two luminaries provide an example for today’s conceived (believe it or not in Kiev) and enshrined in the mud of the Port of the Five Seas.
I read a trusted news report from Thomson Reuters called “Putin Grants Russian Citizenship to U.S. Whistleblower Snowden.” The write up points out that the poster boy for zero trust security is now a “real” Russian. The snap in the Reuters’ story shows the honorable Mr. Snowden without his eye glasses with a broken nose piece, a logo of the National Security Agency whose secrecy agreement he found irrelevant, or his Russian Independent Party pin. (I believe this is the political party of everyone’s favorite world leader, Vlad the Visionary Planner.)
I noted this sentence:
Snowden’s lawyer, Anatoly Kucherena, told RIA news agency that his client could not be called up because he had not previously served in the Russian army.
But what about Steven Seagal? He was a military type. He is a trained operator. Will he re-up for Mother Russia? I believe he became a Russian citizen in 2016. Perhaps Seagal and Snowden could team up for a podcast tentatively titled “Pets or Pals”.
Winner.
People who ignore confidentiality agreements and become citizens of nation states not friending the US.
Losers maybe?
Stephen E Arnold, October 5, 2022
Amazon: Two Day Delivery? Well, Sort Of?
October 5, 2022
Amazon Prime subscribers love the two-day shipping. When their item does not arrive within time, they get upset because they paid good morning for a service! Removing the Karen spirit from the last sentence, it is understandable that there will be occasional holdups with delivery. If delays continue, then there is something wrong with the pipeline. Vox digs into what is happening with Amazon’s delivery system in: “Some Amazon Prime Customers Say They Don’t Have Two Day Shipping Anymore.”
Former corporate Amazon employee Peter Freese noticed that Amazon delivery times were taking longer than expected in his hometown Omak, Washington. After he read complaints similar to his own online, Freese decided to experiment. He had Amazon packages sent to random residential addresses in all thirty-nine Washington counties. All the orders were branded with Amazon Prime, but lacked the “two-day” or “next-day” shipping option.
Lauren Samaha, an Amazon spokesperson, stated there were no problems with Amazon’s delivery times, but they fluctuate based on mitigating factors. She affirmed the company was not cutting costs nor denying two-day delivery to addresses within the continental US.
Freese, however, discovered that was not true:
“Freese’s analysis goes beyond those semantics, though: What he’s found is that some customers who once had Prime two-day shipping no longer do, even on commonly purchased items. Yet they’re still paying the full Prime membership fees like everyone else.”
Amazon’s warehouse employees work under a tight surveillance ship that keeps going 24/7. According to many former and present workers, the working conditions are exploitative, harmful, and can result in injury. Amazon admitted that they underestimated how many employees they needed to staff their warehouses during the pandemic. Delivery delays also point out that Amazon is not infallible and it is beginning to show cracks.
It would be nice if Amazon admitted its weaknesses, then focused on improving employees’ working conditions. Happy workers means higher productivity.
Whitney Grace, October 5, 2022
Google Quirks Identified
October 3, 2022
Stadia went away. The Hacker News thread “Stadia Died Because No One Trusts Google” included some comments which identified what some perceive as inherent Google defects. My hunch is that these defects can be stretched to cover other Google services, maybe the firm’s approach to advertising and “artificial intelligence.”
Here are a handful of comments which I found interesting:
h0l0cube: Google, Facebook, etc. are victims of early success. They made their billions on low hanging fruit, by throwing a lot of resources at problems with very high demand for a solution that weren’t yet tackled well (e.g. query the internet, keep in touch with friends). So it’s no wonder that in this day in age they are incapable of understanding product market fit, innovating, or competing in a market with competent players and a lower barrier to entry.
vxNsr: Google isn’t especially excited by OS, because their bread and butter is all in the cloud they just don’t have the institutional energy to care about consumer software for the consumer’s sake.
marcinzm: Even Google’s more public attempts at innovation are toys rather than useful products.
bitcharmer: These days their [Google’s] DNA is ads.
chopface: … Googlers just don’t care about people. They care about puzzles and systematicity.
josephg: Every time Google shuts down a product, they hurt their reputation. They’re pissing in the pool that future Google products need to survive. At this point I don’t know if Google can make successful new products because nobody trusts their follow through.
hinkley: IMO, Google died the day they announced they weren’t going to work on anything with less than a billion dollar revenue potential. It sounds like a financially smart thing to do but it cuts your legs out because nobody is doing research anymore, and you select for people with half a billion potential and an eagerness to lie.
Interesting to me, probably not to Alphabet Google YouTube DeepMind, definitely not to DeepMind. I can hear this echoing in my mind, “Senator, thank you for the question.”
Stephen E Arnold, October 3, 2022
Microsoft Teams: Ho Ho Ho
September 30, 2022
That Microsoft Teams is something. I refuse to use it. Others have to use it. I am happy with Zoom. I am fortunate. I can dictate what video tool I use. You? No. Too bad. I try not to think about Teams. I admit to sending my son notices of new Teams’ features, and he has a great sense of humor and sends me smiley faces as a reply. I am not sure he is smiling inside, however.
I noted that Teams popped up in a link to a YCombinator discussion “Why Is Microsoft Teams Still So Bad?.” The comments are informative and interesting; for example:
- Roydivision says: Random crashing.
- Classified says: Once the bean counters discover that you can make money with a piece of software, the game is over.
- M4lvin says: In Germany (or maybe whenever the system language is German) Microsoft decided that everyone should have a Ferris wheel and a bezel in their task bar because now it is Oktoberfest in Munich. Seriously? I think we have reached spam-as-an-operating-system.
- Yawnxyz says: Microsoft product suites are like the Olive Garden of the product world.
- Cyberge99 says: I think Teams also offers more capabilities to Enterprise users. I’ve been on a few teams calls with people on the call that are not visible in the attendee list.
What’s interesting is that:
- People complain but organizations use Microsoft products due to pricing, compliance, institutional momentum, security assertions, familiarity, etc. (Does this mean “monopoly”?)
- Microsoft seems to be assembling a communications equivalent to Word; that is, many features, some of which do not work or cannot be located by a user not intimately familiar with the application. (Is this terminal featuritis?)
- Microsoft’s assertions to the media are not fact checked; otherwise, the comments in the cited thread might be less creditable. (Does science fiction count as a technology deliverable?)
I found the question interesting, but the comments speak more effectively than an equivalent number of TikToks. Viva Teams!
Stephen E Arnold, September 30, 2022
Will Simplicity Sprint Help Google Contend with iPhone Rise?
September 30, 2022
It appears Android users have just been relegated to the minority in the US, at least for the moment. Apple Insider reports, “There Are More iPhones in Use in the USA than Android Phones.” Writer William Gallagher tells us:
“Counterpoint Research has previously reported that on a quarterly basis, Apple’s sales of the iPhone are growing. New research from Counterpoint discusses the total installed pool of smartphones that are actually in active use — and iPhones now account for just slightly over 50% of actively used smartphones in the States. According to the Financial Times, Counterpoint analysts have said that this is Apple’s highest-ever share of active smartphone users since the original iPhone launch in 2007.”
So, what is Google’s next phone move? Perhaps it will be another “Simplicity Sprint” like the one CEO Sundar Pichai recently launched in the face of dismal productivity numbers: the company’s second-quarter revenue growth was a mere 13%, down from 62% a year before. The project is asking employees for ideas to boost efficiency. Historically, Google has been considered the most worker-centric big tech company (contrast to Amazon, for example). Some have said that culture is changing; perhaps employees will wax nostalgic on their feedback forms.
Whatever the results, writer and programmer Pen Magnet thinks Pichai would do better to consider some factors unique to programming. In “Why Google Employees Don’t Work,” published at Level Up Coding, they write:
“When it comes to productivity, quarterly and yearly figures don’t matter much for huge companies. They have decade-long product-rollout plans. If something is looking bad today, it’s more likely to be rooted in someone’s bad judgment 5 years ago, who is currently out of the blame-game horizon. … As a 2-decade veteran programmer, every time I think of productivity, all I can think of is excellence. In other words, the fastest way to do something is to do it right, no matter how long it takes.”
If that apparent contradiction piques your interest, see the write-up for more discussion. Will Google find a way to better compete with Apple, or will iOS capture more of the upscale US market for mobile phones?
Cynthia Murrell, September 30, 2022
Google and Its Smart Software: Marketing Fodder and Investment Compost
September 29, 2022
Alphabet Google YouTube DeepMind is “into” smart software. The idea is that synthetic data, off-the-shelf models, and Google’s secret sauce will work wonders. Now this series of words is catnip for AGYD’s marketing and sales professionals. Grrrreat, as Tony the Tiger used to say about a fascinating cereal decades ago. Grrreat!
However, there may be a slight disconnect between the AGYD smart software papers, demonstrations, and biology-shaking protein thing and the cold, hard reality of investment payback. Keep in mind that AGYD is about money, not the social shibboleths in the stream of content marketing.
“Google Ventures Shelves Its Algorithm” states:
Google Ventures has mothballed an algorithm that for years had served as a gatekeeper for new investments… GV [Google Ventures] still relies heavily on data. After all, this is the corporate venture arm of Google. But data has been relegated to its original role as aide, rather than arbiter.
I interpreted the report to mean: Yikes! It does not work and Googley humans have to make decisions about investments.
The spin is that the algos are helpful. But the decision is humanoid.
I wonder, “What other AGYD algos don’t deliver what users, advertisers, and Googlers expected?”
Google listens to those with lots of money at risk. Does Google listen to other constituencies? Did Google take the criticism of its smart software to heart?
My hunch is that the smart software is lingo perfect for marketing outputs. Some of the outputs of the smart software are compost, rarely shown to the public and not sniffed by too many people. Will Tony the Tiger inhale and growl, “Grrreat”? Sure, sure, Tony will.
Stephen E Arnold, September 29, 2022
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