Quote to Note: Insurance on Larry Page
June 26, 2012
Interesting factoid in the form of a quote to note. We don’t know if this is accurate, but we wanted to document the item because it is interesting. The source is “Google Voiceless: Larry Page to Skip Big Conference.” The passage we noted:
Google spokesman Jim Prosser told us that Page’s condition is “notserious” but that Page had been told to rest his voice. That’s a goodthing because as we reported earlier, Google has not insured itselfagainst the loss of Larry Page.
Interesting.
Stephen E Arnold, June 26, 2012
Sponsored by Polyspot
Smart Folks Found to Think Like the Addled Goose
June 25, 2012
After reading the New Yorker’s “Why Smart People are Stupid,” our publisher Stephen E. Arnold is delighted that he is an addled goose living in rural Kentucky. Must be because his IQ is 70, which is dull normal for a human but okay for a water fowl. (I say that with the greatest respect, Steve.)
[Editor’s note: The guy’s IQ is closer to 50 on a good day and with the wind behind his tailfeatures! Sure, he was mentioned in the Barron’s blog here, but that was obviously a fluke.]
The blog post discusses findings from a recent study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology led by Richard West at James Madison University and Keith Stanovich at the University of Toronto. The study builds on the work of Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman, who has been studying the human thought process, including when, why, and how it can fail us, for decades.
Researchers posed classic bias problems to almost 500 subjects and studied the results. Like Kahneman, they found that most people usually take the easiest route to an answer rather than the most logical. We refuse to actually do the math. Most of us are also susceptible to “anchor” bias, where we are likely to base our answers on a factor supplied within the question. See the post for examples (and a more extensive discussion), and try the bat-and-ball and lily pad problems for yourself.
The researchers went beyond Kahneman’s work to study the ways in which such thinking errors are linked to intelligence. They found that they are indeed linked—but perhaps not in the way one would expect. Blogger Jonah Lehrer writes:
“The scientists gave the students four measures of ‘cognitive sophistication.’ As they report in the paper, all four of the measures showed positive correlations, ‘indicating that more cognitively sophisticated participants showed larger bias blind spots.’ This trend held for many of the specific biases, indicating that smarter people (at least as measured by S.A.T. scores) and those more likely to engage in deliberation were slightly more vulnerable to common mental mistakes. Education also isn’t a savior; as Kahneman and Shane Frederick first noted many years ago, more than fifty per cent of students at Harvard, Princeton, and M.I.T. gave the incorrect answer to the bat-and-ball question.”
So why are smarties so dumb? No one knows just yet, but I theorize it has to do with the sort of laziness smart kids learn in elementary school—they can get top marks without fully engaging their brains. Perhaps that means when they come across a slippery question as an adult, they fall right into the trap.
Cynthia Murrell, June 25, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
Quote to Note: Management Wisdom
June 24, 2012
I love management wisdom published by the New York Times, an outfit working to inject technologists into its management structure. Yes.
Navigate to the your local vendor of newspapers (good luck with that). Purchase the June 24, 2012, New York Times which contains news as fresh as two day tuna, and read “Who Made That Cubicle?” in the New York Times Magazine. (Fees may apply, but the Sunday newspaper is just $6 in rural Kentucky. You will find the quote below on page 19 as the last paragraph of a Dilbert-type story: “Not all organizations are intelligent and progressive, Propst [the father of the Dilbert cubicle] two years before he died in 2000.” Now the keeper:
Lots are run by crass people. They make little, bitty cubicles and stuff people in them. Barren rat hole places.” He spent his last years apologizing for his utopia.
Ah, irony. Utopia. Are any search and content processing vendors relying on cubicles? Probably not. Enlightened management. Don’t trip over the scooters, volleyball, or crate of organic protein bars.
Stephen E Arnold, June 24, 2012
Sponsored by Polyspot
New Version of Cuadra STAR Available
June 4, 2012
Knowledge management company Cuadra is releasing version 2.0 of their popular archival collections management solution, STAR Knowledge Center for Archives (SKCA). This version features the addition of a Research Services module, which had been requested by costumers. The press release explains:
“SKCA users requested the new module because they wanted to integrate the tracking of requests with the cataloging data that they already have in SKCA. They needed to be able to track the work done by archives staff on behalf of researchers, including actions such as pulling materials from storage, photocopying, digitizing, and research. . . .
“With SKCA 2.0’s integrated approach, a staff member can easily log a request, generate a pull report, identify materials that need digitization, and use batch operations to mark the catalog records of materials that have been pulled, returned and reshelved. In addition, archivists can use the statistical and management reports to help them substantiate the work they have already done and monitor the additional needed work.”
Customer response to the new module has been positive. In fact, one client shared that the software will not only help with their current work, but also help them pursue long-term plans. Very nice.
Founded in 1978, Cuadra is headquartered in Los Angeles and has offices in Silver Spring, MD, and New York, NY. At the core of each of their products is STAR, an acclaimed software package with the power and flexibility to manage information collections of all types from many types of environments, including archives, libraries, museums, and publishing houses. A SaaS version of the system was released in 2003.
Cynthia Murrell, June 4, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
More Autonomy Activity at HP
May 31, 2012
Short honk. The addled goose is in London. The management traffic jam at Hewlett Packard seems to be getting worse. I thought London was tangled. I read “HP Names New Software Chief, COO.” The founder of Autonomy will leaving HP, which purchased Autonomy for $10 billion or so about eight months ago. First, an HP software wizard named William Veghte had responsibility for Autonomy. Not if the write up is accurate. The new boss reporting to Margaret Thatcher inspired Meg Whitman is a venture capitalist and former IBM software wizard, George Kadifa. Will there be more changes? Will the management snarl be resolved? Sure. But how will HP recover its $10 billion and keep those Autonomy customers happy? Tough questions. The goose has some ideas, but these are not for the free blog.
Stephen E Arnold, May 31, 2012
Sponsored by Information Today which bought me dinner last night
MarkLogic: The Door Revolves
May 17, 2012
MarkLogic hit $55 or $60 million. Not good enough. Exit one CEO; enter an Autodesk exec. Hit $100 million. Not good enough. Enter a new CEO. Navigate to “Former senior Oracle exec Gary Bloom named CEO of Mark Logic.” The new CEO is either going to grow the outfit or get it sold if I understand the write up. Here’s a passage which caught my attention:
Gary Bloom has been named CEO of Mark Logic, which returns him to his database roots.
According to MarkLogic’s Web page, the company is:
an enterprise software company powering over 500 of the world’s most critical Big Data Applications with the first operational database technology capable of handling any data, at any volume, in any structure.
However, I can download a search road map. Hmmm. I thought search was dead. Well big data search is where the action is. MarkLogic is pushing forward with its XML data management system.
Stephen E Arnold, May 17, 2012
Sponsored by HighGainBlog
Google Strategy Questioned
May 9, 2012
Blogger Dustin Curtis presents his take on Google’s business strategy in “Google’s Coherent Bouquet.” Riffing off of Google Co-Founder Sergey Brin’s line, “We’ve let a thousand flowers bloom; now we want to put together a coherent bouquet,” Curtis questions whether such flower arranging is within the company’s abilities. At issue is the importance of social media and, naturally, the threat of competition from Facebook that continually dogs the search giant. The write up asserts:
“Google has about 150 legacy core products which have slowly evolved into great tools over the past decade, but which were designed and built with the complete absence of consideration for any social interaction. Google+ is an attempt to shoe-horn Google’s legacy products into things that are compatible with a new set of social interaction paradigms.
“My point here is that ‘social’ is a point of view from which to design products and not a ‘layer’ that can be easily draped over existing, non-social products.”
Hmmm. Interesting logic. Curtis insists that a shift like the one Google needs is not going to happen without the impetus of “new and unexpected outside ideas.” Is the self-described “villain” blogger correct? Is Google too set in its ways to achieve social success?
Cynthia Murrell, May 9, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
Yahoo and Governance: Semel to Scott Thompson
May 4, 2012
Short honk: I don’t much, if any, attention to Yahoo. My last big analysis of Yahoo was shortly after its then Chief Technology Officer tried to explain to a financial services client of mine that Yahoo was ahead of Google in search. Crazy assertion from a crazy outfit. In my report, I included an image of Terry Semel as the captain of the Titanic. Got a laugh. Yahoo got zero positives from me. (By the way is that Wikipedia profile of Mr. Semel accurate? Check it out between conference calls and SMS texting.)
Navigate to “Scott Thompson Resume Scandal Is Not an Inadvertent Mistake—He Also Claimed Comp Sci Degree as CTO of PayPay.” I want to comment on the spelling of résumé but who cares? That’s my attitude to the coverage of an executive fudging a biography. Furthermore, in my analysis Yahoo is the type of outfit which lives in a world of illusion, silos, and confusion.
The fact that a senior executive would take the time to do a little digging is absolutely no surprise to me. I hear the phrase “I’m too busy” from people whom I know are not too busy. Some of these people ask me for work and then tell me, “We have a spring vacation.” I heard this phrase from a company president who is guiding a company which is losing millions of dollars each quarter. Right. Vacation. Spring break.
I think we have plenty of solid evidence of a core governance problem at Yahoo, but the same issue exists in many US organizations. Whether it is the confusion about the actions of US government employees or the unfortunate Google Street View incident, governance is not a core competency in many US organizations. Enron, Lehman Brothers, Tyco—remember these executive edifices?
Furthermore I don’t think governance can be fixed quickly, if at all.
When an individual professional does not do the basics like checking key facts, the egregious mistakes will continue and most likely increase.
Governance problems are not black swans.
Governance problems are a direct outcome of people who do not focus, gather information, analyze, and reflect.
Rushing to meetings, asking for others to collect information, and staring at mobile devices—these are flashing signals of trouble at Yahoo and elsewhere.
Fiddling with a biography is either effective public relations, impactful marketing, or the shortest distance between a person and the top of Maslow’s hierarchy. For me, Yahoo and fake credentials are no big deal.
Baloney is the business of many businesses.
Desperation marketing is the new normal marketing.
Stephen E Arnold, May 4, 2012
Sponsored by no one but me.
Google Trims Its Sails
April 21, 2012
I live in rural Kentucky on a pond filled with mine runoff. I know zero about sailing on the open seas. However, I do know that the phrase “trim the sail” means a series of steps taken to deal with what the Dockside wearing crowd calls “heavy weather.”
Sailing ships with canvas sails can be tough to handle when the wind blows with gusto. The idea is that the sails should be rolled up in order to minimize the likelihood that a sailing vessel will turn over. The Ahabs call this capsizing. Old geese in Kentucky call this loosing control.
The USS Google, the largest and most unsinkable search system based on advertising, is taking prudent measures to streamline itself. I would describe the actions as “trimming its sails.” The reason? My hunch is that the MBA-speak word would be “efficiency.” My word would be “control.”
“Spring Cleaning: Google Shuts Down Patent Search Homepage, One Pass, Google Related & More” informed me that Google is presenting a lower profile to the economic winds. The write up reports:
Ever since Larry Page took over as Google’s CEO, the company has shut down more and more of its products that were only being used by a limited number of users. Today, the company announced another round of “spring cleaning.”
But here’s the comment which caught my attention, a verbal fog horn perhaps:
As part of this process, Google is also retiring a number of APIs, but most importantly, it is moving to a one-year API deprecation policy across its products (that’s down from three years for some of the company’s APIs).
APIs matter little to the garden variety Google user. APIs do matter to the enterprise, and I think APIs may have a contribution to make to the legal process underway between Google and Oracle.
My view is that most people are blissfully unaware of many Google services. Seven years ago, I counted about 80 Google products and services in The Google Legacy. I no longer keep track of Google products and services because many of them seem anchored in Google’s brute force approach to content processing.
For me, the shift in Google’s approach to APIs will signal that the company may be moving toward a more proprietary approach for developer interaction with Google services. I also think the shut downs and direction changes may give some enterprises additional variables to consider before embracing a “total” Google approach to storage, email, and hosted applications.
A final thought: Perhaps Google knows a major storm is coming. Precautions may be designed to keep the USS Google safe until it reaches a safe harbor.
Stephen E Arnold, April 21, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
Is Google Making a Wrong Turn?
April 11, 2012
We came across a poignant view from a person who does not embrace Google‘s pursuit of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft. Andrew Badr reminisces in his post, “The Google We Lost.” Was the past really that good? We’re not so sure.
Larry Page’s new focus on what Badr calls “human problems” (social, design, and product) bothers the blogger because he feels it does not play to the company’s strengths. Google has spent the last ten years, he says, almost exclusively hiring engineering talent. The best engineering talent, to be sure, but engineers just the same.
Badr posits that the reason for the focus on more touchy-feely issues springs from a “fear of Facebook” as well as the influence of Apple. He charges:
“Google trying to become more like Apple smacks of a nerd who decides to try to be popular. Even if you succeed, you lose something valuable about yourself. Making a decision based on principles like ‘be true to yourself’ is heuristic and long-term; it would be hard to justify to shareholders. But it sure would feel better. ‘Beat Facebook’ is not an inspiring vision, and Google needs to keep inspiring developers if it wants to keep hiring the best ones. And the world loses something — the company that could have been.”
Grousing employees are common today. Grousing that evokes pity is a different type of complaint.
Cynthia Murrell, April 11, 2012, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
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