Yahoo Shopping Search
November 22, 2008
My mother had a black thumb. She could plant a flower, and it would die. My father, on the other hand, could grow tomatoes that would spawn softball-sized fruit without doing much more than dropping the seed on the ground. Yahoo is a bit like my mother, not with plants but with growing profitable businesses. I read in TechCrunch a story by Ouriel Ohayon here that Yahoo sold its Kelkoo property. Yahoo had a shopping search at the time of the 2004 acquisition. Yahoo still has its not too useful to me shopping site today. What it doesn’t have is the $450 million the company lost on the deal. Yahoo has a financial black thumb.
Its inability to integrate acquisitions has long been one of the company’s most glaring weaknesses. The sale of Kelkoo proves once again that Yahoo doesn’t integrate its acquisitions in the manner of Google. Yahoo can own a property for four years and sell it like I would sell one of my goslings. Not much integration evident, do you think?
And what about Yahoo’s shopping search at this pivotal time of the retail year? In my opinion, I don’t think it is very good. Someone responded to my earlier criticism of Yahoo’s shopping search by pointing me to Kelkoo. Well, that won’t work now, will it. Try this test. Navigate to Yahoo.com, click the “shopping” label above the search box, and you will see the bold face “shopping” to alert you that you are now running a shopping search. Now enter this query: “penguin bracelet”. What do you see? Well, I got this page of results:
Now navigate to Google, click products, and run the same query. Here’s what I received from the GOOG:
I know these screen shots are difficult to read due to WordPress’s helpful image compression algorithm. But the key point is that the Yahoo results includes zero nada zippo penguin bracelets. Google delivers me penguin bracelets.
Similar queries return similar results. I am not sure why the Yahoo system does not do a better job of figuring out what I want when I run a query. Maybe I am not as tuned into the Yahoo “way”? Maybe Yahoo is not as tuned into what I want when I run a query? Maybe it is just a lousy search system and method? I use Yahoo less and less because it’s search system continues to unhelpful for me. Google, despite its weird positioning of Google Products is getting better.
My hypothesis: Google has my father’s green thumb. Yahoo has my mother’s black thumb (may she rest in peace). Not only does Yahoo have the uncanny ability to muff its acquisitions, Yahoo can’t find penguin bracelets.
Frankly I am tired of Yahoo technologists telling me that Yahoo’s engineering is as good or better than Google’s. I just don’t buy that argument. I can’t relate to black thumbs, and it is a fact that I can’t buy a penguin bracelet via the Yahoo shopping search system. I can, however, buy a pink penguin bracelet, a gold penguin bracelet, and silver blue gray penguin bracelet from Google.
Stephen Arnold, November 22, 2008
A Modest Proposal: Google for Government
November 22, 2008
I am not a TV person. I flap and hop right over articles about the flaws of user generated videos and the virtues of MFA produced commercial videos. What stopped me in mid flap and hop was a story by Brian Beers on CNBC.com. I have a tough time keeping NBC, MSNBC, and CNBC straight in my mind. Too many Cs reminds me of the majority of those in my high school physics class. Mr. Beers’s “Ratigan’s View: Demand Google for Government” baffled me. I still don’t know what or who a Dylan Ratigan is. The point of the story is that Google should index the government so citizens know more about the goings on in Washington, DC. Well, Google does index the government’s content better than Yahoo, Microsoft, and Vivisimo do. But each of these services has a long way to go before I am a happy goose. You can try this Uncle Same service yourself here. Let me know if you agree with this modest proposal “that would empower citizens to keep a watchdog eye on what our elected officials are doing with (or by laws and policies to affect) our money.” Google as super information hero. I think we need to get the Google triumvirate spandex costumes each with a big “G” affixed to the chest area. Mr. Beers might find that a helpful boost to get Google for Government.
Stephen Arnold, November 22, 2008
Europe’s Answer to Google Books Gets an F
November 21, 2008
I wrote that only a country can challenge Google. The company’s unprecedented 10 year run through online has been largely unchallenged. In the present economic climate, I don’t think the resources are available to out Google Google. The European Union, however, tried. According to Wired here, “Europe’s answer to Google Book Search officially launched Thursday after two years of prep — and promptly crashed.” First the collider suffered a multi million euro glitch and now Europeana nukes itself. The Google alternative experienced heavy traffic and choked. At some point, folks will take a look at Google’s engineering and try to replicate it. The notion that “our servers can handle the load” is time and again proven a fantasy statement. Google’s been working on its system for a decade and continues to invest in plumbing. Now I am not even sure a country can knock off Google. Google is tough to understand, hard to regulate, and now sailing serenely along without a significant competitor to one of its interesting but minor initiatives. The debate over Google as good or evil is essentially irrelevant. The focus has to shift to build businesses on what is now the computing platform for the foreseeable future.
Stephen Arnold, November 21, 2008
InfoSphere and Sandstone Tie Up
November 20, 2008
A happy quack to the reader in Sweden who alerted me to InfoSphere’s new partnership with Sandstone SA (Luxembourg). InfoSphere AB, founded in 2001, is a commercial business intelligence and security consulting firm. Sandstone is a private (OSINT)open source intelligence service or.
The partnership will provide each company with sales, service, and consulting services. Frank Schneider, chief executive for Sandstone said:
The partnership with Infosphere is part of the Sandstone strategy to seek out the best partner organizations to compliment and extend their capability, thus building an OSINT Network of Excellence with global reach.
The Sandstone team is made up of experienced former officers from various intelligence agencies and government services. Governed by a strong code of ethics and moral values, Sandstone provides services focused on financial compliance, business intelligence, KYC, due diligence, political analysis, foreign asset location, and opportunity creation. Sandstone serves clients throughout Europe, the Middle East and Africa as well as in the United States.
InfoSphere has contributed to the Silobreaker.com service which I have reviewed in this Web log. You can read an interview with the founder of InfoSphere here. In my opinion, the deal between these two open source firms will make more open source services and information available to organizations seeking ways to build revenues and competitive knowledge. InfoSphere has been growing rapidly with services ranging from OSINT to online services to high-value content. I continue to be impressed with the InfoSphere operation; it is a company on the move.
Stephen Arnold, November 20, 2008
Pricing Lesson: Subscriptions Aren’t Big Winners
November 20, 2008
In the early days of the commercial database business, I participated in discussions about the relative merits of different pricing models. There was the “by the drink” approach. This model allowed a customer to buy a single item just like a 20 something hanging out in the local watering hole and buying one Perrier at a time. Then there was the “membership plus pay as you go”. The idea was that a customer would sign up for a service and pay a fee either a one time hit each year or a monthly tab like the bill one gets from the Harrods Creek Country Club. The country club knows that there will be a certain amount of revenue each month and management hopes that enough farmers and bootleggers will show up to buy dinner and gold to make the business pay off. We also talked about the leasing model. The idea was to provide the customer with a piece of hardware and then charge a fee for that equipment. Variations included a certain amount of data. I know the leasing angle seems strange today, but in 1980, the red LexisNexis terminal made a lot of money because the terminal used Mead Data paper with a nifty LexisNexis logo on each side so the information could only be printed in narrow margins. Even better, LexisNexis charges $0.02 per cartridge return and the system double spaced. Mead had discovered the same revenue source that Hewlett Packard applies to its ink business.
These long ago conversations flooded through my mind when I read the CNet story by Ina Fried “Microsoft, Labels Try to Revive Subscriptions” here. The story reports that Microsoft’s subscription plan for Zune music is not hitting its financial targets. Ms. Fried reported, “Both Microsoft and music industry executives acknowledge that the uptake for subscriptions has not been what they’d hoped.”
In my opinion, this admission is quite significant for these reasons:
- Spreadsheet fever makes it trivial to create wonderful payoffs. The problem is that subscriptions are not working too well today, and they did not work too well in the 1980s either. Poke around for fees for the original Wall Street Journal online service or the original LexisNexis New York Times online service. When these publications set up their own subscription based systems, the services sank in a sea of red ink. Now the Zune crowd has discovered that what’s possible in a spreadsheet doesn’t match behavior of online customers.
- The Apple model worked and continues to work. What’s interesting about the Apple approach is that it worked in spite of rampant piracy by people worldwide. Microsoft may want to me too Apple’s pricing and skip the effort to find a better way to price.
- The pricing models are less important than the perceived utility of the service. Lawyers will pay Thomson Reuters or Reed Elsevier big bucks to get access to information when it is must have information. The pricing model becomes irrelevant when the client will pay, there’s a risk of going to jail, or a huge payoff will result from having the information. Music is also must have information but there’s a growing price sensitivity which makes pricing music more difficult than pricing a law review article. This means there probably isn’t a fixed answer to “which pricing model?” The Zune pricing approach may find itself in a state of constant experimentation until the right combination produces the payoff Microsoft wants. The problem with this approach is that there may never be a payoff. So, the question becomes, “How long will Microsoft be willing to fund a product that costs the company money?”
With the death of the print version of PC Magazine, subscriptions may not be a pricing option for magazines either. In short, the conversations we had in the 1980s are being held today at Microsoft. Unfortunately, in the world of online information, the company that cracks the code first remains in the preeminent revenue position until another model displaces the incumbent’s pricing model.
My thought is that Microsoft should duplicate what Apple is doing and accept the fact that its maximum Zune revenue will be capped behind the market leader. Constant experimentation is the hand maiden to this approach. Maybe Microsoft will crack the pricing code? My experience suggests that the flow of red ink will continue for the foreseeable future. What pricing approach should Microsoft take? Amazon’s? Apple’s? Some other?
Stephen Arnold, November 20, 2008
Why Countries Must Compete with Google
November 20, 2008
A happy quack to one of my two or three readers in Australia. The story “Massive EU Online Library Looks to Compete with Google” sparked a number of ideas in my mind. You can find the full text of the Syndney Morning Herald’s story here. The story described that the European Union will launch what will be called Europeana. The made up word suggests big collection of European content. For me, the most interesting comment was:
By 2010, the date when Europeana is due to be fully operational, the aim is to have 10 million works available, an impressive number yet a mere drop in the ocean compared to the 2.5 billion books in Europe’s more common libraries. The process of digitalisation is a massive undertaking. Around one percent of the books in the EU’s national libraries are now available in digital form, with that figure expected to grow to four percent in 2012. And even when they are digitalised, they still have to be put online.
My research suggested in 2004 that Google was building a 21st century version of the pre-break up American Telephone & Telegraph system. The Google vision was global and the 19th century telco was giving way to an applications platform that could deliver digital services from Google data centers to any type of network aware device. In speaking with my publisher about the new distributor for my 2007 Google Version 2.0 study, we touched upon the idea that Google is essentially a country. It is not a company.
I won’t repeat the country argument that I explicate in my Google studies. The point is that the European Union has reached the same conclusion. No one is able to fund a start up that will index the European Union members’ information. Google is aiming for global information. The EU is happy with a couple of dozen countries’ information. More importantly, the EU approach will be to act on behalf of almost 24 nations.
That’s a fairly good example of my assertion: A single company cannot compete with Google. I hope you will disagree. I don’t want to say the pledge of allegiance to a kindergarten colors flag and recite such words as “googley nation” or “TCP/IP on everything”. Use the comments section to prove my assertion that Google can now only be challenged by countries.
Stephen Arnold, November 20, 2008
Microsoft and Pricing
November 19, 2008
I saw a new story in Seattle Tech Report here that Microsoft is making is OneCare security service free. A short time later I came across Microsoft’s own news release about this pricing change here. Bundling or giving away services free is not a new idea in software. The notion is to give customers a taste and then sell them more has worked many times. In the Microsoft news release, the company says:
Windows Live OneCare will continue to be sold for Windows XP and Windows Vista at retail through June 30, 2009. Direct sales of OneCare will be gradually phased out when “Morro” becomes available. Regardless of their method of purchase, Microsoft will ensure that all current customers remain protected through the life of their subscriptions.
The marketing technique is little more than shareware or freeware with a catch.
Then I remembered that Microsoft was reducing prices for its Dynamics products. The prices for its cloud services for Exchange and SharePoint were quite competitive as well. Even the Zune, according to CNet news is getting new features and a lower price. You can read “Microsoft Chopping Zune Prices” here.
The question I asked myself, “Will Microsoft’s price cutting and no fee initiatives extend to Microsoft Fast enterprise search?” My hunch is that the Fast ESP search technology may become more affordable in the months ahead. Here’s my reasoning:
- A number of high profile vendors have rolled out more robust content processing solutions that “snap in” to SharePoint. Examples range from Autonomy to Coveo to Exalead to Interse to ISYS to dozens of other vendors. Companies who want to “work around” SharePoint search problems have an abundance of options. Microsoft Fast may have to use severe price cuts to keep customers from getting out of the corral
- As the economic noose tightens on organizations, some vendors may offer a two-fer deal; that is, sign up now, get one year free and pay only for the second year. This approach may be quite appealing in some organizations. In fact, in a recent review of Google prices for the US government, one could easily conclude that Google is keeping this option available to its resellers. The idea is to get shelf space or the camel’s nose into the tent.
- New players may be willing to install a proof of concept for little or no money. These upstarts may provide “good enough” solutions that allow an organization to solve a tough content processing problem without spending much money.
I see the present economic climate forcing some Darwinian actions and Microsoft Fast may have to move quickly or face escalating competition within the Microsoft ecosystem. After spending $1.2 billion for a Web part and a police raid, there may be some strategic pricing changes Redmond may have to consider to adapt to the present enterprise market for search and content processing. If you are a Microsoft champion, please, help me understand if my analysis is on track or off track. Use the comments section and bring along some facts, please. I have enough uninformed inputs from my pals Barry and Cyrus to last the winter.
Stephen Arnold, November 19, 2008
Google Monetizes Its Finance Site
November 18, 2008
Google Finance has improved since it appeared two years ago. I like the link to the America Online Relegence service. A reader sent me a link to “Google Begins to Monetize Google Finance… Good or Bad?”. You can read the full text of this story here. The Web log post reports that “the Google Finance site will definitely add much needed revenues to Google, which should help shore up any losses in other divisions hurt by the weak advertising market.” In my opinion, I think Google will monetize more of its services, and I also believe that the company will release some of its “potential energy” to monetize some of its more interesting technology. In my forthcoming Google and Publishing I describe an interesting matching operation that could challenge such online services as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and similar buyer-service provider activities. I don’t think advertising alone can slake Google’s need for revenue. The cost structure is inelastic in my opinion.
Stephen Arnold, November 18, 2008
Ad Age Provides Color on Yahoo’s Rudderless Boat
November 17, 2008
The ad biz does not feather this goose’s nest. I received a mobile call today from a person from New York. He was annoyed that I have consigned Yahoo to the dust bin. I listened to the arguments the caller advanced. I recall the points about traffic, brands, and visibility on Madison Avenue. I told the caller, “Great points. Let me do some thinking.”
I poked around and saw a reference to the Ad Age article “Why Yahoo Still Matters for You.” You can read the full text of the story here. The authors were Abbey Klassen and Michael Learmonth. The headline, in my opinion, was misleading. The write up provided me with more evidence about Yahoo’s rudderless boat. Among the points I noted were:
- The company lost an account because it lacked ideas
- Yahoo has potential
- Yahoo has more levers to pull than some of its competitors.
None of these points has enough wood behind them to get me to change my mind. Yahoo has been around about 15 years. I think its lack of ideas is evident in the wacky and ineffective search system. One example today: I wanted a football score. Then on the sports splash page I wanted to find the results of last night’s NASCAR race. The search box beckoned me and returned Web wide results, not results about sports. Guess I am the only person in the world who wants to run a sports related query from Yahoo’s sports portal. Yahoo may have levers, but it needs to get a firm hand on its rudder and steer the boat away from Victoria Falls.
Stephen Arnold, November 17, 2008
Why Dead Tree Publishers Don’t Get the Web
November 17, 2008
I have had some push back about my “dead tree” essays. My position is that most publishers are following the trajectory of Ford and General Motors. I don’t think there is much hope for most of the US auto industry or for most of the traditional publishers. Slate published here a story I found wonderfully refreshing. Lesley M.M. Blume’s “Glossed Over: Why Can’t Magazines Get the Web?” contains a wealth of information. One point that I found particularly telling was:
And if magazine publishers were disinclined to build this infrastructure when they were relatively flush, now all of their dwindling resources are going to shore up their core products, making a meaningful transition online even less likely.
I think this is a key point. Plumbing–that is, infrastructure–is not understood, valued, or hip. Take a look at this excellent write up. You won’t want to sign up for one of those three year subscriptions of your favorite magazine after reading Ms. Blume’s essay.
Stephen Arnold, November 17, 2008
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