And then there were two ...

So Microsoft wants to buy Yahoo!, huh? The BBC describes this as a shotgun wedding - with Google wielding the shotgun. [BBC News, February 1st, 2008] And in a post entitled Monkey Boy's three-legged race, Fake Steve Jobs reminds Steve Ballmer of his previous disdain for mergers. When such mergers involved companies getting together to compete against Microsoft, maybe Microsoft could afford to be confidently superior. But now it seems it's Microsoft that needs a merger (with Yahoo!) to compete against the market leader (Google), and Ballmer's previous words may come back to haunt him.

(For another deal like this, think of Oracle buying PeopleSoft to compete with SAP.)

Google purports to be upset at the deal, with a pompous protest from its Chief Legal Officer entitled Yahoo! and the future of the Internet, and even the often cynical Fake Steve seems to take this protest at face value. But if Fake Steve's own analysis is correct, Google has no need to worry. Challenging the deal may simply be a way of making sure the Microsoft board can't back down without losing face.

Apart from Google, Microsoft and the Yahoo! shareholders, who are the winners and losers in this game? Bill Burnham thinks that this is a Bad Deal for Silicon Valley, because Yahoo! was one of the prime buyers of internet startups (notably del.icio.us and Flickr). But of course there are plenty other players. eBay is perhaps still licking its wounds after the over-priced acquisition of Skype, and NewsCorp (which has ruled out a rival bid for Yahoo!) maybe hasn't yet quite worked out what to do with MySpace, but that leaves TimeWarner (owner of AOL), Comcast (owner of thePlatform), IAC (owner of Ask and Bloglines) and a few others.

Oh yes, AOL-TimeWarner, that was a merger wasn't it? The $200bn company that was created by the take-over of media giant TimeWarner by the Internet upstart AOL, but the letters AOL no longer part of the company name, and AOL has now reverted to its ordained place in the corporate world, as a division of a large media company called TimeWarner. A number of the AOL local operations have been sold off, and Google currently has a 5% stake of the remainder [Press Release].

In the past, TimeWarner has got rid of many once-profitable divisions, including Atari, MTV Networks, and Time-Life. Some investors have demanded a break-up of Time and Warner, so perhaps a return to the good old days of Warner Brothers. That kind of thing seems to be normal ebb and flow among media companies. Companies can merge, but they don't necessarily stay merged.

But we haven't seen much of that in the software industry yet. To date, IBM and Microsoft have successfully defended themselves against regulatory break-up. (But the future demands of Wall Street may be more difficult to ignore.) The post-merger Microsoft will be a different kind of company, with new challenges. Maybe Steve Ballmer needs to take Larry Ellison out to lunch and pick his brains. (And I never thought I'd say that.)

Update (further commentary)

• If apparently intelligent people/organizations do apparently stupid things, it is tempting to look for some secret conspiracy or hidden motive that will make sense of the plan. For example, the Economist thinks this might be a devious trap to get Google snared in antitrust action. [The Economist (Feb 5th), via Fake Steve Jobs]

• Marc Andreessen agrees with me that there are plenty other companies acquiring Internet property, but Bill Burnham still thinks the overall effect is negative for Silicon Valley. Fred Wilson sums up: It's time to think long-term.

• Meanwhile Fake Steve Jobs is enjoying himself. Some months ago he was complaining of boredom, pining for a really good train-wreck merger. A reader asks if the Microsoft / Yahoo deal qualifies for this description. FSJ's answer is a resounding Yes.
  

Questions, Questions

Eric Schmidt is quoted by the Financial Times (May 22, 2007):

"The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask the question such as 'What shall I do tomorrow?' and ‘What job shall I take?’ "

With something as outrageous as this, A-List bloggers such as BurningBird and Nicholas Carr hardly need to say anything themselves. They simply post the quote under a suitably provocative headline and get their readers to do the detailed commentary. Nice.

But what Schmidt actually said is clearly false, because Google users have always asked these questions. The problem has always been getting half-decent answers. Possibly Schmidt's real goal is that Google shall attempt to provide answers, or (even better) get some other company to pay for the opportunity. Or that Google shall influence the questions we choose to ask. Or even that we choose to channel every single question in our lives in Google's direction.

But it is interesting that Schmidt expresses his goal in this way, because it illustrates the way Google blurs the boundaries between itself and its users. In his own blog (Google is Me, The Joy of Personalization), someone called Maluke suggests that such blurring is commonplace.

"It's not specific to Google actually, it’s an instance of a common kind of delusions of grandeur for big software companies, media outlets etc."

This relates to an earlier discussion on Google and God from November 2003, where I wrote:

"Many believers say God is not sitting on a cloud somewhere, God is in ourselves, in our hearts. When Google is equated with God, we are supposed to interpret this equation as referencing not the Google software nor the Google company, but the Internet community as a whole - ourselves as Google users. And perhaps we geeks are supposed to be flattered by this."

A few short years later and the public mood about Google has certainly shifted hasn't it?

Website Metrics

You get what you measure. And one way to influence behaviour is to provide an easy metric that is aligned to the behaviours you want to encourage.

This is as true in software as anywhere else, and is one of the reasons why software metrication is an important aspect of software quality.

In a post How to Misuse Google Analytics, Seth Godin points out that Google Analytics measures the success of a website from Google's perspective. Google's commercial objectives involve things like maximizing advertising revenue.

But as Seth points out, the quest for traffic can cause a website designer to make bad decisions. While many websites may benefit from advertising revenue, most non-spam websites have other objectives as well - for example, disseminating and championing new ideas. Google Analytics does not provide metrics relevant to these objectives.

Thanks to Google Analytics and related mechanisms, Google provides a positive feedback loop that reinforces its own commercial agenda. Systems thinker Donella Meadows identified the provision of such positive feedback loops as one of the ways of exerting power and influence over a complex system. (Wikipedia summary, original paper), and anyone who wishes to counteract this kind of power and influence should study her paper carefully.

The End of Google?

In November 2003, I saw the writing on the wall for Google.

"Google will therefore support, with ever-greater efficiency and effectiveness, an intellectual activity characterized by A.A. Milne (author of Winnie-The-Pooh) as 'Thinking with the Majority'." [Google and God. See also Scribe's post Drawing Parallels]

Some more recent doomsayers for Google:

• Jason Kolb: Google is Dying a Microsoft Death (via Willems van den Ende)
• Jason Kolb: More Evidence ...
  
• Igor Palmer: World Wide Web of Junk (via Kingsley Idehen)
  
• Igor Palmer: The Information Age is Seriously Ill

Jason argues that the quality of search results is being eroded by forces outside Google's control. Meanwhile, Igor thinks that "the information age – as aged and ill as it is now - isn't fading away fast enough".

But these voices are still in the minority. For the time being, Google is still the search engine of choice for the Internet Majority, for reasons explained by Sean McGrath: "The next best thing to knowing something, is knowing where to find it."

Sean avers that bookmarking is obsolete, because you can always use Google. He gives a few examples of his use of Google.

• "I wonder is there a direct flight from Knock to Birmingham?"
• "Where in the world is Myanmar?"
• "Have Australia ever qualified for the Soccer World Cup?"

I agree that Google is okay for enquiries of this kind - although I'd probably prefer Wikipedia for two of them. But I'd regard these enquiries as information rather than knowledge.

According to Sean: "In a short space of time search engines have literally changed the way we think about knowledge." It may well be true that many people have started to equate knowledge and its discovery with the results of a Google search. If so, this is a regrettable trend.

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Search Engines

For how much longer will everyone be happy using a Google-style interface (text box input, sorted list output)?

For a while now, I've been using Kartoo as my preferred search engine, because I rather like the way it visualizes the search results. (Thanks to JJ.)

Jef Newson recently pointed me towards Google Music Search. But this is just another text box. How do I enter the song I want to search for? Why can't I hum into a sound file, or pick out the tune on a keyboard?

Is this so far-fetched? Look at the Retrievr experimental service, which uses a rough sketch to search through images on Flickr.

And finally, look at the concept of Brain Fingerprinting, which apparently searches through a human brain to perform pattern matching against memories of an event or non-event. (See BBC News and ABC News via Guerrilla Innovation and Emergent Chaos.)

The battles between Google and Microsoft (and the rest) are fascinating, to be sure. But these platforms are not about to provide support for the things we are really searching for - original ideas, new customers and markets, reliable knowledge, and so on. Intelligence tools may be able to search for complex patterns (chemical compounds or social clusters possessing certain structural characteristics), and visualization tools can reflect these back, but it's usually pretty hard to define what you want or to interpret the results.

So we have to translate from what we really want into what we think we can get. Search for the title of a song, or a snatch of lyrics, or some other characteristics, and these search engines can probably find something relevant. Search for a topic, and these search engines will find companies that want to sell you their expertise. Search for what everyone else is thinking and saying and reading and buying, and it will come top in the search rankings. ("Thinking with the Majority"). What more could we possibly wish for?

Technorati Tags: Flickr Google Kartoo Retrievr search visualization

Focus

I have issued a number of probes to BI vendors for views on the potential synergies between SOA and BI - what I've been calling Service Oriented Business Intelligence (SOBI).

Service-Oriented Business Intelligence (SOAPbox blog)
Service-Oriented Business Intelligence 2 (SOAPbox blog)
Web Services for BI (CBDI Journal, June 2003)
Service-Oriented Business Bntelligence (CBDI Journal, October 2005)

This week I had a useful briefing from Information Builders, makers of WebFocus. I first encountered Focus when I was working with Fourth Generation Languages (4GL) over twenty years ago, and it's interesting to see how the present stance of Focus (which I must now remember to call WebFocus) represents both continuity and change.

Information Builders certainly seem clued up about web services and SOA, and claim to have been playing in this space rather longer than some other BI vendors.

SOA

IB's main entry into the SOA space is a product called iWay, which calls itself an "Adaptive Framework for SOA" and claims to be "a complete toolset for creating composite applications and reusing existing IT assets". iWay is marketed by a separate company, iWay software, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Information Builders.

One interesting piece of functionality is that it can be used to make data from legacy systems (such as unstructured data from notes fields) visible to the Google Enterprise Server, and therefore available for aggregation and analysis. May be worth a look.

Value of BI

4GLs were always supposed to improve productivity for developers, and to improve access for end-users. This twin agenda clearly remains in force. Information Builders sees business intelligence as a key source of value to any business organization; so the greater the number of people using the BI tools, the greater the potential value to the business. (Well, they would say that wouldn't they?) There is therefore considerable emphasis on improving the accessibility of BI functionality, as well as achieving economics of scale in the delivery of BI functionality.

Of course, technology vendors are naturally prone to make optimistic statements about the value of their tools, and the importance of having everyone using them. In this case, realistic assessments of the value of BI must depend on analysing the potential to improve business processes. Information needs are integrated with specific business responsibilities. Business processes and services may be improved by introducing effective feedback loops - for example if you allow customers to access restaurant inspection data, the dirty restaurants disappear pretty quickly. Note that these control loops typically go outside the boundaries of a single organization.

Instead of business intelligence being a highly specialized function, restricted to head office wonks with expensive and complicated gear, the power of business intelligence is taken to the edge of the organization - together with the corresponding accountability.

Integrated BI

I agree that the business value of BI may be greatly enhanced when BI is integrated with the business process. I have been calling this integrated BI; Information Builders talks about operational BI or pervasive BI, which are perhaps not quite the same thing, but are at least broadly in the same area.

There are lots of integration techniques that are relevant here - not just web services, but also Web 2.0 technologies such as Atom and RSS. For example, it is possible to subscribe to a complex enquiry. But we can push this further - imagine being able to subscribe to a hypothesis, and then being notified whenever any relevant evidence (for or against the hypothesis) becomes available.

Collaborative BI

I have argued that the next step beyond integrated BI is collaborative BI - supporting collaboration between distributed knowledge workers. Having implemented simple versions of Embedded BI and Integrated BI, Information Builders has announced the intention to introduce some support for Collaborative BI in the 2006 release of WebFocus. I look forward to seeing the details of this. However, I suspect that the full power of Collaborative BI will take longer to develop.

BI Process

So how is all this technological product innovation going to be reflected by process innovation - affecting the way that people build and use BI systems and services? Perhaps it is too early to say. Vendors like Information Builders may contribute to this innovation, may disseminate patterns and best practices, and may wish to develop formal methodologies. But I suspect the important changes will emanate from the user community, and will be slower to emerge.

Bloglines Upgrade

A fascinating insight this week into the processes of software innovation.

On October 10th, Redmonk industry analyst Stephen O'Grady announced that he was switching his newsreader away from Bloglines. His main gripe against Bloglines was a lack of visible innovation. Having rejected the Google alternative because

the interface seems to want to break down my preference towards browsing by feed to a river-of-news/relevance style interface

(in other words, it would force him to change the way he works - does this count as arrogance or innovation on Google's part?)

he selected an experimental newsreader (Feedlounge) from a couple of Redmonk friends. The single most compelling feature for him was the fact that he can navigate the entire UI via the keyboard.

On October 13th, Bloglines announced some new functionality. The first item on the list? You guessed it - hotkeys. You can now navigate your feeds using the keyboard.

Unless this is an amazing coincidence, this represents some impressive influence on Stephen's part. I'm very envious - I'm always telling vendors how they could improve their products, but I've never had any of my suggestions actually released within three days.

And it also represents an impressive degree of responsiveness within Bloglines. Okay, perhaps it didn't require a major product redesign, and perhaps there was already something in the pipeline, but a three day response is still pretty good.

Well done Stephen, well done Bloglines. Stephen may prefer to use the experimental stuff, but at least for the time being I'm going to continue using Bloglines.

Received Opinion

Opinion is recursive. I have always been wary of technical research based on opinion surveys, because most technical opinions are already based on second-hand information. How are we to interpret the fact that 75% of IT managers believe that platform X is flexible, or that vendor Y is attacking vendor Z, or that the most significant success factor is P? How many of these opinions are based on first-hand experience, and how much on reading what other people think – or what other people want them to think.

(The internet amplifies this effect. Google typically finds you the information that other people have already found; blogs and wikis often circulate received opinion without critical engagement; vested interests are often imperceptible behind a complex information supply chain).

There has recently been a vigorous debate between Lotus Domino and its admirers on the one hand, and the Radicati Group. John Vaughan argues that the Radicati Group analysis is based on out-of-date opinion; Lotus is now under new leadership, and the opinions collected by Radicati don't reflect this.

I haven't looked at the rights and wrongs of this particular debate, but I want to comment on some general principles of software industry analysis.

Clearly there is often a delay between a real change and the perceived change. Outsiders don't change their opinions just because there is a new management team with some fine-sounding words. And even when the new management has started to achieve something, it may take a while before this disseminates through received opinion.

Given that there is always a huge legacy of out-of-date opinion, the challenge with opinion surveys is to detect and interpret shifts in opinion, rather than simply report the current distribution of opinion.

Obviously the vendor marketing departments care about the prevailing opinion, because this is what they are selling into. Purchasers care about prevailing opinion for a different reason: because they don't want to look stupid buying a technology that nobody else wants. But in some cases, the ideal scenario for a purchaser is to buy just before everyone else buys. You may be able to negotiate deep discounts and lots of free support from a vendor who is hungry for revenue and for customer success stories. Then if everyone follows your lead, you may appear very smart indeed.

Just like in the stock market, good decisions are based on a shrewd estimate of tomorrow's prevailing opinion. Momentum only works in the short term. And if we analysts (whether stock analysts or technology analysts) simply reflect momentum, we aren't doing our job.

Google and God

Anyone who seriously equates Google and God must be both intellectually and spiritually impoverished.

originally posted November 1st, 2003

---

Is Google God? (Thomas Friedman, June 2003)
There, but for the grace of Google (Ben Macintyre, May 2005)
Stick to what you don't know (David Carr, May 2005)

Is Google omniscient? Only if all the knowledge in the world is accessible via the Internet, and Google provides reliable access to this knowledge. Neither of these conditions is valid.

Google and GooglePlex represent very large finite numbers. There is always a finite number of results from a Google search, and only a fraction of these are factual, meaningful, relevant or valuable. In contrast, God is usually conceived as infinite.

> David Kolb on fact, meaning, relevance and value

Many improvements to Google have been suggested, and some of these might improve the fact, meaning, relevance and/or value of a search-act. Google becomes a kind of Panopticon, watching the whole world watching the whole world.

> more on the the limitations of the Panopticon
> suggested improvements to Google (pdf)
(compiled by Seth Godin and Ramit Sethi)

The suggested improvements are just great for those people who want to ask the same questions as everyone else, and get the same answers. Google rankings already depend on the clicks of previous websurfers, and this dependency will become more sophisticated. Google will therefore support, with ever-greater efficiency and effectiveness, an intellectual activity characterized by A.A. Milne (author of Winnie-The-Pooh) as "Thinking with the Majority".

Many believers say God is not sitting on a cloud somewhere, God is in ourselves, in our hearts. When Google is equated with God, we are supposed to interpret this equation as referencing not the Google software nor the Google company, but the Internet community as a whole - ourselves as Google users. And perhaps we geeks are supposed to be flattered by this.

But however much of our minds and our lives we publish on the Internet, lots of stuff - perhaps even the most important stuff - cannot be published, cannot be put into TXT and JPEG.

And the things that are really worth searching for - integrity, wisdom, justice, courage and love - are not simply listed on Google but can only be found through focal practices, and through authentic engagement with other people.

> David Kolb on integrity, wisdom, justice, courage and love

> Albert Borgmann on focal practices

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Google and Longhorn

How does an act of branding reveal problems with both Google and Microsoft?

Originally posted October 31st, 2003

---

Popular commentary suggests that Microsoft's new generation operating system (code-named Longhorn) represents a threat to Google. There are lots of blogs discussing how Google should respond. But there is a deeper issue.

> suggested improvements to Google (pdf)

(compiled by Seth Godin and Ramit Sethi)

If you search for "LONGHORN" on Google you will get loads of references to Microsoft's latest software, at Microsoft and third party websites. You will also find some websites referring to Longhorn cattle and Longhorn sheep, and some of the places they can be found.

We must assume that Microsoft marketing people were aware of these associations, and of the opportunities they provided for some mild humour at Microsoft's expense. After all, it is standard practice for IT-literate marketing people nowadays to run a proposed brand name or project name through Google, to see what comes up.

But now try putting "LONGHORN BEETLE" into Google. You will now find a load of other websites, referring to various species of a highly destructive pest. I imagine that Microsoft marketing people were not aware of these associations.

Of course, if you had scrolled through pages and pages of Google search, you would have come to the Longhorn beetle eventually. But the point is that most people only look at the first few (or few dozen) pages. If you don't already know about Longhorn beetles, Google will not draw your attention to them.

Anyone who uses search engines regularly is aware of their limitations. While there are concerns in some quarters about Google's increasing dominance of the Internet search space, this isn't just about Google, since competing search engines may suffer from the same limitations. (While competition is important commercially, it doesn't always give us a genuine choice.)

How did I find out about longhorn beetles then? I looked in an old-fashioned reference book. Not very difficult - but the problem is that using Google (or Internet search engines generally) is so easy that people don't always remember to use other sources as well. Google was okay once I knew more precisely what I might be looking for.

This is one of the pitfalls of using the Internet for serious work. It is not a serious pitfall, as long as people are aware of its limitations, and take sensible precautions. But in its corporate enthusiasm for the Internet, Microsoft is often one of the first organizations to fall into any Internet pitfalls.

	Google becoming dangerous	when people start to act as if the Internet was the only available source of information, and Google the only way of finding stuff
	Microsoft remaning dangerous, Google becoming vulnerable	as long as Google represents a source of Internet value as yet untapped by Microsoft
	Microsoft remaining vulnerable	when its employees themselves get carried away by the wonders of the Internet, and fail to take ordinary precautions.

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