CQ2

Amidst the continuing Microsoft acquisition saga, Yahoo is making some interesting strategic moves, principally towards more openness and what used to be called the Semantic Web. This is smart, I think, and makes a lot of sense. Will it be valuable? Is their timing right? Not sure; that’s what makes it a business.

They’ve opened up their search engine, via their Open Search Platform initiative and are now extending that to an ‘open search ecosystem‘ that builds on the data web. Details are still emerging, but it looks like Yahoo is going to use lightweight semantics to try to connect data silos, rather than the traditional, now heavyweight, view of the Semantic Web — what the cool kids now call Web 3G.

(more…)

The MS-YHOO deal is keeping the merger arb guys up at night.

Michael Arrington notes that the Yahoo acquisition is getting very expensive, in terms of Microsoft’s market cap; Microsoft has “lost nearly $40 billion in market cap in the eight trading days since they made their offer.” In other words, “Microsoft has shrunk by a Yahoo in the last eight days.”

Henry Blodget has a must-read piece on the logic of the deal; he argues that Microsoft is confusing the ad-driven consumer business with the license-driven corporate business. This makes sense to me; Microsoft needs to defend the Office franchise in the corporate environment, where even Google is getting license revenue ($50/user/year for Google Apps) in lieu of advertising. Enterprises aren’t going to use ad-supported free software, at least not in any future I can see. So why should Microsoft take on the pain that is Yahoo for the consumer side? Blodget writes, “Put differently, the part of Google that threatens Microsoft’s core Windows and Office business is Google Apps, not Google Search.”

A former client of mine, an enterprise architect and a guy I really respect, recommended Splunk (”not just a dirty word”) to me. They bring, more or less, a search engine approach to log file analysis. Now, this is not the sexiest thing in the world, but it’s critically important, especially in large IT shops. A large enterprise generates humongous amounts of log files; my friend said that he’s pinned a big server with just the logs from their domain controllers. And remember, these are just text files.

So the question becomes: how do you analyze all this? Traditionally, people have taken a static reporting approach, which has its place, but you need more when you have to be actively responsive. When was the last time David Hasselhof logged on? Where was he? What systems did he log onto? Did he look at Michael Jackson’s billing records?

Long ago, people thought that some kind of library-like structure was required in order to discover information on the Internet, but it turned out that brute-force searching was better. Likewise in this case, where the end goal is a Google-like interface. Now, this approach has its limitations. You have to know what you’re looking for, first of all. It doesn’t do correlations. It’s got a beautifully simple interface, but it’s not an easy UI for normal, proactive review. It’s not for canned reports. It’s not a SEM (Security Event Manager, or SIEM: Security Information and Event Manager) tool.

But for what it is, it’s great. It’s easy to look at Splunk and say, “you’re just indexing text,” but there is great power in that; look at Google. There been such a huge emphasis on auditability that we’ve generated huge files of events, but mostly they just sit there unloved. Splunk is a good way to leverage that resource.

Google’s recent announcement that they’re supporting IMAP has finally convinced me to move off of a desktop email client, Thunderbird in my case, and use Gmail exclusively.  Google’s spam filters, enhanced by the many-eyes of collaborative filtering (I mean the “report spam” button), are so much better than T’bird’s.  I was wasting too much time each day sifting through the dross for the pearls.  I’m sure I’m giving up something, but searching is faster and the new features are coming fast and furious.  iPhone integration is great; I don’t know that the IMAP announcement would have made as much of a difference if I didn’t have an iPhone.  Since I travel a lot, keeping POP email sync’d up was a hassle; I’d come home from a week’s trip and have hundreds of spams to deal with after the filters had done their work.  I’m hedging my bets by downloading everything on Gmail to my local machine, but the cloud computing vision just got one giant step closer for me.

Now, they know what you look like:

Google has quietly added facial recognition to its image search.   If you do an image search and append &imgtype=face at the end of the URL, you get only the faces associated with that search.  So, for example, an image search of “Novell” gives you screenshots, network diagrams, box shots and the like.  But if you append &imgtype=face, you get only people’s faces.  Cool, but scary.

From Radar O’Reilly:

Another couple of webcasts from our hero, Prof. Hans Rosling of Sweden’s Karolinska Institute and Gapminder (acquired, inevitably, by Google.)

In the first webcast, Rosling using his Trendalyzer visualization tool to describe economic and social change in Sweden over the past three hundred years. If he doesn’t convince you to wash your hands, no one will.

Recently, both the United Nations and OECD (announcment here) have committed to opening up their statistical databases free of charge. In his second webcast, Rosling points out, all of the country-level statistical data — in the whole world, ever — is a smaller download than “Lord of the Rings.”

As before, both are well worth watching, not only for the content of what you learn, but how Rosling delivers the message; it’s a miracle of data visualization and a heartening message about the possibilities of the future.

(Previous post about Rosling here.)

I know they’re improving Maps at an alarming rate; My Maps, full-screen (hide directions), traffic, street view, drag to re-route directions, and so forth. And that’s just in the past few months, in one application. Gears is also significant because it promises to bridge the off-line gap, the so-called airplane problem. They’re supposedly acquiring Grand Central, which I think is very smart. They just released the desktop for Linux, which is also great. And they’re doing something important, which I don’t understand, with package management; but Stephen O’Grady tells me it is, so it is.

But here’s why, today, I think Google’s great, and it cost me two bucks. My five year old was looking forward to watching a show (”FETCH! With Ruff Ruffman,” whose appeal escapes me) this afternoon on PBS. But it turns out that since we only have old-fashioned over-the-air analog television — which is practically a war crime, I know — that particular show wasn’t on at the promised time. I assume he saw an ad for some PBS cable channel. Anyway, it was his television for the day and he was bitterly disappointed. Sobbing.

Google to the rescue. First, I tried going to the PBS website, but they only had lame games and, frustratingly, trailers for the show. YouTube, nothing. But a quick Google search offered me the entire first season in the Google Video Player (soon to be deprecated in favor of YouTube?) for $1.99/episode. So I got 29 minutes of relief from child care on a Sunday afternoon and Google got my undying gratitude.

Microsoft’s “Silverlight” announcement a few days ago has gotten a lot of positive early attention (see here and here and especially here for examples) and focused attention on the category of Rich Internet Applications. The Mono folks have announced that they’re going to do a Linux version, tentatively codenamed “Moonlight.” OpenLazlo, a pioneer RIA, has been discussed as a Google acquisition target, if AJAX and the persistence engine planned for Firefox 3.0 aren’t enough. And Silverlight, uh, overshadowed Adobe’s recent Flex announcement.

All the initial reports suggest that Microsoft, presumably under the watchful eye of Ray Ozzie, got this one right; it’s fast, small, beautiful, and reclaims space for Microsoft on the desktop. Can Office on Silverlight be far behind?

I’ve used the New York Times Reader (free trial, $15/mo., included with paper subscription) which is based on Silverlight and it is a great experience. You don’t need to be online to use it; in fact, it sort of blurs the distinction between being on and off line to the extent that you don’t really care so much. And it has rich controls for viewing, much better, because it’s customized for reading a newspaper, than a plain old browser, even with all the cool Javascript and prefetching tricks.

Lazlo claims some corporate customers, but from what I’ve seen Rich Internet Applications are in their infancy in the enterprise. Silverlight’s got an advantage there, of course, because of all the armies of VB and .Net developers who now have another tool at their disposal; it will be interesting to see what they build.

So Bob Hull, who doesn’t give a rat’s ass about Web 2.0, sends out this email today to a couple of other spreadsheet nerds in my practice:

Hey,

Been trying out the web-based shared spreadsheet beta at google. I’m not sure how fully compatible it is with .XLS formats, but it is a great tool for collaborating remotely (e.g., when Nadine and I were working on the [client] business cases, which weren’t full of advanced functions, it would have helped a lot).

If you haven’t tried - do

I’m sure there are some security issues - although it is PW protected.

The specific case he refers to is illustrative in a couple of ways. We were working on a Linux migration strategy a big Novell customer, including doing financial analysis of several scenarios (e.g., Oracle/Solaris -> Oracle RAC/Linux, Windows -> virtualized Windows on VMWare or XEN). So that’s cool and everything. But we were also working in different locations (Bob’s wife was hospitalized during the project, so he had to leave to care for her, but he foolishly kept working remotely) and with terrible collaboration tools. It was really a case of the slow boat in the convoy determining the speed for everyone.

On that project, as Bob indicates, we really could have used Google’s spreadsheet, or one of the alternatives that are out there.

And, by the way, I’ve been testing it and it seems to import .xls files - as long as they’re fairly simple - with no problem at all. So you can’t bring in a multi-tabbed pivot table rich charting dashboard, but the single tab discounted cash flow analysis comes across fine. And you could reasonably argue that doing DCF is what a spreadsheet ought to be doing, not running your company.

So what?

The product itself is interesting, in that it’s a viable alternative right off the bat to Excel and OpenOffice. But, as I’ve said before about Writely (which Google has subsequently acquired, so they have a word processor and a spreadsheet and check out S5 for presentations), these web based office tools have built-in advantages. Bob highlighted the collaboration aspect, but there are others. For me, foremost among them is format. I don’t know how long .doc is going to be around, but I can bet you that .html is more viable.

Google’s spreadsheet is the first good way I’ve seen to go from .xls to .html, which is not trivial. A lot of spreadsheets, including at Novell, get mailed around principally as presentation layers; columns and rows of numbers. You can do this in HTML, of course, but that’s not in the toolkit for most Excel users. There’s an Export to HTML option in Excel (which is generally very good about importing and exporting), but it generates ‘orribly non-standard HTML. So if I want to generate a web page from my Excel spreadsheet so that I can share it with my team mates, currently the best option that I know of is Google Spreadsheets. Or maybe MS Sharepoint.

Also, if Google plays their hand correctly, it will get better quickly on the basis of the community around it. Do you need a function to convert pre-July 11, 1998 Thai bhat to dollars? Maybe someone had that itch once and scratched it and released it into the wild so not only are there the Excel functions from Microsoft (=sum(b1:b15)) but also (=oldbhat(value, target_currency)).

On 6 June, Jon Bultmeyer, on the topic of Goggle’s spreadsheet, said:

…imagine you migrate your spreadsheets into the Google cloud because you want to share them live, which creates demand for others to have gmail accounts.” Now once you have the spreadsheet there, imagine formulas that want to keep your content there like

=search($A$1)

=rss(”http://foo.com/bar.xml”)

=flickr(”http://flickr/tag/foss”)

=webservice(”http://salesforce.com/mycustomers”, “custid”, $A$1)

=video(…)

=map(geocode($A$1))

in other words, formulas don’t have to live in within your machine, they can be resolved in the cloud. So is this the Everyman’s application- as-potential-AJAX-mashup-platform?

I think this is right on; I’m not sure if he’s joking about the Excel spreadsheet formula syntax, but that’s what people understand.

I have a very specific use case in mind for Enterprise Web 2.0, which consists of a business analyst mailing around spreadsheets and I’m sure it’s consistent from company to company. It would be fantastically useful for them to be able to call external services using something simple and familiar like Excel formulas. A lot of times, people use Excel *just* for presentation, which is absurd, of course, but they know how to do it.