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Google CIO Says Tipping Point Near on Cloud Computing in Enterprise
Google CIO Ben Fried has told a tech executive summit in New York that he thinks the tipping point for Cloud computing to explode into the Enterprise space is at hand. And Fried says the prospect is scary and disturbing.
Of course it's clear that Google has a vested interest in spreading this meme, but that doesn't mean the meme is a lie. As Fried points out correctly, "The macroeconomic tides — you can’t fight them forever — will force companies to adapt. "
This shift opens myriad opportunities for entrepreneurs and for mid-size companies with agile development capabilities to jump in and provide services and supporting products that could fuel another round of economic expansion. At the same time, as large companies outsource IT infrastructure, jobs will be lost. My guess is that the smart IT guys have already figured this out and begun joining the ranks of the self-employed to tie into and support the Cloud services their former employers need.
What say ye?
Google's Knowledge Graph Grabs My Attention
The announcement yesterday that Google is beginning to roll out its new Knowledge Graph on search results pages (SERPs) is the latest salvo in the quickly escalating battle among Google, Microsoft and Facebook for Web dominance in the information space. I have not yet seen or tried the Knowledge Graph but I will closely monitor Google's rollout and hope to get a look soon.
In fact, I'm more excited by the Knowledge Graph than I am by Microsoft's recently announced intention to include social results on Bing SERPs. A few days ago I compared my thoughts about how Google and Microsoft Bing plan to incorporate social results into their SERPs and I gave high marks to Bing. The Knowledge Graph moves the marker strongly back toward Google for me. As much as I sometimes like to know what my friends and followers are saying and thinking about some subjects, the kinds of searches I do will largely not be enhanced by that additional data. But the Knowledge Graph -- really, what appears to be a strong first take at the Holy Grail called the Semantic Web -- has the potential to make search far, far more useful and interesting to me.
It certainly is a fun time to be alive and watching technology!
Bing vs. Google Search: What Role Social?
As soon as Microsoft finishes rolling out the new Bing design, we should be able to start getting a handle on what people think about the importance of social search results compared to Web search results.
Bing is including social network results for searches off to the right side of the page in a gray-background panel of their own. Google is integrating Google+ and other social network results into the search results stream, treating them as an equally valuable "find" with more traditional results locating Web sites and pages.
Which will users prefer?
Or will this prove nothing more than a skirmish in the larger battle that will ultimately see Facebook become the search engine tail that wags the Bing/Google dog? Do we want social integrated into search or do we want search to be integrated into social?
There will be a period of time -- a year or so, I'm predicting -- during which the outcome of that contest will be up in the air as all three jockey for position. But ultimately, for me at least, I think I'm going to prefer Bing's solution to Google's. There is a different quality of results between what a search algorithm with page ranking and other values baked in will give me and what the views and experiences of my social media network connections will offer. By mixing them into one stream of results, Google puts the onus on me to filter out the potential noise of social results. By segregating them to the side, Bing gives them at once more and less import. I suspect that, all other things being equal (and they seem to be), I'll end up switching to Bing.
Now that would be momentous in my life!
Oracle-Google Java Suit Needed a Special Master Not a Jury
What a freaking stupid mess.
There's a legal mechanism called a "special master" whom a court can appoint to oversee such trials. A special master is someone with technical expertise, impartiality, and the authority of the court to conduct hearings, review evidence and report to the judge.
A jury of 12 people whose combined knowledge of programming languages in general, APIs more specifically and Java APIs even more specifically amounted to bupkus, has declared that programming languages are subject to copyright. Even if they're in the public domain. Sort of.
Trials like this one, in which Oracle sued Google for copyright infringement on some Java APIs they acquired when they bought Sun Microsystems, don't belong in public courts with public juries made up of people who are specifically selected for their ignorance of the underlying technical issues and who are furthermore unimaginative enough to avoid jury duty. I'm not blaming the jury here; the problem is the system.
There's a legal mechanism called a "special master" whom a court can appoint to oversee such trials. A special master is someone with technical expertise, impartiality, and the authority of the court to conduct hearings, review evidence and report to the judge.
This case cried out for such treatment in my lay opinion.
The result, as we have it, is borderline useless and yet will become binding law for the foreseeable future if it's not overturned.
Yeesh.
Google's Brin a Bit Hypocritical
Google co-founder Sergey Brin, in an exclusive news interview, expressed serious concerns about the near-term fate of the open Internet. He focused his concerns primarily on:
- governments trying to censor content
- entertainment industry stubbornness in adapting to the Net
- Apple
He attacked Facebook and Apple for their proprietary, closed platforms, which he says gives them a throttle on consumer freedom and access. Of course, those are his two primary rivals, which leaves the value of his observations clouded in the mists of FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt, for the uninitiated).
Beyond that point, however, the fact is that Google is as much a proprietary platform as Apple or Facebook, they just go about it in a different way. Where the two competitors on Google's radar largely shun open source while Google fairly embraces it, Google is no less inclined to lock its users in, using a very clever and useful interlinkage of data among its apps and interoperability of all their software and platform pieces to make it nigh impossible for folks (like me) who are heavy users of their technology to consider moving to other platforms.
I don't see any of this as evil or nefarious. It's good business all around and all of these players are up-front about what users are buying into. I'm a heavy user of Apple and Google, less so of Facebook (though increasingly there as client demand calls for it). But I never had any illusions about platform openness and competitive price-amelioration as part of my picture. I've opted for convenience over the potential moral dilemma of using closed-source or locked-in technology.
Is Search Broken on YouTube?
YouTube is owned by Google. That should mean that search on YouTube would be world-class, right?
Wrong.
I've noticed in the past couple of weeks as I've begun some intensive research on YouTube for a client study I'm writing that YT search often produces results that I consider to be just wrong.
Today's example: a friend sent me a Windows Movie file of a hilarious parody in which Canada as a nation throws its hat into the U.S. presidential race. I wanted to share the video with others, but I'm aware of the fact that most of my friends don't have software that will play .WMV files because most of them are Mac and iOS folks. So I went to YouTube to find out if the video was available there.
I typed into the search box, "Canada Party." Before I'd finished typing the entire entry, YT's suggested terms popped up with "Canada Party" and "Canada Party Announces Candidacy." Cool, I thought. So I clicked on that second entry and was taken to a page with a ton of videos. Some were about Canadian politicians announcing their candidacy for various offices. Some were just about political announcements and didn't appear, at least, to have a Canadian slant or flavor. But importantly, the video I wanted to locate was not on the page despite the fact that it matched perfectly the search term.
So I backed up and selected "Canada Party" and, sure enough, the video I was looking for showed up in the first page of results. So the more generic term produced a better result than the specific term. That's just wrong. And pretty unhelpful.
Google's Game-Changing Search Shift. Get My White Paper
Google is about to change the search engine universe in ways that will render most of what search engine optimization (SEO) tools and "experts" do today to get high rankings in search results utterly obsolete.
In the process, however, they're going to make it far better for folks who follow the SEO advice that hundreds of SEO consultants, including yours truly, have been saying for quite some time. The "secret sauce" to high search engine rankings is the simple two-edged sword of quality fresh content teamed with excellent backlinks.
As outlined in this piece on ReadWriteWeb.com, Google intends to "create a layer of people, places and things - and a network of their relationships - that is visible to Google search. In order to stay ahead of Facebook and Twitter's interest graphs," In other words, they're going to look semantically at the content of search terms and seek out internetworked connections between and among those sites using the terms in semantically meaningful ways.
If you've been trying vainly to game the search engine strategy, this will definitely trip you up. And it should. Google's interest is not in helping you find customers and prospects; it's in bringing its users the best possible search results. If your site rates among those results, it gets recommended; if not, it doesn't and shouldn't.
There are are a couple of SEO techniques being used widely today that will bite the dust in the wake of this change, which is probably several months away from anything resembling large-scale implementation: keyword use in headlines and captions; and keyword density in copy. The Google engine will be smarter and better able to ferret out context from surrounding words so the key is going to be to write coherent and cohesive copy on focused subjects. Strangely enough, that's what we all want from our search results, isn't it?
I'm working on a white paper on this subject right now. If you want to get a free copy when it's ready later this month, cite this post on Twitter or on Facebook in a way that I'll notice.
This is going to be huge.
Google Opening App Marketplace to HTML5
Google is announcing at an international conference that it will welcome HTML5 Web app developers to submit products to its online app store. This could be a major stride forward in the adoption of HTML5 as the de facto standard in Web -- and particularly mobile -- app development.
Today, one of the few major advantages native apps have over HTML5 versions is that they have focused and readily accessible central marketplaces. In particular, those who develop apps for Apple's iOS series of products know they can get a spot on the Apple App Store shelf and at least have a shot at being found and purchased (or downloaded free). It's quite easy and simple and it makes the distribution of such apps a no-brainer even as it provides no guarantee of real visibility in a vastly overcrowded store.
But there is no central marketplace for HTML5 apps. This is more of a problem for mobile phone owners for whom searching the whole Web to find useful tools and toys is a more challenging task than on a laptop or desktop system. Of course, the store itself has to be a Web site/app but at least it will gather large numbers of these apps of the future into one place, which ought to facilitate more accessibility.
(There is one other budding HTML5 app marketplace called OpenAppMkt but it is in beta and has almost zero traffic or visibility yet (though it does come up #1 in Google search for HTML5 app marketplace, I'm sure that won't last long).
Google Has Funny Error Messages
I was trying to link an event I'd signed up for to my Google calendar from gMail today and encountered the error message in this image. Too funny. I like this kind of creativity. Brightens my day even when something has gone wrong.
There's an art to this and Google gets it.
There's an art to this and Google gets it.
Google Can Answer Questions, Too
I was chatting with some old friends yesterday about how online search hasn't changed much in the past decade. We reminisced a bit about some more or less failed attempts at creating new search paradigms. One of those for which we both have a soft spot is Ask (which was originally called Ask Jeeves). That service took a question-and-answer approach to search. Instead of trying to construct a search phrase using Boolean connectors like AND and OR and NOT, you just asked a simple English-language question.
Ask.com is still around and still doing the English-language (perhaps "natural-language" would be more accurate since it probably works in non-English languages) searches. But not many people know about it or use it.
I figured Google could probably handle searches phrased as questions as well so I gave it a try. Sure enough, answers are as easy to get with a question as with a search phrase. Interestingly, neither Ask nor Google turned out to be particularly good at parsing or answering compound questions.
For example, I could get both search engines to give me good results for the question, "How many pieces of music did Mozart compose?" In fact, the results were nearly identical.
But when I asked, "Who composed more musical pieces, Mozart or Schubert?", both engines fell down. Google corrected my "or" to an "and", rendering the question pointless and the answer unusable. But when I corrected it, the results it returned weren't comparative, so they weren't really direct answers. Ask.com accepted my question without a hassle (score one point) but its results were quite similar to those provided by Google. (BTW, the answer to the question is Schubert, by quite a margin.)
Search remains the most used and least understood means of navigating the Web. You'd think by now someone would have found a more reliable and accessible way to do that.
