The embeds of the future will work for the company, and be paid by the company to provide news about the company in a multitude of formats. Print, newsletter, video, blog, podcast, moving billboards, tattoos — whatever it takes. Because the bits and pieces of Corporate America that have a story to tell will still have their stories – just no ready outlets.

How is this different than what you have today? Surely there are corporate PR departments and external agencies already doing these things, right?

No.

What is required is an internal producer who writes in external voice — like the neutral point-of-view so often described by Wikipedia. People can smell marketing and propaganda coming around the corner, and they know when the pitches and puff pieces are missing that edge of neutrality. An accurate and fair piece is accurate and fair, no matter who writes it.

It’s an interesting theory, but it seems to presuppose dual marketing communication efforts, with separate departments of “Straightforwardness” and “Hype”. That may work at some companies, but in most cases I think it will be more practical to try to infuse straightforwardness through multiple parts of the marcom effort.

My more specific quick responses include:

• That sure sounds a lot like Robert Scoble in his Microsoft days.
• It also sounds like “community managers” at MMO game companies. (Both of the MMOs I’ve played have had great ones.) They often only use one or two channels (forums and the associated general website), but otherwise they fit the bill.
• Ike’s views fit very well with mine on the future of the information ecosystem.
• I’m getting ever more sympathetic to the idea that you need people whose main job is external communication of a straightforward kind. Reasons include:
  • Senior executives who write great blogs commonly don’t keep them up. And even when they’re active, the blogging is pretty sparse. E.g., among companies I follow closely, Vertica, Aster Data, and Netezza have all done some outstanding blogging in the past, but do very little of it now. Only Dave Kellogg at Mark Logic really keeps going.
  • It’s not obvious that senior executives are wrong to spend their time at something other than blogging. One of the greatest vendor blogs ever was Jonathan Schwartz’s at Sun.  Umm — how sure are we that he actually did much good for his company with that effort?
  • I frequently tell vendors “If you tell Story X in your own words, I’ll gladly point to it or post it for you.” They usually agree this is a wonderful idea — but then usually don’t free up the rather limited resources that would be required to take me up on it.
• That said, the kinds of people who provide customer support (pre- or post-sales) are often very well suited to fill the role Ike is describing. At least, that’s the case in enterprise tech companies.
• The media mix isn’t really as complex as Ike was suggesting. It basically falls into two groups: Text, and audio/video.
• That said, text/graphics and audio/video media people are increasingly the same. (Just think of sports media, where the newspaper folks make their big bucks on radio or TV. That’s a harbinger of the future. Or think again of Scoble.)
• One flaw of Ike’s idea is that in its pure form it only makes sense for companies large enough to have multi-person PR staffs. Other firms would have to use part-timers, or outsource.  And if you’re going to do that, might it not make more sense to pay part of the cost of sponsoring, you guessed it, an independent blog?
• I know that’s text/graphics-only, or at least text/graphics-mainly, but I happen to think audio/visual business news/PR is minor anyway. People may give enough attention to, for example, listen to audio from a company if it purports to teach them something. But news ABOUT a company? Who’s so interested in that to sit still for audio/video, unless they happen to be employees, or investors in its stock?

Bottom line: I think he’s wrong about some of his detailed views, but Ike Pigott is directionally very right in suggesting that newsmakers will increasingly become content creators for news about themselves.

• Centibeats
• Microfortnights
• Microweeks
• Nanocenturies
• “The velocity of an unladen swallow”
• Planck times
• Shakes of a lamb’s tail
• Warp (Star Trek, of course)
• Centons (Battlestar Galactica)
• Parsecs (a unit of time in Star Wars Episode IV )
• Jiffies
• Skidoo (23.00 skidoo, to be precise)
• Gigawatts (pretty hard to explain how that’s a unit of time or velocity)
• Epochs (one precise figure was 1.25e-15 epochs)
• Hertz
• Femtogalactic years

I haven’t tried to check or estimate the conversion factors used.

Related links

• 2010 April Fool’s Day highlights
• My recent roundup of past years’ April Fool’s highlights
• A companion roundup of other, even funnier pranks
• My alternative to pranks: April No-Fooling Day
• Google Operating System with more on Google’s 2010 April Fool’s jokes.

• In a charming blog post, Google annoucned the new Android Translate For Animals feature.
• Reddit has apparently made every user an administrator, throwing the whole site –or at least the Reddit hot stories list — into chaos.
• A video depicts icons falling off of an iPhone onto a table.
• Firetoys, Ltd., whoever they are, are promoting a Back To The Future style hoverboard. I want one!

Edit: And more being added as I find them:

• Supernatural Season 6
• A crucial computer gaming accessory

Related links

• My recent roundup of past years’ April Fool’s highlights
• A companion roundup of other, even funnier pranks
• My alternative to pranks: April No-Fooling Day

This idea is not, to put it mildly, new. I first saw the definition

Recursion: See recursion

in the glossary to Intellicorp’s KEE documentation, in 1984 or so. And I’d guess the joke is actually a lot older than that.

For another variation of the same idea, see this link.

Edit: For yet more recursive humor, see this picture of Wil Wheaton.

• Embarrassing stuff about anybody can be found.
• Deal with it.
• If there’s embarrassing stuff about EVERYBODY out there, maybe our societal norms will loosen up and get more tolerant.

If anything, Arrington understated the case, by focusing on two kinds of disclosure:

• Specific pieces of information such as photographs, which were originally gathered in a well-intentioned way.
• Anonymous “reviews” — e.g., like those on Yelp, but soon about specific people as well.

That overlooks two other threats:

• Data aggregration or other technologically-advanced snooping used against one.
• Amateur, private-eye-like stakeouts, as cameras and other surveillance equipment get cheaper, and online publication becomes bone-simple.

I.e., Arrington was even more correct than he seemed to realize.

Fred Wilson responded by suggesting that the key issue is making sure that enough good things are said about you to more than compensate for the bad ones. I emphatically agree with that too, as per my 2008 online reputation dictum:

The internet WILL tell stories about you, true or otherwise. Make sure your own version is out there too.

Where Wilson fell down a bit is in suggesting that you should get so many good things said about you they should completely crowd the bad ones off the top page of search engine results. First, this is difficult. Second and more important, if somebody is checking you out for a job or whatever, there’s a good chance they’ll click through to the second page of the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). But otherwise his thoughts are spot-on.

To paraphrase Andy Warhol, everybody is a celebrity for 15 minutes, or to an audience of 15 other people. And for many of us, you can tack a few 0s onto those figures. So there’s no reason to expect any more privacy than celebrities have — but there’s also no reason to expect any less tolerance for our failings than is shown to them.

Related links

• People are very confused about privacy

Notwithstanding the manifest virtues of centralization, there are numerous reasons you might want data marts,  in the tabular and document worlds alike.  For example:

• Price/performance. Your main/central data manager might be too expensive to support additional large specialized databases. Or different databases and applications might have sufficiently different profiles so as to get great price/performance from different kinds of data managers. This is particularly prevalent in the relational world, where each of column stores, sequentially-oriented row stores, and random I/O-oriented row stores have compelling use cases.
• Different SLAs (Service-Level Agreements). Similarly, different applications may have very different requirements for uptime, response time, and the like. (In the relational world, think of operational data stores.)
• Different security requirements. Different subsets of the data may need different levels of security. This is particularly prevalent in the document world, where security problems are not as well-solved as in the tabular arena, and where it’s common for a search engine to index across different corpuses with radically different levels of sensitivity.
• Integrated application and user interfaces. In the relational world, there’s a pretty clean separation between data management and interface logic; most serious business intelligence tools can talk to most DBMS. The document world is quite different. Some search engines bundle, for example, various kinds of faceted or parameterized search interfaces. What’s more, in public-facing search, a major differentiator is the facilities that the product offers for skewing search results.
• Different text applications require different thesauruses or taxonomy management systems. Ideally, those should all be integrated — but the requisite technology still doesn’t exist.

Bottom line: Text data marts, much like relational data marts, are almost surely here to stay.

Related link

• The future of data marts

• Open source
• Targeted to appear in netbooks in the second half of 2010
• Google Chrome browser + new windowing system + Linux kernel
• Minimal user interface
• Data stored or at least backed up in the cloud, and hence available on any computer
• Hardware compatibility hassles allegedly eliminated
• Ditto for software update hassles
• Ditto for security problems
• Apps apparently assumed to run inside the browser. (Not clear if this is required or just recommended.)

Obviously, Google Chrome OS is a direct attack on Microsoft — even more so than Google Wave, which I’ve predicted will “play merry hell with Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SharePoint, and more,” or for that matter than Google Mail and the rest of Google Apps. Taken together, Google’s initiatives suggest that an all-out Google-Microsoft war is coming, in a conflict that many people have been expecting — and analyzing — for years.

So how will this all shake out? Well, let’s start with some basic points:

• Google Chrome OS Release 1 is expected over a year from now, and then only on a limited subset of PCs, namely netbooks.
• Google Chrome OS Release 1 is supposed to have great performance and be bullet-proof. Hmm …
• Google is evidently assuming that the apps people want to run will either be browser-based, or else be new ones written for Chrome OS. Hmm …
• Google is signaling that Chrome OS will be very limited in features. That makes sense for Release 1 — but what will be missing?
• Consumers have proven their willingness to buy non-Microsoft computers, especially Apple ones, specifically in the Mac and iPhone/iTouch product lines.
• A lot of people would have compatibility issues replacing Microsoft Excel or PowerPoint with partially-compatible alternatives. I’m not so sure about Microsoft Word, however. Other than those three, Outlook, and the Windows family itself, I’m not aware of any Microsoft client products that have much lock-in. (Well, maybe Xbox, but that’s not in the main stack.)
• Open source software often gets most of its community support in a couple of areas, namely compatibilities and language translation. Google probably doesn’t need the help in languages, but letting other people fix Chrome OS compatibility issues whose importance it didn’t recognize is potentially valuable.
• Google probably won’t make any direct revenue from Chrome OS. So how much will it invest in the project?
• Notwithstanding Danny Sullivan’s concern, there isn’t much of an antitrust issue here. Google’s search can’t easily be used to favor Chrome, Chrome OS, or Google Apps. And the other way around — e.g., using Chrome OS to favor search — Google clearly isn’t a monopolist.

So while Google may kill Microsoft’s client business some day, it clearly won’t happen for quite a while, Techcrunch’s excitement notwithstanding. We’re talking a multi-year effort before there’s any realistic chance of Microsoft being toppled. On the other hand, it’s hard to think of major software compatibility issues that won’t quickly be addressed, except Microsoft’s own product and, probably, MMO games — assuming, of course, Chrome OS gets enough initial traction for anybody to care. So intermediate- and long-term, Microsoft’s PC business is very vulnerable indeed.

The bulk of Google’s announcement follows (emphasis added):

Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we’re already talking to partners about the project, and we’ll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve.

Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.

Google Chrome OS will run on both x86 as well as ARM chips and we are working with multiple OEMs to bring a number of netbooks to market next year. The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies. And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform.

Google Chrome OS is a new project, separate from Android. Android was designed from the beginning to work across a variety of devices from phones to set-top boxes to netbooks. Google Chrome OS is being created for people who spend most of their time on the web, and is being designed to power computers ranging from small netbooks to full-size desktop systems. While there are areas where Google Chrome OS and Android overlap, we believe choice will drive innovation for the benefit of everyone, including Google.

We hear a lot from our users and their message is clear — computers need to get better. People want to get to their email instantly, without wasting time waiting for their computers to boot and browsers to start up. They want their computers to always run as fast as when they first bought them. They want their data to be accessible to them wherever they are and not have to worry about losing their computer or forgetting to back up files. Even more importantly, they don’t want to spend hours configuring their computers to work with every new piece of hardware, or have to worry about constant software updates. And any time our users have a better computing experience, Google benefits as well by having happier users who are more likely to spend time on the Internet.

We have a lot of work to do, and we’re definitely going to need a lot of help from the open source community to accomplish this vision. We’re excited for what’s to come and we hope you are too. Stay tuned for more updates in the fall and have a great summer.

Natural language computer interfaces were introduced commercially about 15 years ago*.  They failed miserably.

*I.e., the early 1980s

For example, Artificial Intelligence Corporation’s Intellect was a natural language DBMS query/reporting/charting tool.  It was actually a pretty good product.  But it’s infamous among industry insiders as the product for which IBM, in one of its first software licensing deals, got about 1700 trial installations — and less than a 1% sales close rate.  Even its successor, Linguistic Technologies’ English Wizard*, doesn’t seem to be attracting many customers, despite consistently good product reviews.

*These days (i.e., in 2009) it’s owned by Progress and called EasyAsk. It still doesn’t seem to be selling well.

Another example was HAL, the natural language command interface to 1-2-3.  HAL is the product that first made Bill Gross (subsequently the founder of Knowledge Adventure and idealab!) and his brother Larry famous.  However, it achieved no success*, and was quickly dropped from Lotus’ product line.

*I loved the product personally. But I was sadly alone.

In retrospect, it’s obvious why natural language interfaces failed. First of all, they offered little advantage over the forms-and-menus paradigm that dominated enterprise computing in both the online-character-based and client-server-GUI eras.  If you couldn’t meet an application need with forms and menus, you couldn’t meet it with natural language either.

Even worse, NL actually had a couple of clear disadvantages versus traditional interfaces.  First of all, it required (ick!) typing, often more typing than the forms and menus did.  Second, forms and menus tell the user exactly what he can do. Natural language, however, lets him give orders the computer doesn’t know how to follow.  This is inefficient, not to mention frustrating.

However, even in 1983, it was obvious that the typing objection would go away some day, because of speech recognition — once desktop computers reached 100 MIPs or so.  (Effective keyboard-replacement speech recognition – as opposed to true natural language understanding — is mainly a matter of processing power.)  15 years later, standard PCs exceed 100 MIPs (assuming that 1 MIPs = a couple of megahertz for these purposes), and speech recognition is indeed getting practical.

In fact, as become increasingly evident recently, speech recognition is now a hot technology.  Bill Gates has been talking it up for a couple of years.  Increasingly, the press has swung to believing him … And my parents just bought a PC with two speech recognition products on it.

That said, speech recognition is as misunderstood (no pun intended) as most artificial intelligence technologies.  Yes, it beats typing, in a number of circumstances:

• On the telephone (duh!)
• “Busy hands” and/or “busy eyes” applications and locales (doctors‘ offices, trading floors, warehouses, etc. – and, some day in the future, your kitchen and car)
• People simply reluctant to type (e.g., anybody with sufficient wrist or back problems, and many males over the age of 45)

But before our computers talk back and forth with us in the voice of Majel Barrett Roddenberry, applications are going to have to add several important elements required for truly functional natural-language  interfaces:

• Intuitively clear names for everything on (or just behind) the screen
• Application-specific disambiguation logic

For most practical purposes, the latter requirement equates to

• A new generation of document selection technology

THE RULE OF NAMES

According to legend, knowing something’s name gives you power over it.  When that “something” is a button or menu choice on a speech-enabled computer, the legend is literally true.  But when a feature doesn’t have an obvious name, you can’t easily invoke it.

When applications consisted mainly of forms and menus, this was rarely a problem.  Everything had a clear role and label.  But web pages are less organized.  Hyperlinks can be scattered all over the place, with little rhyme or reason.

Frankly, I don’t think this is a hard problem to solve.  It wouldn’t take a lot of XML to divide the page into clear regions, so that commands like “Show me article #3″ (on a search results list) could be interpreted in the obvious way.  But it does take at least some discipline; random web pages will not necessarily be easy to “talk” to.

CYBERNETIC LISTENING SKILLS

The bigger challenge is to make sure that the application can respond in some useful way, no matter what command it’s given. This is even more difficult than it was 15 years ago, because of the radical increase in “casual” computer usage.  In the old days, we could assume the user had some clear business reason for using the application, and if necessary that s/he had time to be trained (even if people rarely sat still for as much training as they really needed).  Therefore, we could at least assume that the users had at least a general idea of what the application did, and hence of which commands the computer could obey.  From an NL standpoint, we could assume that what they actually “said” (which in those days meant “typed”) was at least reasonably close to what they were “supposed” to say.

Now, however, some of the most important applications are internet e-commerce and portals, competing and begging for the user’s attention.  The user is there strictly on a voluntary basis, and if he doesn’t get immediate gratification, he‘s gone, history, hasta la bye-bye.  Site-specific training isn’t even a consideration. And even if somebody did actually take a class on “How to use Excite,” the knowledge would be obsolete in six months.  So applications, if they are to have natural language interfaces that please and respond to users, have to be able to respond pretty much to any command.

Ideally, voice-enabled systems would be like the computers on Star Trek, which can return information from vast archives, brew a pot of Earl Grey tea, play three parts of a quartet, create self-aware life forms, or answer questions like “Computer, what is the nature of the universe?”  More realistically, they should be able, for example, to respond to a command like “Tell me about flights to Miami” by automatically giving the user a travel-reservation application or web page, and entering Miami in the appropriate form field.

If one thinks about the complications in such a system, it becomes clear that there are only two possible ways an application system can be designed to respond meaningfully to an enormous range of reasonable possible requests.

1. It can do the equivalent of saying “I’m sorry, I didn’t understand that,” “I’m sorry, I can’t do that,” and so on.

2. It can interpret many commands as text-search strings, and return appropriate results.

The first strategy – application-specific disambiguation logic, clear responses to “errors,” etc. — is absolutely necessary.  No software is perfectly intelligent; the user will have to be asked for disambiguation help from time to time (just as clerks today ask customers to repeat their requests!). I’m not going to go into much detail about how that works because, frankly, it’s a tricky thing to get right.  Users hate unnecessary disambiguation steps. They also hate the incorrect responses that result from ambiguity, and do tolerate being asked for help when it’s truly needed.  In short, whatever you build the first time around will probably be wrong.  So build something fast; then run, don’t walk, to the nearest usability lab, find out how you screwed up, and redo your system until you get it right.

I’m convinced that the second strategy — heavy reliance on text search technology — is a requirement as well. Just try to name a major web site that doesn’t use text search.  True, text search has gotten a bad rap recently, mainly because a whole generation of search engines didn’t really work.  But it will stage a comeback.

Related links

• My December, 2007 survey of speech recognition technology
• Star Trek fun

]]> http://www.texttechnologies.com/2009/05/30/men-are-from-earth-computers-are-from-vulcan/feed/ 2 http://www.texttechnologies.com/2009/05/30/men-are-from-earth-computers-are-from-vulcan/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TextTechnologies/~3/3bVS4DSrGks/ http://www.texttechnologies.com/2009/05/29/google-wave-finally-a-microsoft-killer/#comments Fri, 29 May 2009 09:49:24 +0000 Curt Monash http://www.texttechnologies.com/?p=330 Google held a superbly-received preview of a new technology called Google Wave, which promises to “reinvent communication.” In simplest terms, Google Wave is a software platform that:

• Offers the possibility to improve upon a broad range of communication, collaboration, and/or text-based product categories, such as:
  • Search
  • Word processing
  • E-mail
  • Instant messaging
  • Microblogging
  • Blogging
  • Mini-portals (Facebook-style)
  • Mini-portals (Sharepoint-style)
• In particular, allows these applications to be both much more integrated and interactive than they now are.
• Will have open developer APIs.
• WIll be open-sourced.

If this all works out, Google Wave could play merry hell with Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SharePoint, and more.

I suspect it will.

And by the way, there’s a cool “natural language” angle as well.

For starters, here are some basic links:

• Google has naturally set up a home page for the Google Wave project.
• Featured on that page but also separately available is an 80-minute video introducing Google Wave.
• Techcrunch has two highly detailed posts on Google Wave, one summarizing what’s in the main Google Wave video and one reporting on a Google Wave Q&A.

Here are some reasons I think Google Wave could actually live up to its promise:

• The email problem Google Wave purports to solve is real and critical. The email paradigm assumes linear conversations, and what actually happens is that they branch. Google Wave’s message-board-like paradigm is simply better, and more flexible (e.g., not limited to a single enterprise!) than Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Notes.
• The instant messaging problems Google Wave purports to solve are also major. Instant messaging is slow, tedious, disjointed, and ephemeral. Fully integrating IM with email solves most of those problems. And Google Wave’s UI interactivity solves most of the rest.
• Twitter needs to be integrated with other forms of communication. What’s more, Twitter’s functionality needs to be drastically extended. Google Wave is the best hope I know of to meet those needs.  Enterprise Twitter is just a special case of that.
• Workgroups (enterprise or otherwise) need light-weight mini-portals that can be created on the fly by non-technical users, to ease collaboration. Microsoft SharePoint, SAP Rooms, et al. don’t really meet that need.  Google Wave could.
• In particular, collaboration on documents, presentations and so on needs to be more cloud-based and generally easier than is the case in Microsoft Office. Google Wave has the potential to provide that.
• Google + open source is a potentially potent combination, especially versus Microsoft.

One note: Google of course needs to improve the reliability and customer service of its cloud-based offerings to make a huge dent in Microsoft’s market. But even with its flaws Google has already been a good alternative for a while.

As for the “natural language” angle: At the 44:30 mark of the main Google Wave video is a demo of some cool, very grammar-sensitive spell-checking technology. Google’s spell-checking technology is further discussed in a separate, short video.  The basic idea is that Google uses its vast library of web pages — and email and chat? — not just to model intended word usage but also kinds of mis-spelling behavior as well.

And to the CBS employee who was fired and threatened based on this story – we believe certain U.S. Whistle Blower laws may protect you from retaliation from CBS in this matter. We’d like to provide you with legal counsel at our cost.

That’s a remarkable offer to make, one that is very rare for traditional media to match. As such, it’s a strong (albeit very partial) answer to the ongoing handwringing about the future of investigative journalism.

By the way, I once got an analogous offer — but it was from a company, not a media outlet. In 1994, I broke the news that Sybase’s development efforts were a train wreck.  Gartner Group accelerated its research on the same issue, and went out with the same story*. Sybase faxed libel threats to Gartner and me. I quickly reached out to Sybase competitors for help.  Oracle’s and CA’s general counsels walked me through the legal issues (without overstepping the bounds that would have led them to be “acting as my lawyer”). Larry Ellison promised by email to pay my legal expenses if any. Charles Wang of CA was too cheap to match the offer — but he sat in personally on my call with his lawyer.

*Tony Percy admitted the causality to me a few years later, after he’d left Gartner.

So fortified — and with PR maven Simone Otus doing her best to talk sense into her Sybase clients — I faxed back a pair of two-page letters.  One explained the basis for my written opinions, demonstrating there was NFW I was guilty of libel. The other outlined a proposal for reducing hostilities.  The whole thing simmmered down. Sybase’s sales and earning fell apart a couple quarters later, exactly when I predicted. Management was replaced by people much more friendly to me (Mitchell Kertzman, Dennis McEvoy, et al.). Some outstanding folks got involved in analyst relations (at various times Rob Cooley, Dave Taber, and Merv Adrian, which is pretty much a Hall of Fame class right there).  And all was cool.  But I digress …

Anyhow, my main point is that the new information ecosystem is constantly evolving new ways to fill the roles that traditional media are, at least in part, vacating. TechCrunch’s bold act of investigatory journalistic commitment is just one example.

And while it’s now almost 15 years old, my Sybase story shows another way this can work. I’m a self-employed analyst and writer now, just as I was then. But even so, I can afford to research and write contentious things, without concern for legal intimidation.