Excerpt:

Many organizations collect vast amounts of customer, scientific, sales, and other data for future analysis. Traditionally, most of these organizations have stored structured data in relational databases for subsequent access and analysis. However, a growing number of developers and users have begun turning to various types of non-relational — now frequently called NoSQL — databases.

I’d quibble that most NoSQL systems do not qualify as what I’d call databases (or more precisely, database management systems), so I dislike the term “NoSQL databases” and I generally prefer “NoSQL systems” instead.  Some NoSQL systems are databases (e.g., MarkLogic, an XQuery-based XML database/server or CouchDB, a document database) while others are not — e.g., Hadoop is a distributed computing framework, Dynamo is a key-value store, memcached is a distributed caching mechanism, and Cassandra is a highly scalable, eventually consistent, distributed, structured key-value store.  For more examples, see the Wikipedia structured storage page.

While I generally think the article does a good job at difficult task of explaining things in high-level terms, it does perpetuate the notion that NoSQL is primarily about unstructured data and I’m not at all sure that it is.

…  NoSQL databases will be used largely for working with unstructured data in ways that require scalability …

While several NoSQL technologies were developed for web applications (e.g., spiders) which handle large amounts of unstructured information, I don’t see much that specifically either makes them good at unstructured information or, for that matter, bad at structured information.  A key-value store works well when the value is a structured record or an unstructured text field, primarily because it doesn’t care much about the value.  It just knows how to find it fast given the key.

I think the vast majority of information that people call “unstructured” is actually semi-structured and the trick to managing it well is determining what structure is present, optionally enriching it further, and then leveraging the available structure to the max.  For example, consider email, which many people might call unstructured.  Email has:

• Address fields, such as to/from
• Send time/date
• Subject line
• Body text
• Footer/signature
• And potentially a series of replies and comments that make up a conversation thread

That’s a lot of structure, and you’d like a good query system to be aware of it:

• Find all emails that include the word “legal,” but not in the standard footer or disclaimer:  to avoid returning every email in the system if a company’s standard footer includes the word legal.
• Find the emails contain the word “option” within three words of “backdate” that were sent to the general counsel before a given date (to run precise searches)
• Tell me who sends the most email about subject X:  so I can identify an expert.

This, by the way, is exactly what MarkLogic lets you do.  (You can see an example of a system running MarkLogic against 40M emails at markmail.org.)  Since I view MarkLogic as a NoSQL system, I suppose I’d say that some NoSQL systems are all about unstructured information, but to the extent a system treats unstructured information as a BLOB, I’d argue that it’s not really about unstructured information.  It’s more about providing a vessel in which to put it.

In any case, I still think it’s a nice article to hand the CIO who’s probably hearing some of the NoSQL hype.  If you’d like something one level more technical, I also found this deck, posted yesterday by Harri Kauhanen, which I’ve embedded below.

The first thing I learned is that standing in the middle is a great way to get attacked from all sides.

• My database buddies blasted me, treating me like a reckless turncoat:   how dare you endorse these BASE people?  (Humorous double entendre intended.)
• The NoSQL folks blasted me, generally misunderstanding the protest march metaphor I was using (see below).
• The above-it-all crowd blasted me for oversimplifying the issue, suggesting that I was endorsing simplistic views such as it’s about batch vs. online or it’s about scaling vs. not scaling.

All of which, of course, only confirmed the religious nature of the movement and that was indeed a movement, regardless of whether any given participant identified himself as such.

(Several folks also blasted me for using the Tea Party Movement as a metaphor.  Let me clarify that this is not a political blog so I won’t debate politics.  I intended the metaphor to cover only concepts like “rebellion” and “grass roots,” both of which I do believe apply to NoSQL.)

First, I’ll clarify the protest march metaphor which was easily the most misunderstood aspect of the post.   Let me share my first rule of protests:  not everyone is there for the same reason.  Some people are there for the stated cause, which I’ll call cause A.  But others participate on behalf of a group; their signs will say “Group 1’s for Cause A.”  Others are there for cause B which lacks enough support to generate its own march, so they tag along with signs saying “Cause A and Cause B.”  If you’ve ever been at a rally, you’ve invariably winced when speakers attempted to hijack the agenda, turning to some personal cause, all while pretending to speak on behalf of the group.

It was this sense of chaos and disorder that I was trying to portray.  When I made the list of reasons why I thought people were on the NoSQL march, it was neither to say that I agreed with them or that all people were there for all reasons.  I was doing the equivalent of asking protesters on the  UC Berkeley Anti-Grenada March why they were there.  To which the replies might have been:

• To protest the Grenada invasion (cause A)
• To remind people about [insert group here] rights, all while protesting against Grenada
• To protest about UC budget cuts, all while protesting about something the Government did, which I’m pretty sure was bad.
• Because I go to every march; what’s this one about?
• Because I was at Top Dog when it went by and had nothing better to do

So hopefully, the intent of my NoSQL-reasons-list is now clear.   Some folks are there because they don’t want ACID transactions.  Some folks are there because they are dealing with Internet scale.  Some folks are there because they hate the SQL impedance mismatch.  Some folks are there because they’re tired of paying oligopoly prices to Oracle.   (I particularly liked the comment that said Oracle was free because they had an enterprise license that most certainly wasn’t, ignoring the possibility that recent enterprise/agency directives to look at open source could result directly from the size of the last Oracle check.)

And yes, some folks are there because it’s cool and they want to be like Twitter, Google, and Facebook, but getting them to admit that is a virtual impossibility.

One irony is that I actually agree with one of the fiercest commenters:

To respond to the commenter:

• Thank you for the clear definition of why you moved to NoSQL.
• Your comment was picked up by the Otaku blog in an post called NoSQL Explained Correctly (Finally), so congrats and I’m glad I could help facilitate “the conversation.”
• Disorder and chaos is what I was trying to portray in the protest march metaphor, not hippies or nobility
• You are clearly using NoSQL for two of the reasons on my list:  scalability and bloatware (i.e., perhaps not the best word choice, but the idea was undesired, included functionality — e.g., ACID transactions)
• You did exactly what I said to do:  consider all alternatives and do what’s right for your business
• So, why are we disagreeing again?

I think some people didn’t like my putting “coolness” on the table as a factor and the notion of a “movement.”  I believe those are both very real and ironically those who disagreed with me loudest were effectively screaming:  it’s not a movement and I’m not doing it to be cool; I’m doing it because it’s right for my business.  If so, great.  But why does it hit such a nerve?

In the end, when it comes to NoSQL I am trying to:

• Provide an overview of why I think people are considering and/or using NoSQL solutions

• Provide good background references and readings (see bottom of my first post)

• Remind mangers to keep an eye out for the “bad reasons” to go NoSQL — i.e,. coolness and Google wannabeism

• Remind people not to confuse NoSQL with NoDatabase.  Special-purpose databases (e.g., MarkLogic) are optimized for specific applications (e.g., semi-structured data) and handle them far better than a general-purpose RDBMS.  So in your haste to move off Oracle, don’t advance directly to an open source key-value store; there might be alternative DBMSs that meet your needs more effectively.

• Remind people not to confuse NoSQL with NoCommercialSoftware.  While people seem to dislike when I say it, the RDBMS market is an oligopoly and the big vendors’ pricing, margins, and heavy-handed customer relationships are all consistent with that market structure.  But you can find other classes of commercial software where the vendors are hungrier and more customer centric.

In addition, please note that this year we have added (1) the ability to pay the registration fee using training credits and (2) an integrated package that includes the pre-conference training with the program registration which might help people use training budget to attend this educational event.  Contact Kelly Stirman, director of Mark Logic University, at kelly-dot-stirman at marklogic-dot-com if you’re interested.

In order to help you decide to attend, I’ve embedded a video overview of the 2009 event and the 2010 preliminary program below.

Here’s the video:

And here’s the preliminary conference program:

MarkLogic UC10 Conference Agenda Sessions

And did I mention that this year we will have our first user conference party!

• One force is DBMS specialization:  while the general-purpose RDBMS is useful for a broad range of applications, it is optimal for few of them.  The RDBMS has slowly become expensive bloatware that is functionally a jack of all trades, master of none.  MIT’s Michael Stonebraker calls the RDBMS a one size fits all solution.

• The other force is NoSQL, an organic and rapidly-growing industry movement away from relational databases, driven by a number of factors including both technology and cost.

The purpose of this post is to share my thoughts on NoSQL.  Make no mistake, like the Tea Party Movement, NoSQL is a rebellion; just look at the name.  But like most demonstrations, not everyone is marching for the same reasons.  Here are some of the things I think various members of the NoSQL crowd are marching against:

• Table-oriented, 1960s-era database technology:  RDBMSs were designed for handling data and short-text fields, necessitate mapping programmatic objects to tables (i.e., the impedance mismatch), and require the use of an increasingly stone-age query language, SQL.

• Scalability:  relational databases were not designed to handle and do not generally cope well with Internet-scale, “big data” applications.  Most of the big Internet companies (e.g., Google, Yahoo, Facebook) do not rely on RDBMS technology for this reason.

• High prices and the heavy-handed treatment of customers:  both stem from the underlying oligopoly and the lack of credible alternative suppliers

• Closed source:  the inability to customize the internals of the DBMS engine to meet specific needs

• Bloatware:  ironically that while RDBMSs are perceived as light in requirements that matter (e.g., scalability), they are  also seen as over-engineered for features that don’t.  (ACID transactions are a favorite target in this department.)

• DBA supremacy.  For years, corporate DBAs called the shots on where strategic data assets would be stored, and thus how they would be accessed.  This created headaches for the programmers of the world who, in response, have done as much as possible to abstract away the database (e.g., Ruby on Rails).

On the flip side, there are things the NoSQL crowd are fighting for:

• Open source, implying control.  The ability that open source software provides to customize product functionality.

• Open source, implying free.  The often-flawed notion that the absence of software license fees results in a reduced lifetime cost of ownership.

• Coolness, or the “I want to be like Google” effect.  If Google’s got BigTable,  Yahoo’s got Hadoop, and Facebook’s got Cassandra, then we should build our own, too.  Our app is hard; we’re smart guys, too.

• Vengeance, or the “I’m so mad at Oracle that I’ll do anything” effect.  Yes, some folks are just plain mad enough at Oracle to either go write their own DBMS, or take on the support of a very low-level infrastructure technology.

So, if you’re considering a NoSQL solution — a class in which I include MarkLogic — you need to figure out what you’re marching against, what you’re fighting for, and ultimately what will meet your needs at the lowest total cost of ownership.

My first recommendation to detect and, where applicable, kill off the coolness effect.  Google is swimming in money and PhDs.  They can build anything they want regardless of whether they should and, right or wrong,  for Google it just doesn’t matter.  So unless you have Google’s business model and talent pool, you probably shouldn’t copy their development tendencies.

Heck, I get the coolness attraction.  I think infrastructure software is cool, too.  That’s why I was an OS geek early on and have spent my career around databases.  But I surely don’t think that F1000 companies and government agencies should build their own DBMSs, nor fall into the trap of thinking that open source low-level stores are a free and easy way to avoid Oracle license fees.  Cool shouldn’t be in the equation.  Technology suitability and total cost should be.  Period.

My second recommendation is to orthogonalize the open source question, making it independent of functional requirements.  (This breaks if source customization is a requirement, but remember that requirement is often fictional:  most open source users don’t customize.)  If you’re struggling with an RDBMS on a given application problem you shouldn’t say:  we need an open source, NoSQL type thing.  You should say:  we need to look at relational database alternatives.  Those alternatives include a open source database projects (e.g., MongoDB, CouchDB) and distributed computing frameworks (e.g., Hadoop), but they also include commercial software offerings such as specialized DBMSs like Streambase (for real-time streams), Aster (for analytics on big data), and MarkLogic (for semi-structured data).  Don’t throw out the commercial-software-benefits baby with the RDBMS bathwater.

My personal take on this issue is that:

• Relational databases, like the mainframe in 1985,  are entering the Autumn of their lives.  They won’t die quickly and mainframe isn’t dead today, but their best days are behind them.

• Our kids will see SQL the way we see COBOL.  Some people can’t stand when I say this, but I think they’re in denial.  There is no logical reason to assume that the relational database and the SQL language are the endpoints in database evolution.  Yes, Larry Ellison is powerful.  But Adam Smith is more so.

• Our kids will see no data/document dichotomy.  They will just see digital information.  We need to understand and remember that the data/document dichotomy is an artifact of the limitations of the tools and technologies with which we grew up.

• Some of the NoSQL hype is an over-reaction to the database oligopoly.  I believe there are organizations out there who should be using alternative commercial databases, but instead are using open source NoSQL-type projects due to coolness, anger, or a mistaken belief that open source always has a lower total cost of ownership.  I believe rationality will return to these people.  One day management will say:  “Holy cow!  Why in the world are we paying programmers to write and support software at this low a level?”  (This is potentially avoidable if you can mentally project yourself into the future now and imagine how you will look back at the coming three years.)

• Some of the NoSQL hype is a valid reaction to the technological limits of relational databases and the impedance mismatch in programming on them.

In the end, I think it’s great that the NoSQL movement is happening.  It’s awakening people to traditional RDBMS alternatives.  It’s making people understand that they don’t have to write big checks for commodity software.  It’s helping people solve problems that they can’t solve, or solve efficiently, on relational technology.

My axe to grind is simple:  just because you’re throwing out Oracle, don’t throw out all DBMSs and all commercial software with it.  Take a breath.  Look at all your alternatives.  Study total costs and technology applicability.  And make your best decision.

Interesting Writings on NoSQL

• Wikipedia NoSQL entry
• The NoSQL Discussion Has Nothing to do with SQL by Michael Stonebraker
• The Legit Part of the NoSQL Idea by Curt Monash
• The MyNoSQL Blog by Alex Popescu
• Jason Hunter’s presentation on MarkLogic Server to NoSQL Oakland
• Announcing the Release of HadoopDB by Daniel Abadi
• Seeking a Database that Doesn’t Suck on Ambient Irony
• Twitter Growth Prompts Switch from MySQL to NoSQL Database by Eric Lai (Computerworld)
• No to SQL:  Anti-Database Movement Gains Steam by Eric Lai

Mark Logic is a gold sponsor this year, which sounds pretty good, though in the ever-inflating world of sponsorships that puts us behind the “premier diamond,” “premier platinum,” “platinum,” and “premier gold” levels.  (This reminds me of olive sizing where “extra large” is actually the fourth largest level after super collosal, collosal, and jumbo.)

We are proudly located in booth #2 and if you stop by, be sure to enter our drawing to win a free Kodak Zi8 High-definition pocket camera.  Hopefully, you’ll come by to talk about Mark Logic’s strong presence in media and the kinds of new information products that we help companies build atop our powerful XML Server.  Or, better yet, to ask detailed questions about the algorithms within MarkLogic Server that enable it to process complex queries against vast 100+ TB repositories of semi-structured information.  But we’ll understand if you just want to come by to enter the drawing.

Mark Logic’s own Fernando Mesa is speaking at 9:20 AM on Wednesday 2/24 in the Wilder room to present  The Mobile Opportunity: Developing a New Generation of Personalized, Task-Aware Applications for Mobile Devices. Fernando’s a great speaker and I’ve already seen him give this talk at one of our internal events.  Like Colin Crawford, I think that mobile is a huge, second-chance opportunity for the media business, a chance to start over and get things right, setting the expectation that content isn’t free.  So I believe that all media businesses should be looking hard at mobile and figuring out ways to make money there.  While this isn’t the precise topic of Fernando’s talk, here’s a bit of his abstract:

Publishers are continually challenged to find ways to differentiate their content products in the mobile space. Discover how you can increase the value of your information using a new breed of technology Infrastructure that provides the tools for publishers to quickly build innovative mobile applications using location-based services, Information discovery, and context-aware delivery of content. We’ll review some of the challenges Publishers in supporting a large number of devices and eReader formats (with more to come) and the importance of having a flexible platform that can quickly adapt to device and format changes. Finally, we’ll suggest ways to maximize your product reach across mobile devices by leveraging open standards and toolsets.

Finally, we co-hosted a round table on cloud computing last night at 7:00 PM, entitled MarkLogic Server in the Cloud to Integrate the Content Supply Chain.  If you’re more interested in that topic, be sure to visit Mark Logic’s cloud computing center.

Following in the format of a Letterman top 10 list, our marketing team has created the following:

10.  Hear tales of massive scale, incredible performance, and unparalleled agility from our award-winning customers and partners.

9. Network 1-on-1 with the Mark Logic product team and ask those burning questions only they can answer.

8. Listen to the latest observations and adventures of Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired magazine and best-selling author of The Long Tail and Free.

7. Get the straight scoop on new capabilities coming in future releases of MarkLogic Server and MarkLogic Application Services.

6. Learn technical advice, tips, and best practices from our own developers and professional services team.

5. Eat, drink and be merry at the California Academy of Sciences,  a world-famous facility that combines an aquarium, planetarium, natural history museum and rainforest.  (Yes, this year, we’re finally having a party!)

4. Find out what’s on the mind of our illustrious founder, Christopher Lindblad, in our annual fireside chat.  (This alone is worth the ticket.  You can never predict what Chris will say!)

3. Meet our partners and learn how they can help you get the most from MarkLogic Server.

2. Participate in a rousing DemoJam competition — a company tradition we’re extending to the global Mark Logic community!

1. What more do you need?!?!  Register today and get the $695 early bird rate.

In its most recently reported financial period, 3Q09, Nstein reported (all figures CDN) $4.6M in revenues, and -$0.8M in EBITDA.  Revenue was down 24% on a sequential basis and 17% on a year-over-year basis.  Given the $18.4M run-rate and the $24.2M in TTM revenues, Open Text paid 1.9x run-rate and 1.4x TTM revenues for the small, largely text-mining focused concern.  While the 100% premium is surely good news for shareholders, it’s off a valuation that is less than 1x TTM revenues (0.72x to be precise).  Then again, the company was both losing money and shrinking.

I’ve charted 11 quarters of Nstein history above, which makes the picture pretty clear.  Even the 2/08 acquisition of Picdar couldn’t get growth going, organic or otherwise.

In terms of focus, Nstein’s roots were in text mining.  The Eurocortex acquisition brought them a poor man’s CMS, with Nstein paying less for a  company than large Documentum customers pay for a license.  Picdar brought them digital asset management.  So you had a company doing $4.6M a quarter split across three areas:  text mining, CMS, and DAM.  Given the abnormally low 52% gross margins, that means a whole lot of that revenue was services, so they were maybe doing $2M a quarter in license.  That’s $0.7M in license for each of the three areas, which basically rounds down to nothing.  Remember the expression:  if you try to be all things to all people you can end up nothing to everyone.  This appears to be yet another example.

To my knowledge, this focus splitting was done in the name of “solutions” though what the company was known for — to the extent  it was known at all — was text mining.  I’ve previously blogged on such solutions strategies, and Nstein’s in particular:  NStein 2Q08, Growth Slows:  The Moldy Sandwich.

The tension highlighted in the “moldy sandwich” argument is that between creating a truly best-of-breed component (e.g., a sentiment analysis engine) and offering customers complete solutions to problems.  Companies are invariably pulled by their salesforces to the latter, while most companies can only credibly offer the former.  Simply put:  do you want to offer your customers either great ham, great cheese, or great mayo — and ask them to build the sandwich — or do you want to offer them a complete sandwich, but made from bad ingredients?  For most technology companies, I’d say you’re kidding yourself if you can think you can do both.

While I’ve never been a fan of the moldy sandwich strategy, I both know and like several of the folks at Nstein, and want to offer my congratulations to them on this deal.  While I’m guessing the CMS will go away and the DAM customers will be moved to Artesia, I’m reasonably sure that they have found a nice home for the text mining engine and gotten a reasonable valuation for the firm (given its trajectory) and a nice pop for shareholders in the process.

Other coverage of the deal:

• CMSWire:  Open Text to Cash Out CDN $35M for Nstein
• Beyond Search:  Autonomy and Open Text:  Which Strategy has Stronger Legs

I’m not judging morally or technically:  I blog about business, I know little about golf and even less about figure skating.  I am, however, judging PR strategy and skills in handling these situations.  In my estimation, Tiger gets an F and Lysacek gets an A+.

Why?

Lysacek did a simply amazing job in last night’s interview with NBC’s Bob Costas.  Either Lysacek is the best PR “natural” I have ever seen, or he has simply world-class PR advisors.  Despite Costas repeatedly baiting him, Lysacek looked a home-run hitter at batting practice, swatting away the inflammatory questions.

Excerpt (after having just shown a video of Plushenko saying that he thought he merited the gold):

Costas:  “Plushenko said:  ‘if the Olympic champion doesn’t know how to do quadruple jump, … now it’s not men’s figure skating, it’s dancing, … you can’t be considered a true men’s champion without the quad.’”

Lysacek:  “well, I think no one likes to lose, and a lot of what he’s saying is probably coming from a little bit of disappointment and anger so, taking it out of context, I don’t think, for me, I can’t be emotional or react to it …”

That is simply a superb answer.   He gets the real issue on the table (bitterness), takes the high ground, and refuses to answer the question all at the same time.  But it gets better:

Lysacek, continuing:  “the truth is that he’s been a force to be reckoned with in men’s skating for the last decade and has been a great role model for me …  [he] did something that no one thought was possible, [took time off,] came back, and got his third Olympic medal — two silvers and a gold — and that’s not something to be taken lightly.”

Wow.  Call the guy who’s attacking you a role model and then cite his accomplishments in a clear and precise way.   This guy is good.

But it doesn’t stop there, Costas continues:  “Plushenko said:  ‘ … the sport itself is regressing if the Olympic champion doesn’t do the quad, just doing nice transitions and being artistic, that’s not enough, because figure skating is a sport, not a show,’ again quoting him.”

Lysacek:  “Well I think it’s interesting that he puts so much emphasis on just one step in the program.  It is a 4 minute and 40 second skating routine so we have to put together our strongest moves — jumps, spins, and footwork — and we’re graded on everything we do in between …”

Here he’s answering the question, but using a powerful technique — framing — in how he answers.  Sure Plushenko wants to make it about one jump, but what about the other 4 minutes and 35 seconds?  It gets better:

Lysacek:  “… interesting enough, last night we tied on the component scores (the old artistic scores), and where I edged him — slightly — was on the technical scores which means my jumps were graded better than his and my spins were graded better than his.”

This guy’s on fire.  First, he reframes the problem back to whole-routine and then fires a cannon through the “dancing” argument by saying, “uh, by the way, I won on technical scores.”  And I love the passive voice :  not “my spins were better,” but “my spins were graded better.”  But it gets better still:

Lysacek:  “… to me he had a challenge, he had to skate last, he had to wait until the end of the event, he had the most pressure on him because he was leading after the short program, and I thought he looked incredible.  He went out and skated great and, for me, I congratulate him and hope that he’s 100% satisfied with that.”

Costas:  “Was he gracious to you in the immediate aftermath?”

Lysacek:  “Yes, he was very nice.  He’s a great guy.  I known him for a long time.  I’ve looked up to him for a long time.”

What do I love about Lysacek?

• Great delivery
• Absolute sincerity and ergo credibility
• Great use of facts
• Refusal to engage in an emotional conflict
• Remapping the questions:  saying what you want to say almost regardless of what was asked

Now, let’s look at Tiger’s confession, via some excerpts:

Now every one of you has good reason to be critical of me. I want to say to each of you, simply and directly, I am deeply sorry for my irresponsible and selfish behavior I engaged in …

But still, I know I have bitterly disappointed all of you. I have made you question who I am and how I could have done the things I did. I am embarrassed that I have put you in this position …

The issue involved here was my repeated irresponsible behavior. I was unfaithful. I had affairs. I cheated. What I did is not acceptable, and I am the only person to blame …

I stopped living by the core values that I was taught to believe in. I knew my actions were wrong, but I convinced myself that normal rules didn’t apply. I never thought about who I was hurting. Instead, I thought only about myself. I ran straight through the boundaries that a married couple should live by. I thought I could get away with whatever I wanted to. I felt that I had worked hard my entire life and deserved to enjoy all the temptations around me. I felt I was entitled. Thanks to money and fame, I didn’t have to go far to find them.

I was wrong. I was foolish. I don’t get to play by different rules. The same boundaries that apply to everyone apply to me. I brought this shame on myself. I hurt my wife, my kids, my mother, my wife’s family, my friends, my foundation, and kids all around the world who admired me.

I’ve had a lot of time to think about what I’ve done. My failures have made me look at myself in a way I never wanted to before. It’s now up to me to make amends, and that starts by never repeating the mistakes I’ve made. It’s up to me to start living a life of integrity.

Let me be a little cynical here, but in terms of frequency “star athlete / rockstar / celebrity / politician has affair” should be a dog-bites-man, not a man-bites-dog story.  How is that John Denver can write his affairs into song lyrics …

There’s so many times I’ve let you down,
So many times, I’ve played around,
I’ll tell you now, that they don’t mean a thing

… and get away with it, while Tiger gets hung out to dry?  (And yes, I know there are a few decades in between.)

The first mistake Tiger made (other than the affairs) was letting this story get so big.  Some of that was out of his control (e.g., his enormous popularity) but a lot of it was controllable.  He could have just said earlier what he ended up saying later:  look, it’s no surprise that star athletes get a lot of “temptations” and I, uh, gave in.  My bad, it happens all the time, and what’s between me and wife is none of your business.  Next story, please.

But, having holed up for three months, he’s turned an “oh, another athlete had an affair” story into the Tiger Woods 24 Hours Mystery.  And, unfortunately, his confession does nothing to provide the details that he should now sadly provide if he wants to kill off the mystery angle, once and for all.

His delivery was poor:  scripted, stiff, hollow, robotic, insincere.

I didn’t like the way “therapy” was pitched.  You could substitute “disease” for “affair” and “drug” for “therapy” and the script would still make sense.  While I might sound harsh, that smacks of not taking responsibility.

The whole framing of the announcement was wrong.  Who is he apologizing to?  Everyone, it seems, but as one fan said:  “he doesn’t owe me an apology.”  Is he apologizing the sponsors who already fired him?    If so, send them a letter.  In his public statement, he should be apologizing to his wife and his kids, period.  The rest should be commentary for the media.  Not a confession.  Not an apology.

The execution was bad as well.  Media attendance was limited to three reporters, alienating the journalists he’s trying to reach.  The timing was in conflict with a golf event, further irritating the golf establishment.  There was no Q&A, which further reinforced the stiff/scripted perception.

So what I did dislike about the Tiger confession?

• Insincere
• Scripted
• The therapy angle
• Poorly timed
• The mass apology framing

If I were Tiger’s PR advisor, I’d say the message (which should have been delivered fast) should be:

• I got caught up in the celebrity bubble
• I admit that I had affairs
• I apologize to my wife and kids for what I’ve done
• Any questions about my wife and family — either past or future — are  personal, and I will not answer them
• Deep down I am unhappy and in therapy to try and fix that core problem
• I hope to return to golf within a year
• If I learn any lessons that are useful to others in this process, I hope to share them in the future (think:  book!)
• This is extremely difficult for me and I thank you for your support

I value speed and authenticity in PR which is why I am so negative on the Tiger confession.  But I must admit that the media has responded pretty positively to it, for example, this piece in the New York Times, entitled Vulnerability in a Disciplined Performance.

This afternoon, we will cut over to a new blog design. Authoring wise, I will be changing from Blogger as my authoring tool to Wordpress, though that shouldn’t directly effect my readers.

I will also be changing the RSS feeds shortly; more on that after the new feeds are up and running.

Also, remember I now tweet from @kellblog, no longer from @ramblingman.