Whit Andrews

Yesterday, California joined the orderly progression toward more formalized e-discovery rules via an instant law Gov. Arnold Schwarznegger signed without apparent fanfare. You’ll find a substantial amount of excellent research we’ve written about e-discovery on Gartner.com. The first pieces are from 2005 and there’s more than 60 as of now to read (if you read them all, you get a free gavel).  I’m sure there will be more soon, and until then you can peruse the archives of this blog and that of my colleague Debra Logan.

The step was no surprise. We’ll see other states emerge with similar rules in the near term, and overseas, we already saw Australia introduce similar measures. What happens often happens first in California, but not this time. What I wonder is how long it will be until we have some final judgments on issues like search standards.

Update! Handy guide to the differences between Cali e-discovery and the FRCP from Morgan Lewis.

Microsoft indicated yesterday it has added some of Twitter to to its Bing search index. I got called a week or so ago by a reporter at a sizeable magazine who wanted to talk “real-time search,” and I admit I stumbled doing the math on the topic. I do remember when Google’s indexing was so fast, and the Web so small, that it saw itself as essentially real-time — and they’re still powerful zippy. But certainly with the advent of twitter and other services, real-time search has become increasingly important to a variety of perspectives.

I did some test searches, and I wasn’t impressed yet. I’m not saying #bingfail, mind you. I’m just saying that it needs some work, and no one at Microsoft would say different. We’ve covered the bing launch and we’re continuing on. What I will say, though, is that one of the searches — on @karaswisher, who called me once for a Wall Street Journal story (there, that takes care of today’s mention of that event in 2001) — shows a very smart result set in comparison to Google’s result set. Bing pops Swisher’s flickr tag, YouTube channel, and Gawker activity. (Note: Flickr’s a Yahoo pproperty and YouTube’s a Google property. Props to Microsoft to playing well with others, or exploiting them, depending on one’s perspective.)

Hit diversity is important. Bing is grabbing different ways of looking at Swisher from an admirably diverse set of sources and presenting them in a crisp interface. On that, I am impressed.

Great news organizations (and lesser ones) have frequently created the role of ombudsman to serve the people who otherwise might not be heard by a giant media power. Such a role serves as a voice for the people to a putative voice of the people. When a media organization is extremely powerful, ombudsman offices temper that power. Google is such a media organization, and like the other major powers in its industry — I would name here particularly Yahoo and Microsoft — it needs an ombudsman.

Organizations and companies with the power and reach of Google benefit substantially from the role of ombudsman, and Google is no exception. Anyone who uses Google for any purpose would benefit from the company’s designating a powerful internal ombudsman to serve as a foil for its power.

The key reason Google needs an ombudsman is that its influence and information store are unprecedented in intellectual history, and so existing controls and models for control are inadequate or insufficient. If Google does not establish a fresh perspective on its own activities, it will fail to detect any impending backlash. Google’s success has benefited consumers, businesses and governments. An ombudsman would help Google protect itself from developing blind ambition. (The same is true for Google’s rivals, both present and future. Facebook, too. Oh, heck, throw in Twitter.)

Previous calls for Google to develop an ombudsman role have gone unheeded. Google is too powerful and too swiftly traveling a trajectory of its own making to continue without an ombudsman to help it see the risks its own size and power create. So, I know bringing this back up may go nowhere, but I intend to pound this drum for a while. Earlier efforts in 2006 and 2007 have gone unanswered. There may have been others I haven’t found. That’s a mistake. Google must stop ignoring its own need — and so should its competitors, their own.

Ombudsman’s offices typically are granted a staff and a guaranteed outlet for the results of investigations and thinking exercises they conduct. In the newspaper industry, that might have been a “column” in which the ombudsman was given the right to write anything he chose about the operations of the paper. He might scold the paper for mistreating a politician, or for failing to respond to a citizen’s plea for help. The job is difficult, but the ombudsman typically is indemnified for all but the most egregious breaches of decorum.

Essentially, the aim is to create a guaranteed public dissenter within the powerful structure of a hegemonic information broker.

With the majority of the world’s search traffic, Google serves as the primary arbiter of information to all Internet users. It is perceived as a great authority. Its ambition extends throughout people’s lives, including their shopping, their advertising, their daily interests, their personal and business correspondence and their business records.

The company’s key dictum is, famously, “Don’t be evil.”

But — and IMHO, this is the tweetbite — How does Google know it is not being evil?

Google has found itself in disputes about photos that allegedly must have been taken while someone trespassing, about allegedly purloined databases, and about unfortunate results for searches on sensitive terms. It regularly apologizes for mistakes it may (or may not) have made. These examples I use are because they are times that Google would substantially benefit from a steady internal critic who could speak externally without nuance — not because I think they are times Google has in fact been evil.

However, because the company is understandably private about its activities, methods and strategies, it is difficult to credit its position on many issues. Google does not have an easy method for reversing apparent injustices — if such a word is even appropriate — in the rank of businesses in search results. (This is generally related to “SEO,” for Search Engine Optimization, the means of trying to affect such rankings.) Nor does it have an active and publicly visible worker aiding it in determining when its ambition is too great or the data it could collect so sensitive that it should abort a project.

Such challenges seem academic or intriguing to enterprises who are not affected. However, such concerns can become real all too quickly. Effective search optimization strategies executed by opponents of companies, governments or individuals can result in reputation damage. Privacy concerns can emerge quickly and escaped information can be irreversible. Most important, Google’s march into innovation raises the risk of effective monoculture across various applications and capabilities. The specter of a single company successfully serving as a gateway to electronic shopping, communications, information location, news and other critical elements is daunting.

The internal watchdog that an ombudsman could become would raise concerns before such potential became irreversible and temper Google’s necessary capitalist drive.

With extremely rare exceptions, actions that look evil to the affected weren’t conducted with evil intent. Again: How does Google know it is not being evil?

It was back in something like 1999 that I saw Bill Nguyen for the last time (he’s not dead, but running Lala — I just ain’t seen him in a while). Bill was running Onebox.com at the time, which was a different company from the current Onebox.com, about which I know nothing. What I had learned from watching Bill run companies was that he was usually thinking about the business opportunity that massive success at his current service would make possible. I use the same logic, now, on Google, and two paragraphs from here I’m going to tell you what I think about why they’re building Wave.

I walked into his office that afternoon in 1999 late to an interview (I was interviewing him as a reporter). Onebox was a means of providing faxes, voicemail and email to a single service that would look basically like a Webmail client — and this was way before UCC. It was scaling out very fast (and was bought shortly after). I walked in and said, “Bill, I figured you out while I was driving. You don’t care $%^& about voice mail or faxes or email. All you care about is the box. You’re gonna sell people the right to deliver me songs and pictures and movies to my onebox!” And he laughed like I was Richard Pryor at his funniest.

Bill never did actually answer me, though, and Onebox disappeared into what was then Phone.com and Bill got filthy rich (which I think is nice, because I liked Bill a lot) and I never found out.

Wave is just like Onebox. What Google is trying to build is something that will allow me to sweep money-making objects into my communication stream. They are building new inventory, in other words — a new delivery model that will allow for advertising separate from their core search model.

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If Bing does nothing else but boost the ampage around “conversational” search, it will be enough of a victory for me to be delighted it’s there. This blog entry detailing a Google exec’s gracious consideration of the search newcomer’s strength is delightful, and even lacks what would have been the justifiable reflection that Google, with its “related search” autoclusters and pocket-door navigational aid was already headed in this direction. (Mind you, being the steward of the best-known interface on the planet is no small responsibility, and threatens to trigger paralysis in even the finest user design guru. Ask David Shen, who faced many such a challenge.)

I saw this jump-and-take-notice blog entry via my colleague Jim Lundy. There’s a bug in Google Apps Synch that causes problems for Microsoft’s desktop search client. Desktop search from Microsoft has been OK in early generations, and in my experience with clients it’s frequently selected as a corporate standard when companies want desktop search but want to pay little or nothing for it and want it managed (and both conditions occur much of the time).

It reminded me of when Enfish had a problem that knocked down my .ost file for an afternoon while I was at a client. I fixed it by resynchronizing — I was new to using a corporate-supported server for email, after years of an ISP that’s long ago been sucked into the vast vortex of telcom 1x revs acquisitions, so that was a new concept to me — and all was well. I told Enfish, and they blamed Microsoft.Maybe they were right — too much time has passed one possibly to know. But i remember that horrible lurch when I though for an instant that my .ost was dead.

People frequently say to me that I have an impressive memory, which is how you can tell they don’t know me all that well. My memory’s a train wreck - it’s my software that’s good. I remember emotional moments, but few of those are related to my .ost’s or .pst’s.

So I can imagine the shrieking intensity that happens when people fear their email is lost or damaged. Imagine doing a search and discovering what you know should be right there hasn’t been indexed. Whew. Scary. My sympathy to the folks facing this bug, and my best wishes for a swift and effective resolution.

I’ve been busy this week (while you, doubtless, lounge on a fainting couch and nibble chewy bits of fruit dipped in syrup and dredged in nonpareils) and so have Allen Weiner and Andrew Frank. Our research note on the launch of Bing shipped last week. It’s got good points, one of which is that without the success of Bing, this could be the end of the line for Microsoft’s natively developed MSN. I can’t help wondering how many times one might have said that before, though. Probably roughly the same number of times one might have predicted the rise of the next Yahoo-, AltaVista- or Google-killer.

When WolframAlpha hit the media,  we got a flurry of inquiry about it from Advanced Technology groups and investors. People wanted to know: Google killer? IBM killer? Yahoo killer? We said, we don’t know, really, we gotta see it work. (Luckily, at the time at least, all I covered was enterprise search, so I could just get out the big DELETE key and keep smacking it with my palm.)

WolframAlpha was a Large Launch. Like I said recently, big launches don’t confront me any more. But Wolfram Alpha did quite well, with broad media coverage. The risk is that when everybody (who cares) about something starts hearing about it, they don’t go with the idea of hope in mind; they go to PLOKTA and see what goes wrong.

These ploktistas — of which I admit to be one — generally used to just bounce up and down in their chairs and say to themselves, “Well, I guess they’re not so darned smart.” My classic query that I used to plokta Web search was about Blue Star Acid. Google handles it EXTREMELY well. (Looks like it might be a keymatch. Not that that is a bad thing, mind you.) Then we they got blogs, which let us them broadcast, to literally dozens thousands of readers, what they thought.

Now we have hashtags (on Twitter). Try #wolframaplhafail. That revealed to me this blog entry, which admittedly I might have found before, had I been reading it. What I would not have found were folks’ little microsnarks, such as Which color is the new black? And I went and made my own, including Florida National Parks (uhm, hello? Everglades?) The #fail hashtag wouldn’t exist without a hype balloon to deflate in a raspberry buzz.

Again: Write this down. No more Big launches. Launch small; excel; then compete and evangelize.

I noted recently that Big Launches are No Man’s Friend. On the other hand, though, the next day I got a taste of why they still happen and developed a handy conspiracy theory to go with it.

So, I was talking to the folks at SimplyBox Tuesday. They briefed me and a colleague who write about the componentization of content, but what SimplyBox is about is snatching bits from Web sites and saving them so you can come back later. First vendor I knew that did this, kinda, was Documagix. That was 1996, and they were very very basic, but over the next few years the idea blew up — by 1999, there was a company called Octopus.com, and I knew some other people who never got much off the ground. Ultimately (by which I apparently mean penultimately) there was Clipmarks. And now SimplyBox.

SimplyBox has not had a big launch, of which I heartily approve. And yet, because Google Wave has had a big launch, SimplyBox — which started out explaining how email wasn’t good, and we can all agree with that — has to answer how it fits in with Wave. Hate Wave, work with Wave, differentiate from Wave — gotta talk about Wave. We all do. We can call it the “Wave vision.” We can call it the “Wave model.” We can say, “Have you read the Wave API?” (In which case, if you’re me, the answer is, “Do I look like I’m trying to dig out my brain with a grapefruit spoon? If not, you can assume I have not read an API yet today.”)

But, no matter what, because Google went Big with the Wave, they shut down the conversation. Just like Amazon shut down its competition with the affiliate program (”Hey! I can get an Ingram Book account and I’m a bookstore! Or I could be an Amazon affiliate…mmm…free money…donuts…[silence]), Google’s elegance of vision and apparently superior video (Sorry, was gonna watch it, but Ghost in the Shell 2 is still in the player) shuts down any competition.

Which makes one say — hey, wait a sec’. Google had 200 — I dunno, 100? a bunch — of developers working in Sydney for two years. (In Whit development years, that’s 5 hours of raw code. You want REM lines? That’s extra. Call for rates.) Why launch now?

Maybe they needed to shut somebody down. Constellation pushed early. Atcive Desktop shut it down. Maybe there’s another wave out there to combat Wave — something from Microsoft, or IBM, or…probably not, though. But if there was, and Google had seen it coming? CRASH. Ha-ha-ha-haaaah! WIPE-OUT!

The point is — sometimes a launch is just a launch. And sometimes it’s a pre-emptive strike.

OK, campers, here’s my PostSecret: I blew off the Netscape keynote when they announced Constellation.

Thanks to flickr’s termie for the image.

Now you know. Well, you know what my secret is. I bet a lot of you — even most of you — are sitting there right now asking yourselves, “Why did I click that RSS feed thing?” Well, no, maybe not yet — but you don’t remember Constellation, either.

Hint: “Push.”

Another hint: “Microsoft introduced Active Desktop to combat it.”

Last hint: “It went in the midden with everything else related to push technology except that software update thing.”

The point is, I missed the part of the Comdex keynote when Netscape showed off Constellation. At the time, that was roughly equivalent to skipping the announcement of Wave at Google I/O. (Please, for the love of all that is not holy, per se, tell me you have tattooed that great Wave logo on your naked cheek by now, like all the other cool kids.) I found out about it on CNN, that night, in my room in Las Vegas’s elegant Four Queens hotel. (I liked staying in the Four Queens, because I could look out my window at point blank range upon the fabulous light show.) I was eating a room service cheeseburger, and I was absolutely stricken. Missing something like that — well, you know how (legitimately) exciting Wave is for developers and Web People Who Know? Well, Constellation was like that then for the business side of IT, for the people who had discovered that Microsoft could not be presumed to successfully dominate every aspect of technology, and that there were alternatives to discussing the shortcomings of HTTP 1.1 at dinner, and so forth.

These were rock star years. The Rolling Stones introduced Windows 95. Netscape was itself a celebrity. And the fact that I missed the Constellation launch, on the Big Stage in Vegas, about 10 years ago? Zero impact. Less than zero. I had a cheeseburger I can remember! That’s a mark in the “plus” column.

My frustration with Wave and Wave coverage in general stems from my grounding in those hype-driven years, just as did my frustration with the Bing blast. (There’s a truck. Like you would doubtless expect.) It’s not just hype. Stealth launches can create hype, too, but it’s more manageable, and even a lame literature major like myself can see where it’s going, and why.

The enormous Wave wave — at least in our teacup here in technology — seems practically designed to disappoint. The good news is that we are all saying it will be a long time before Wave matters. But we’re simultaneously being overwhelmed by superpositive messages from a world yearning desperately for unequivocally good news.

I credit Google: No rock stars; no trucks; just a video shown to the faithful with a clear technical message (to people like my colleague Ray Valdes) that backs its claim. Bing shouldn’t have banged the gong so loud.

But what I yearn for, as I said earlier, is a no-launch world. Twitter didn’t have a debutante party; nor did Facebook; nor did Myspace; nor, for that matter, did Google. It’s the products that don’t have to be sold or even rolled out that have the most impact.

Wave’s launch is proper; I suspect it is the yearning the world has for Great New Things (and I have said that a desire not to be bored is what will keep America and the rest of the world from economic despondency) that resulted in superhype.

Same advice goes for any major new venture just now, though: Co-exist with what’s there. Google is not going away, and nor is Microsoft, nor mainframes, nor databases. And launch soft: Prove yourself first; then compete.