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.
4 responses so far ↓
1 Daniel Tunkelang // Jun 3, 2009 at 12:38 pm
At the Text Analytics Summit, Seth Grimes recited the Longfellow poem, “There Was a Little Girl”:
There was a little girl,
Who had a little curl,
Right in the middle of her forehead.
When she was good,
She was very good indeed,
But when she was bad she was horrid.
It was, as he noted, an apt description of Wolfram Alpha.
2 Wolfram Alpha so far, or, the Big Launch #fail risk // Jun 3, 2009 at 2:20 pm
[...] post by Whit Andrews aggregated by [...]
3 Wolfram Alpha so far, or, the Big Launch #fail risk « wolfram alpha blog // Jun 3, 2009 at 3:21 pm
[...] post: Wolfram Alpha so far, or, the Big Launch #fail risk 03 Jun 09 | [...]
4 Slick Bing Tricks: Limited Twitter Add, Diverse Sources // Jul 2, 2009 at 10:30 am
[...] 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. [...]
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