A Misguided Battle For Desktop Productivity?

By Kyle McNabb

Anyone else getting social networking fatigue? What about frustration with too much choice in email, calendaring, instant messaging, and content authoring & publishing tools? Do you think you're more or less productive as a result of all the technology being thrown at you at work and outside of work? These questions, and more, are the focus of our ongoing research into the needs of information workers and the future of desktop productivity. What's struck me as a part of this research is how out of touch many established and new desktop productivity vendors are with the needs of information workers.

Findings from our research will be published in early Q2 2008, but I wanted to share a few observations:

- The technology line between work and life has blurred to the point of obscurity. Ten years ago, most information workers wouldn't associate many of the tools they used at work to what they would do outside of work. People, yes people, use this type of technology at home, at work, online, and offline. Information workers aren't expressing the need for a new word processor, but they can be found wishing for help managing business and personal contacts — many of which may be in Facebook, LinkedIn, or on their desktop. They also can be found wanting for help managing their time, not just at work but in life. They want access and visibility into their work calendars, personal calendars, and if they have a spouse or kids, their family calendars. Many of these people use Outlook at home, not just at work. And these people don't just have one email account, they have multiple — work, Hotmail, Google, Yahoo!, AOL, you name it!
- Yet many Microsoft alternatives may be too narrowly focused. With the possibility of taking a half a point to even a full point of desktop productivity market share away from Microsoft (or some $50 million to $100 million annually), no one can blame vendors like Adobe, IBM, Sun, Google, Thinkfree and others for taking a shot at Office. But we've learned that information workers — the people that use desktop productivity tools to get their jobs done — don't see great value in having a low cost alternative to Microsoft Office. A Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Access alternative, without an equivalent to Outlook (even if it is offered as an online service), for many of these people is basically 'ho hum'. For many we've spoken to, the novelty of the online service wears off quickly, and they revert back to using Microsoft Office or OpenOffice.org derivatives because they're useful offline. Frankly, these people (information workers) want something more innovative, something they can look at and believe they'll be more productive — and suffer less  fatigue — as they use it.

Desktop productivity's future will include more choices for people. And a few vendors will certainly establish themselves as low cost/no cost Microsoft Office alternatives. But I'm convinced we've yet to see real innovation in this area. I think we'll see real innovation when technologists look beyond trying to imitate Microsoft Office and instead:
1) Tackle the work/life needs of information workers. What could this mean? A real focus on personal information management to help information workers (people) keep the personal and business information they want and need, organize it, and help them use it while online and offline. Maybe it'll help them keep track of all their calendars and events. Maybe it'll help them keep tabs on personal and business contacts, without requiring them to jump from one site to the next. It could lead to using email as a social networking means — something Yahoo! referred to as Inbox 2.0 (enough 2.0 already). Whatever it does, it will have to address the information worker's fatigue associated with too much information and too many tools.
2) Stop insisting people use their technology as a distinct tool. I'm not convinced, based on what I've learned from this research, that the next great innovation in desktop productivity will result in a brand new tool. Instead, perhaps innovation will materialize from those that choose to work within the tools many information workers already use. For many information workers, the day begins and ends in Microsoft Outlook. For others its Lotus Notes. Perhaps, just perhaps, technologists should look at making these established tools work better for information workers, versus thrusting new tools with their own distinct user interfaces at information workers. I know some of my own social networking fatigue would be addressed if I just had one place to go to access and use all my personal and business information (emails, contacts, you name it) whether I'm online or offline.

My opinion, for the technologist(s) that can address the work/life needs of information workers, the world will be their oyster. What do you think? Comments below, or email me your thoughts.

More Reasons For Microsoft/FAST Search Transaction

By Boris Evelson

While I echo my colleagues' earlier comments on the Microsoft/FAST Search transaction, I also give Microsoft thumbs up for being the first of the major BI vendors to embrace alternative DBMS for BI. For a while now I've been predicting that alternative DBMS for BI will gain continually increasing momentum for the following reasons:

• Traditional relational databases were designed from the ground up for transaction processing, not BI. Only in the last decade have they even begun to accommodate BI-style queries, and still play a constant balancing act between OLTP and OLAP optimization. Columnar databases, such as Vertica, Sybase IQ, KX, ParAccel, SAND Technology, InfoBright, are specifically designed and optimized for nothing but OLAP query processing. Their schemas are also much more flexible since it's as easy to drop, add, or update a column in a columnar database as it is to insert, change, or delete a row in a relational database.
• A similar argument points to the fact that relational databases are pushing their limits in their capabilities of storing and processing unstructured content. Search, storage, and processing are less of an issue here; instead the inherent inflexibility and rigidity of relational schemas don't lend themselves naturally to unstructured content processing. An I&KM professional typically needs to know the kinds of questions (queries) that will be asked and what types of future analysis will be required to model data for structured BI. But unstructured content in BI is unpredictable by nature, having no room for predefined schemas. Index-based DBMSes such as those from FAST Search and Endeca, on the other hand, are nothing but indexes with embedded data. They require no schemas, are infinitely more flexible than relational databases, and can handle structured data just as naturally as they handle unstructured content.

I am sincerely hoping that Microsoft/FAST Search transaction is yet another confirmation of this trend. Among other large BI vendors, SAP has already bought into the trend with SAP BI Accelerator appliance which is based on a columnar-like search index.

What's next? SAP, Oracle, or IBM may acquire Endeca — major FAST Search competitor. Sybase IQ, the major columnar DBMS player, must also be a target on Oracle or IBM's list.

Microsoft Buys Into High-end Enterprise Search With FAST

By Leslie Owens and Ken Poore

The value of high-end search technology was demonstrated today as Microsoft offered to acquire FAST Search & Transfer for approximately $1.2b. The transaction, endorsed by FAST management and key investors, is expected to be completed in 2Q08. We see this as a good deal for FAST, a good deal for Microsoft and a good deal for customers. This is a transformative event for the enterprise search industry.

Let’s set the stage: for years, pure-plays like Autonomy, FAST, and Endeca have shouldered the burden of explaining the rationale for enterprise search as they have defined the market.  Now infrastructure players like Microsoft, Oracle and IBM have woken up to this opportunity. This year will be the year to determine what enterprise search is, and what it isn’t: A platform? A system? A feature? Where does it belong in the enterprise and what is it for?

With this acquisition, Microsoft leapfrogs IBM and Oracle, who have both been rolling their own nascent search initiatives -or doing small acquisitions. Microsoft is now in a strong position to offer a full menu of search products, from basic implementations that compete directly with Google’s appliances to high-end, massively scalable media and commerce systems. They also significantly extend into features like auto-categorization, entity extraction, and clustering.

For Microsoft, FAST makes a lot of sense. Microsoft’s current search strategy was centered on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) and its spin-off Microsoft Search Server Express. SharePoint’s search has consistently been criticized by high-end search providers as too lightweight – its SQL Server-dependent engine never proved to scale massively, and its search across unstructured content was superficial when compared to the deep semantic algorithms of market-leading search vendors. FAST’s strong search technology delivers Microsoft needed credibility outside the firewall and among major media outlets. And the acquisition saves Microsoft the cost and time of completely re-architecting its own search house. In addition to scalability, Microsoft buys itself into the big leagues with an enterprise-savvy connectivity solution in FAST’s Unity search federator. 

FAST’s strengths are derived from a well-regarded search technology platform that is at the core of many media, entertainment, communications, retail, and financial services web sites. FAST’s engine also powers the search in many large enterprises, reaching across the breadth of intranets, file shares, content management, databases, and other core business content sources. FAST touts Comcast, Best Buy, Deutsche Telekom, Reuters, Dell, TV Guide, CareerBuilder, and others as flagship customers—customers Microsoft shall claim as well.  FAST’s ESP platform, like the other leading search engines, brings a much stronger set of semantic and linguistic indexing capability that will greatly improve discovery of unstructured information over SharePoint’s limited keyword-centric search. 

FAST had a tough 2007, though. Well-publicized gaffes in how they recognized revenue forced a major restructuring of its management team, a realignment to focus on core (and lucrative) competencies, and a reduction in its workforce. What emerged was a company with a strong customer base and core technology that had a depressed stock price and was primed for takeover. Microsoft and FAST are established partners. Many SharePoint customers have already upsized their search to FAST when they outgrew the limits of SharePoint.

What does it mean to I&KM Pros managing a search initiative? If you are an existing SharePoint and FAST customer, you will (eventually) have a simplified vendor relationship, a changing professional services model, and a strengthened R&D team behind this functionality. You should save money on licensing too. For I&KM Professionals just starting to evaluate products, it will be harder to justify the purchase of an independent search company when the enterprise is already aligned behind Microsoft as an infrastructure solution for business productivity. Current customers of pure-plays Autonomy or Endeca should prepare to defend their choices with IT and business stakeholders who may be influenced by Microsoft/FAST’s unified infrastructure story.

On the positive side, we expect this acquisition will drive down the price point for high-end search. Microsoft won’t be able to slide in a line-item that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars into a SharePoint license agreement or the price tag for a SharePoint installation will become too big to swallow. This pricing pressure will have a ripple effect through the industry. Those who are negotiating new license agreements with independent search companies like Autonomy will soon have a big stick to use. This acquisition is another linchpin in Microsoft’s enterprise workplace strategy--FAST fills a big hole for enterprise-scale information discovery and it further builds SharePoint’s momentum for content management and collaboration.