Pattern Finder

For Me, Firefox 2.0 Definitely Starts Up Faster than IE 7

After my post on Thursday about why I was sticking with Firefox, Peter Gurevich, the Performance Product Manager for Internet Explorer, left a comment on my blog asking me to get in touch with him to see if he could offer any pointers on how to make IE 7 faster.

So, figuring that facts would help -- and having been a Customer Support Engineer in a previous life -- I ran some tests. Happily, after claiming in public that Firefox was faster at loading, I wasn't hallucinating. Here are the results, which I've sent along to Peter:

IE 7 vs. Firefox 2.0: Firefox Wins for Me

I've been running the released version of Internet Explorer 7 since it was released, and I downloaded Firefox 2.0 yesterday. If IE 7 had blown me away, I was going to de-install Firefox. I've used Firefox since its early days, due to its speed and tabbed UI. But I keep IE around because some sites don't work well -- or even function -- with Firefox. I was amenable to going back to IE because I find it a bit of a pain to switch back and forth.

But, unfortunately, while IE 7 certainly got into the general ballpark of Firefox, it didn't blow by it. And, at least for me, IE 7 loads incredibly slowly, while Firefox 2.0 got even zippier. So I'll continue to lead a schizophrenic existence. (I'm still futzing around with which Firefox theme to use -- I used Qute in the past, but it doesn't work with 2.0. The theme Mostly Crystal leads at the moment.)

Oracle's Content DB - Document Infrastructure

When I was talking yesterday with Rich Buchheim, Oracle's Senior Director of Product Management, Content Products and Strategy, he made an interesting point. "We view Content DB as the underpinning for all content in the enterprise -- not only content currently outside of document management systems, but even the content within those systems. Open Text is reworking their software to access documents stored in Content DB, so it's conceivable that a company will eventually get all of its content living in Content DB, no matter which content management repository UI the users work with."

This brought me up short, since I'd certainly been thinking of Content DB as a play for content outside of the usual suspects -- Documentum, Interwoven, Stellent, Vignette -- but clearly Rich has a grander vision. Whether Oracle is the vendor that can get everyone to do that is an open question, but I do think some form of ubiquitous content infrastructure is where the market is heading.

It's a bit ironic that Microsoft had the vision early, circa 1995 with Cairo and then WinFS, but it's Oracle that has beat them to the punch.

The Downfall of ECM: Users That Can't Be Bothered

One of the sessions I attended yesterday at Oracle OpenWorld had the unexciting title of, "Building Applications with Oracle Secure Enterprise Search." What it really was about was why A.T. Kearney tossed out PC DOCS and installed Oracle Secure Enterprise Search (SES) to track its intellectual property generated by consulting engagements.

Basically, the A.T. Kearney consultants revolted against all the work they had to do to submit documents to the PC DOCS system. Driven by billable hours, they said, "I'm not spending 15 minutes filling out metadata fields." So, compliance was minimal and the company couldn't reuse material it had already created.

After looking at Documentum, IBM Omnifind, Microsoft SharePoint, Oracle SES, and Verity, A.T. Kearney chose Oracle SES. Consultants submit their documents to a team area, the system crawls them, and the company now knows what it knows. In the past, compliance hovered in the 10% area; now it's around 80%.

TSA Theatre

I flew out to San Francisco yesterday from Boston to attend Oracle's OpenWorld Conference, and got to see some "TSA theatre" in action. I had put all my liquids and gels in the required 1 quart bag, and one of the screeners saw that one of the items was saline solution for my contact lenses.

"That's over the limit!" she yelled. "That's a 4 ounce container and you're only allowed 3 ounces." I started to explain that the TSA regulations on the TSA Web site said a 4 oz. container of saline solution was OK as long as you declared it (probably because a lot of people wear contact lenses and you can't buy a 3 oz. container from any supplier). But before I could get started she said with a huge wave of imperiousness, "But I'll check with my superior to see if he'll make an exception," implying that she was doing me a huge favor, as opposed to following the rules as written. After about three minutes -- I'd made it through the screening by then -- she returned announcing, "Well, he made an exception this time," darkly hinting that I'd better not try it again. I pointed out that there hadn't been any similar histronics when I flew out of Logan last week, and she said, "I can't imagine why they allowed that."

Last week I sat with a woman on the flight back from Minneapolis and she'd had her cosmetics confiscated. She'd packed them in her checked baggage on the way out and hadn't really thought about gathering them together on the flight back. She did have the quart bag, but had few things in it. There was plenty of room in the quart bag for her cosmetics, but TSA wouldn't allow them to transfer them to it. She'd turned up with an almost empty plastic bag and she wasn't going to pull any last minute shennigans on TSA, no sirree.

I do get riled by episodes like this, but then I think, "Still, it's cheaper than going to see Robin Williams perform." You've just got to stand back and enjoy the show.

Free Multivariate Testing, Courtesy of Google

Google has recently begun offering a public beta of something it calls Website Optimizer.

Here are three descriptions of what it does:

• Google: "Without extensive experience or resources, you can run multivariate experiments on landing page content, including headlines, promotional copy, and images."
• My plain English description: Website Optimizer allows clients to test different designs for the same web page to see which one is most popular with visitors.
• A longer-winded description from my recent Content Analytics report: "A/B testing discovers whether users prefer item A or item B. In the past, in-person interviewers asked people their preferences. Online testing speeds the process by tracking which item web visitors click on, or prefer, more often. Multivariate testing is a much more sophisticated form of A/B testing; it could be called “A–Z testing.” It displays many more options (say, 25 to 50) and, using statistical methods, discerns which ones are the most popular. Rather than forcing users to choose between polar opposites, multivariate testing lets them select from a much wider array of options, and hence highlights preference clusters. It offers shades of gray, rather than black or white. Extremely difficult when done by hand, multivariate testing is much easier in the online world."

Google's offering this service for free is a huge step forward. Ten years ago, similar testing of different product package designs would have cost tens of thousands of dollars. A company would have had to create paper mockups, convince appropriate test subjects to take time out of their day and turn up for interviews, and then hire interviewers to ask the right questions and collate the answers.

My Content Analytics Report is Now Available

Burton Group published my report on Content Analytics yesterday. The official title is, Content Analytics: Assessing the Value of Corporate Content. Although I've been covering web analytics for a number of years -- actually, I was the first industry analyst to write a major report on the subject, back in 2000 --  content analytics is the next wave. Web analytics (made up of technologies such as clickstream analysis, search analytics, A/B and multivariate testing, RSS analytics, and blog analytics) monitors how content is consumed: the back end. But most enterprises do a terrible job of costing out the front end: the content creation process.

Content analytics is about analyzing the entire content creation and consumption process as a way to optimize it. Given that large Web sites now field large editing staffs (40 or 50 is not uncommon) and maintain tens of thousands of Web pages per site, they need to update the content that users find relevant and stop wasting their time putting up content no one reads.

Or as the report summary says, 

EMC's Getting Out of the Way of the SharePoint Train

EMC Documentum and Microsoft today announced an alliance that integrates SharePoint 2007 with EMC's Documentum products. Some of the high points are:

• Users will be able to use the Office 2007 and SharePoint 2007 user interfaces as ways to put content into the Documentum repository. All of a sudden, users -- especially casual users -- won't have to go to Documentum training to use the Documentum system.
• EMC Documentum will be creating a set of Web Parts to integrate search, workflow, and content between Documentum and SharePoint.
• There are two deployment options. Companies can use the Office/SharePoint UI to put documents into Documentum only, or can put documents into both SharePoint and Documentum.

So what does all this mean?