Pattern Finder

HP Buying Tower Software

Hewlett-Packard announced today that it was buying Tower Software, an Australian document and records management company.

Some interesting quotes in the press release:

1. "The deal will enable HP to expand its offerings in the fast-growing electronic discovery and compliance software market."
2. "The addition of Tower also is expected to enable HP Software to address the growing Microsoft SharePoint compliance and e-discovery opportunities."

Translated, that means that HP is buying it for both tactical and strategic reasons. Tactically, buying Tower Software will increase HP's revenue by allowing it to sell a more complete solution (Tower TRIM Context and the HP Integrated Archive Platform are already integrated). Strategically, buying Tower Software will connect HP to the SharePoint ecosystem, which is growing by leaps and bounds. Startups/small companies are selling solutions that fill gaps within SharePoint, and veteran providers (e.g., EMC/Documentum, Open Text, Tower Software) are integrating with SharePoint as a way to connect to information worker workflows.

This is yet another example of the silos of yesteryear (imaging systems that were separate from document management systems that were separate from records management systems, etc.) all toppling in a movement towards a more lifecycle approach.

Google Apps: Discovering That Microsoft Owns the Desktop

I've been updating my Google Apps report (the updated version should be out in several weeks) and in the course of making the revisions, I began to notice a pattern: Google is discovering--and reacting to the fact--that Microsoft still pretty much owns the information worker desktop.

In August 2007, when the first version of the report was published, Google Gmail only supported POP3. A user could use a different e-mail client to access Gmail, but the mail stayed on the server--there was no way to download the mail to a client such as Microsoft Outlook so that the user could access the mail offline. That changed later in 2007, when Google added IMAP support. At that point, an organization could move to Google Apps Gmail and a worker used to working in Microsoft Outlook would never know the difference (at least from an e-mail perspective). Earlier this year, Google announced synchronization between Microsoft Outlook and Google Calendar (one-way in either direction, or two-way: the choice is up to the user). This week, Cemaphore Systems announced that it was offering a product that would allow people to automatically synchronize their e-mail, calendar, and address books between Google Gmail and Microsoft Outlook.

In other words, Google Apps is morphing to become a backend service to Microsoft Office. (This doesn't mean that the Google Calendar and Gmail interfaces are going away, but rather that the Microsoft Office interfaces can take their place if an enterprise so desires.) This shift--one that Google really doesn't highlight--is a replay of what happened in the business intelligence (BI) space five years ago. Until that time, BI vendors would come in to brief me and rant and rave about customers using Excel: "Any company that performs BI within Excel is just plain stupid: there are multiple versions of the truth and the company spends an inordinate amount of time asking, 'Will the real numbers please stand up?' That company should be using our package to analyze the business." However, that rant never got anywhere: their customers, especially casual users, continued to work in Excel. Eventually, BI vendors such as Business Objects and SAS recognized they would never win the user interface battle, and took to developing Excel servers: the approved, corporate numbers sat on a BI server and fed them to workers using Excel.

This product strategy shift means that Google Apps now has two marketing stories: (1) it's cheap on the backend and frontend or (2) it's cheap on the backend. Google started with #1 (instead of paying Microsoft Office and Exchange license fees, pay $50 per user per year) but is now recognizing that may be too big a cultural leap for large organizations. So now it's offering option #2: (instead of paying Exchange license fees, pay $50 per user per year). With #2, the Google mantra of "Use Google Apps because it has a great consumer-tested UI" goes away, but the "less in your face" strategy may be more to enterprises' liking.

The "Computer Sayings" Hunt

There's an interesting post in the Bits blog of The New York Times entitled, "Did Bill Gates Really Say That?" It describes Fred Shapiro's quest to chase down the origins of computer-related sayings such as:

• "640K ought to be enough for anybody." [Attributed to Bill Gates; sitting here with 4 GB of memory in my PC, that estimate missed the mark.]
• "Do not fold, mutilate, or spindle." [I remember it as "Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate," as many commenters did.]
• "Garbage in, garbage out." [Mr. Shapiro tracks it down to 1959; twenty years later it was in full swing, as GIGO was drilled into me in my programming course at John Hancock.]
• "Information wants to be free."
• "I think there is a world market for about five computers." [Said during the days when computers cost millions of dollars and took up entire rooms.]
• "There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home." [Attributed to Ken Olsen of DEC. Again, another miss, at least in the Creese household, where the current census is three laptops, one desktop PC, and three PDAs.]
• "That's not a bug, it's a feature." [I was a product manager for nine years, and found this phrase very useful, especially near ship date.]
• "To err is human. To really foul up--it takes a computer."

The comments on the post are more interesting than the post itself. Some commenters go the geek route, giving mini-tutorials on memory assignments in the early IBM PC. Others do the historian thing, recalling conversations with Ken Olsen and retired IBM engineers. It's amazing how much knowledge is still out there about computing's early days--we just need to write it down.

An enjoyable read if you were into computers before the Internet arrived.

Smart Move: OpenOffice.org 3.0 to Support Read/Write of OOXML

According to a post at OpenOffice.org Ninja, OpenOffice.org 3.0 is planning to support the reading and writing of OOXML documents. This will not occur in the immediate future: OpenOffice.org 3.0 is about six months away (with OpenOffice.org 2.4 shipping in the meantime) and the screenshot included in the post shows a lot of work still needs to be done. However, this means that sometime in 2008 OpenOffice.org users will be able to easily share documents with workers or partners who are using the Microsoft Office 2007 default file formats.

What's interesting here is this appears to be a change in the OpenOffice.org stance from seven months ago. On August 15, 2007, Michael Brauer noted in a blog post, "First of all, Sun's OpenOffice.org developers are only working on import filters, that is, filters that read OOXML documents into OpenOffice.org. We are not working on export filters, that is, filters that save OOXML documents."

Whether it's a shift or not, the OpenOffice.org plan to import/export OOXML documents strikes me as both pragmatic and smart--although I'm sure the coding will be an absolute bear (see this post on the difficulty of importing shapes from OOXML). Most companies--and almost all end users--aren't interested in the ODF/OOXML debate: they just want to get their work done. Towards the end of 2008, OpenOffice.org users will be collaboration peers with enterprise users who use Microsoft Office 2007 (the vast majority) because they'll all  be using the same file format. At that point, some smart enterprises are going to say, "Hey, this pretty full-featured office suite plays well with my documents--and best of all it's free. We should look at switching from Microsoft Office."

Don't get me wrong--I don't think there will be a mass migration to OpenOffice.org 3.0. You can find plenty of blog comments where people say they prefer the fit and finish of Microsoft Office to that of Google Apps and OpenOffice.org. Furthermore, Microsoft has made sure that the tight integration/synergy between Office 2007 and SharePoint 2007 doesn't go unnoticed.

Nevertheless, I think we will start to see pockets of OpenOffice.org usage, especially if the economy continues to go south and IT departments start looking for ways to economize. Let's be real--if an IT department figures it can decrease its Microsoft Office license fees by a fifth by replacing 20% of its Office installs with OpenOffice.org--and without taking a huge hit in productivity or training costs--it will do so. Several years ago, people would have laughed if you'd said Apple would soon have 14% of retail PC market share in the U.S.--yet that's happened. Get ready for some interesting times.

AIIM 2008: The Highs and Lows of a Spectrum of Knowledge

I'm about to attend day three of the AIIM Conference. Each year I come to the same conclusion and each year I forget it; I figure this year I'll write it down in a blog post so I won't forget it for next year. The conclusion is: attending the AIIM Conference is a great way to be hit between the eyes with the wide spectrum of knowledge and quality in the content and collaboration space--from cutting-edge vendor demos, to presenters with great insights, to presenters just pitching their wares, to newbie attendees who aren't even sure what "content management" means.

I'll start with the last part. On Tuesday I was joined at the lunch table by two fellows who were just looking for a place to eat--open chairs were few and far between in the Food Court. We got talking, and when they realized I was an industry analyst, they couldn't believe their good fortune, because they had tons of questions:

• "I've heard people use the term 'damn'--what does that mean?" "Ah, they're saying 'DAM,' which stands for 'digital asset management'--those are systems that manage rich media, such as videos and big images."
• "How is SharePoint different from Documentum?" "Documentum is a longtime best-of-breed document management system that helps departments manage really valuable documents. SharePoint is a less-expensive, 'fill in the gaps' collaboration and content management system that helps enterprises track the more mundane, everyday memos."

They must have peppered me with questions for half an hour; a somewhat sobering thought, given that the AIIM Conference is full of attendees who have been doing content management for years. It's worthwhile remembering that those battle-hardened veterans are counterbalanced by those who are just starting out.

Then there's the presentations, which run the gamut. I attended one entitled, "Build Smarter Internal and External Communities via Social Networking Methodologies and Technologies," which was basically a rehash of a five-year-old presentation and ended with, "Please join my network." Not very insightful, and high on the self-promotion quotient. I attended one entitled, "The Future of Text Analytics" given by a Distinguished Engineer from IBM, and he spent most of the time talking about personalization and web analytics. Interesting, but not what I was looking for. On the other hand, I also saw one on implementing a taxonomy at The Hartford Insurance Group, and it was great--full of useful war stories.

Each year I hope the AIIM Conference will be full of only highs--but seeing the gamut of highs and lows can be educational as well.

AIIM Keynote: Pogue (Insight) and Google (A 30-Minute Ad)

I attended the AIIM keynote this morning by David Pogue (NY Times columnist) and Matt Glotzbach (Google). David talked for the first half hour; Matt talked for the second.

 

Matt's presentation, delivered under the guise of talking about "The Power of Simplicity," was actually a 30-minute ad for Google: "Let me show you e-mail in Google Apps.... This is an example of Google Spreadsheets.... Here's what Google Sites looks like...." Enough said.

 

In contrast, David Pogue actually took the assignment seriously: he talked about simplicity and referenced a variety of products in doing so.

He started off noting that users get easily confused. He talked about spending a day with Apple Tech Support and getting listen in on some of their conversations with customers. David noted, "You know when they say, 'This conversation may be recorded for quality assurance purposes,'--trust me, that's not why they do it. They do it so they can take the funny bits, burn them to a CD, and then play them at parties." David listened in on a conversation where a woman complained about her mouse squeaking too much. "Really?" said the CSR. "I've never heard that complaint before. What are you doing?" "Well, I'm taking the mouse and dragging it across the screen--and it makes this really awful sound." (As David's telling this story, everyone in the audience is thinking, "Now there's a winner..."). Then there was the fellow who was getting exasperated because his computer was still just sitting there doing nothing even though he kept typing "11." "Why are you typing 11?" asked the mystified CSR. "Well, because the message on the screen is telling me, 'Error type 11.'" (Once again, everyone in the audience is thinking, "Ooo, another winner...").

Given this level of misunderstanding, David said having products that are easier to use is a must. He said it was the iPod that started The Cult of Simplicity and began to stem the tide of feature bloat.

His advice to users was,

• If it doesn't work, it's not you.
• Be aware of good and bad design.

For designers, he recommended:

• Sweat the details
• Count taps (a reference to Palm device design, where three was the maximum number of taps allowed to complete a task)
• It's not what to add, it's what to leave out
• Simplicity sells
  

To buttress the idea of simplicity sells," he showed off his MacBook Air (3/4" thick, 3 pounds), and noted that when he opened it up on the plane ride from Florida to Boston on Monday, people three rows away were craning their heads to get a look at it. "The bad news is I didn't get any work done during the entire flight due to everyone quizzing me about it--but boy, what a chick magnet."

He concluded with two songs--literally. He had a Yamaha keyboard on stage and played it while singing two songs with high tech lyrics--one dinging the RIAA and the other talking about his yearning for an iPhone. (That's what happens when you put a Yale music major on stage in front of thousands of people--he performs.)

Presenting at AIIM Tomorrow on Content Analytics

I'll be presenting at AIIM tomorrow, talking about content analytics. The official title is, "Content Analytics: Using BI to Squeeze the Greatest Value Out of Your Content." The AIIM session name is BUI01; I'll be speaking at 1:30 on Tuesday; the synopsis is here.

Those of you who have read my report on content analytics know the thesis. For those who haven't, I'm arguing that we need to start putting the same metrics and processes in place for the content chain that we've had for decades in the supply chain. Otherwise, we may be overspending to generate irrelevant content and under-investing to generate relevant content. Without some kind of feedback loop in place, we're just guessing at how to create relevant content at a low cost.