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Jason Stamper's Blog: May 2005 Archives
Recordable Radio: About Time Too
May 26, 2005
I've often bemoaned the fact that - despite video recorders having been around even longer than Betamax hasn't - you haven't been able get cheap radio recorder appliances. Well now you can.
Sure you could record the radio with a radio tape recorder, but how many of them have a timing facility like a video recorder? It's taken the switch to digital radio for the radio makers to think it worth their while to allow you to record the radio, and soon they'll all be adding timers just like on VCRs.
The Roberts Gemini 11 is a good example of this new trend, allowing you not only to record but to pause and rewind live radio broadcasts. Great for those moments when you're absorbed by a good old political ding-dong on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme, when a window-cleaner puts his ladder through an upstairs bedroom window (closed at the time, predictably).
The Pure Bug gets top marks for recording though - it can record the radio as MP3 files onto a removable SD card. You can play any MP3 on it too, and even hook it up to your PC via a USB cable to swap tracks between the two.
It's designed by Wayne Hemingway, co-founder of Red or Dead, and it's got quite a youthful look if you ask me. Said 'youf' will presumably be wanting it to record some 'urban flavas' or some-such incomprehensible musical genre - rather than Radio 4 - and amazingly the giants of the music industry don't seem to be up in arms about that just yet, despite their 'iPod tax' silly nonsense, which makes the Netherlands Officially The Worst Place to Shop For an MP3 Player.
Although having said all that, you could always just wait for the next BBC strike and hear radio programmes repeated that way.
Man on Littlewoods Cover Shock
May 24, 2005
News has broken that after 72 years of its catalogues, Littlewoods will for the first time be putting a man on its cover. Quite a change for the company, but not nearly such a change as has been inflicted on Littlewoods and other catalogue suppliers by the Internet.
Googling Google for 'Google'
May 20, 2005
You may remember back in February I performed a wholly unscientific comparison of Google, MSN Search and Yahoo!, in which I tried a search for the terms 'Google', 'MSN' and 'Yahoo!' in each of those search engines, to see who is the daddy of web search.
I thought it was time to update the metrics. Search has been back in the headlines this week as Google extended its desktop search efforts into the enterprise, offering "employees one-stop Google search for the desktop, intranet, or web", the latest piece of one-upmanship between the search firm and Microsoft.
Desktop search has been identified as the next battleground for Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and others, thanks to the perceived deficiencies of the search function in Windows, which Microsoft hopes to address in the Longhorn version of the operating system. Earlier this week, Microsoft brought its consumer desktop search out of beta and, as CBR had earlier reported, said it plans to deliver an enterprise version towards the end of the year.
Enterprise search is taking Google-like technologies in a completely different direction, enabling rapid retrieval of all sorts of enterprise information thanks to some nifty caching technology. MSN, Google and Yahoo have all upped the ante in the search space, but whose web search is the most comprehensive? My simple test involves searching Google, MSN Search and Yahoo! for the terms, 'Google', 'MSN' and 'Yahoo!'. Scientific it isn't. But the results are interesting.
When I performed this test in February, Google won hands down, finding 155 million occurrences of the term 'google', while MSN Search found 'google' 68.6 million times and Yahoo found it 58.1 million times. For the search terms 'MSN' and 'Yahoo!' the results were similar.
Try it now, and Google finds 'google' 261 million times (up 68% on February). MSN finds 'google' 65.3 million times (down 5% on February), while Yahoo found the term 178 million times (up a massive 206% from February).
The order is not the same for the searches of the terms 'MSN' and 'Yahoo'. 'MSN' was found by Google 61.5 million times, fewer than MSN (65.7 million) and Yahoo (135 million). The term 'Yahoo!' was found by Google 361 million times, Yahoo 351 million times, and MSN Search 104.6 million times.
What can we learn from this? Damned if I know. It seems though that Google is still the most comprehensive, with Yahoo coming in second and Microsoft Search third. Yahoo actually beat Google in this test in a search for the term 'MSN'. It is relatively early days for MSN Search, so perhaps it is still trawling through those millions of web sites and caching them for future search purposes.
As I noted last time I did this informal test, however, you can't rule Microsoft out. Apparently the company's ad campaign is going to include television, print, Internet and outdoor promotions. Microsoft marketing has deep pockets. Can Google compete with that level of publicity? We shall have to wait and see. The search engine wars are far from over, and enterprise search is the next battleground.
Salesforce.com vs. Microsoft Office? No Contest
May 18, 2005
You should never start an article, or even a blog entry, for that matter, with an apology. So I'm sorry to break that rule here, but I wanted to start by apologising that this entry is a little longer than I'm informed blogs should, in general, be. So if you are pressed for time you may not want to trawl through this article. If you're interested in salesforce.com, MS Office or the fact that some punters are saying salesforce.com will kill MS Office, then read on....
You see, I've become a little perplexed by a number of reports about media darlings salesforce.com. The company is unquestionably making hay in the on-demand CRM world while many of its historically client/server competitors flounder, and CEO Marc Benioff is undoubtedly rather good at sales and marketing. But although he used to report to Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, he's no more God than Ellison is (you'll remember perhaps the 1998 book by Mike Wilson, 'The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison: God Doesn't Think He's Larry Ellison').
So I was somewhat bemused by a story last month on an IT news web site (that I see no particular reason to name here) that ran with the headline: "Salesforce.com: The MS Office Killer."
To understand the context of the article you need to know that salesforce.com successfully sells its CRM software in a hosted manner and charges monthly rental instead of upfront licensing fees, but you probably knew that already. What you might have missed is that at an 'Integrationforce Day' event last month, Benioff previewed what he described as a web-based, on-demand operating system called Multiforce. The news site that described Multiforce as an MS Office killer offered this analysis: "When salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff coined the company tagline 'the end of software,' he wasn't kidding. He's planning to eat Microsoft's lunch."
So is Multiforce an MS Office killer? Salesforce.com says when Multiforce is launched this summer it will, "Allow salesforce subscribers to multi-task between multiple on-demand applications, all running in the same salesforce environment, with a single click.... Multiforce will extend the range of salesforce.com's vision of on-demand computing from running CRM to powering all of a business' on-demand applications written for the company's platform."
That last bit's the key: "all of a business' on-demand applications written for the company's platform". Multiforce is unlikely then to enable you to switch between your salesforce.com and existing, bespoke, homegrown applications in the same environment. The applications running on Multiforce will share the same salesforce.com data repository, remember. It's also unlikely to enable you to switch between your salesforce.com and Oracle, SAP or SSA Global applications in the same environment. Or, for that matter, enable you to switch between a Microsoft-style productivity suite and salesforce.com applications in the same environment.
What Multiforce will enable companies to do is switch between salesforce.com and other hosted applications, as long as they have been built by salesforce.com customers or partners, for the sforce platform, and with salesforce.com's Customforce development tool. Those are some rather large caveats if this was really going to compete with MS Office, which it clearly isn't.
Multiforce is not a hosted version of a suite of personal productivity applications like MS Office. Even if a salesforce.com partner tried to write one for the Multiforce environment, it would be tricky when they are limited to using the Customforce development tool - fine no doubt for building on-demand applications, but not quite what Microsoft's developers will turn to when building the next version of Office.
Microsoft isn't about to give salesforce.com the ability to bring Office into the Multiforce environment, not least because it already competes with salesforce.com in CRM applications. Anyway even if it did it wouldn't kill Office, but extend its reach.
Could salesforce.com bring something like Sun StarOffice into the Multiforce environment, and go up against MS Office? Potentially, but there's no reason more people would choose StarOffice on Multiforce than they would choose it standalone - and it's not exactly denying Microsoft sleep just yet as a standalone proposition - because Multiforce will only be attractive to salesforce.com customers, not the far broader market for Microsoft Office. Besides, if you want to access Microsoft Office applications in an on-demand manner you can do that perfectly well already using something like Citrix's Presentation Server.
Benioff is quoted in the article in question as saying, "We don't do applications like Word or Excel... but there are elements of Microsoft Office, like SQL Server, that we want to replace." Salesforce.com wants to replace SQL Server in every situation it is used as a CRM tool. It also wants to win Microsoft CRM customers and deny it CRM prospects. But Multiforce isn't Benioff's attempt to compete with Office. He hasn't got round to that just yet. Though knowing his ambition, that day will come eventually.
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