The Future of Search is Simpler

Gary Szukalski, VP of Field Marketing at Autonomy,  gave a keynote speech at ESS West 2008 entitled "Meaning Based Computing" notable for its lack of vision. He was a replacement for Stouffer Egan, Autonomy's CEO, whose slides he likely used. The talk detailed the difficulties inherent in enterprise search, especially how challenging it can be to understand the full meaning of a word like "dog" or "shred" without context. We live in this world, we understand the difficulty.  While his talk outlined the direction of automatic categorization, alerts, profiles, dynamic and real-time clustering and schemas, it left me wanting real vision and a roadmap from the industry leader. He never rose above the complexity of information processing. 

In a sharp contrast, Google provided more vision in their 10-minute lunch pitch than Autonomy's same old key note speech. Google provided a clear vision: you can be up and operational in one day and search everything.  Simple to use and simple to administer.  In 2008, Google is not the naive implementation that we saw 6 years ago: they have made real progress toward their vision. While other companies are marching to that vision. Dieselpoint's OpenPipeline, Endeca's simple administrative controls, Fast's navigators, Autonomy's categorization, Google is providing the vision. The future is simpler and usable by everyone on the enterprise. We have along way to go - but we can change the business world.  We are moving closer to the vision of many sources of data providing insight and increasing the pace of business decisions.

Comments

[Ben]

here here!