Ba Da Bing!

Microsoft has recently launched it's new search engine, called Bing, with a massive advertising campaign. Excuse me. It's not a search engine. It's “the worlds first decision engine.” Whatever that means.

Okay, I know what that means. At least what Microsoft wants you to think it is. The thrust of the marketing campaign is that you get better tools for deciding which sites to bother. Of course, that's not the real purpose of Bing. At its heart, Bing is about sticking Google in the eye with a pointed stick. Not unlike the purpose of Google Chrome which is to kick Internet Explorer in the groin. As good as they are, neither delivers the knockout that these companies would like to deliver. And so it goes.

Being the hopeless tech geek that I am, I couldn't help messing around with Bing and found a few interesting surprises. The unique features that Microsoft has created have led me to use Bing pretty much the way I approach Chrome – it is more useful in certain circumstance but won't change my everyday habits.

Google is still my go-to search engine for most everyday uses in the much the same way Firefox is my everyday browser. When I want something quick and dirty, Google is my engine of choice. That's not going to change. It excels at finding the usual stuff quickly. If what I'm looking for will pop up in the first three entries, Google is great. Its clean interface helps, providing users the basics like the site name and summary, so that it is easy to identify a site quickly.

Bing is different. It is really good at organizing result sets. Like Google, you can toggle between different types of searches, such as Images, Video or News, using links at the top of the page. Unlike Google, the information on the page is arranged into logical categories, specific to the search, with the best hits displayed in each category. You can see more of the them if you like but that's usually pointless. If what you want is not in the top five hits, its not anywhere in the results.

For example, in searching for Helen Kane (a singer from the 1930s that was the model for Betty Boop), I get general results, then categories such as Songs and Albums. Even better, on the left side are similar searches. In this case, actors and musicians from the late 1920's and early 1930's are featured. Makes sense.

Together, these two features make it easier for me to drill into just what I want without complicated queries. For more obscure information, Bing makes it easier to find what I need by guessing some structure and organizing the results accordingly.

Another feature that Microsoft is touting is the little popup on the side of each entry that gives a more intelligent summary of the site. It's fine for what it does but is more of an amusement than a useful tool. You don't get enough to avoid clicking through to the site and the simple summary on the page is usually enough to decide if you want to click through in the first place. Cool technology in search of meaning.

There is yet another advantage to Bing, though the same could be said for Yahoo, Ask, and any other search engine – different results. The dirty little secret of all search engines is that the same query often returns different result sets. The search algorithms are based on statistical equations that can return different sets even when run on the same data. You can sometimes get different results from the same data set by rerunning the same queries on the same engine. Since the search is kind of fuzzy, the result set is not absolute. This has long been one of the reasons that professional researchers will often use more than one commercial database provider even when the underlying data is the same. I saw this a lot in the patent search game.

All that is to say that using multiple engines for particularly difficult searches is a good strategy in any event. When the quick Google search fails to get me what I want, I can now turn to Bing. I get some different results and some better organization.

Technology-wise, Microsoft has come up with excellent search software. Unfortunately, that is not enough to move people toward abandoning Google and using Bing as the search engine of first choice. Instead, it will be where you go when Google doesn't cut it. Good technology but bad business. Bad business because Bing needs advertising and lower hits translates to lower revenue. Bing is not a Google killer. More of a Google annoyer.

Let me put it another way. It's not going to go Ba Da Bing on Google.

FCoE is Rubbish

I'm beginning to understand the debate about the Fiber Channel over Ethernet (FcoE) concept and I don't like it. At first it made little sense to me. iSCSI delivered most of what we needed in terms of cheap SANs. It leveraged the IP infrastructure already in place in just about every organization in the world. iSCSI also made use of 40 years of experience, knowledge, and training. For high performance you went with Fiber Channel since iSCSI couldn't meet the very high loads of some systems. Otherwise, iSCSI was good enough for a lot of applications.

So why FCoE? The cost structure is likely to be higher than iSCSI or at best the same. The performance wouldn't be the same as pure FC. The idea that you need a gateway to the IP network doesn't really make sense to me either. Who really does that anyway? A few folks doing long distance SANs perhaps but there are tools for that and cost is not a big problem in those environments. You can always gateway to iSCSI if needed and the hardware for that already exists.

Then it occurred to me. It's marketing, stupid! When networking vendors such as Cisco go out and sell their SAN products, they are generally on the same footing as the FC players like Brocade. Brocade has more experience and knowledge about SANs which translates into an advantage for them. They also know the storage folks inside large companies that network vendors don't. Those storage guys like having their own flavor of network technology. It keeps the network admins out of their shorts.

Now, FCoE starts to make sense. You can sell IT on convergence or native integration or unified platforms or whatever marketing babble you choose. It is hoped that management will rally around the idea of having one networking platform even for two different types of network applications. Don't kid yourself, SANs and LANs are very different network applications with very different technology needs.

Best of all, as a networking vendor you have the upper hand in the sale. You can insert your champions (the core networking folks) into the process. You can sell expertise that the FC guy doesn't have. The worst case scenario has you on equal footing to the FC vendor where you can sell on the merits of the products. Of course, with 30 more years of experience in Ethernet, you will have a few tricks up your sleeve that the FC guy doesn't. Nice position to be in.

FCoE as a convergence/integration/unified platform play is rubbish. No one is going to run SAN traffic and LAN traffic over the same Ethernet network. It will still be two pools of equipment, much of it specialized to FCoE. Most of the real networking expertise in a company is in the IP space so no real advantage there. Once you start to install the specialized FCoE switches and NICs (or brand new unified platforms using a forklift I imagine) the costs won't be that much different.

iSCSI makes sense in so far as it provides a low cost SAN option for low to mid-performance SANs. Old fashioned FC makes sense because it provides a proven high performance storage networking capability for intense applications. FCoE does neither. All it does is give networking vendors a leg up against existing FC vendors.

Great marketing I must admit. Not convincing technology but a good way to position SANs as just another network flavor. If there is a technology advantage here it doesn't seem to create much of a business advantage for the IT folks.

I'm sure I'll get a bunch of hate mail telling me all the minor advantages of FCoE, many from corporate mouthpieces. Instead of wasting your time on that, tell me why someone will pay money for FCoE rather than iSCSI or FC. Tell me why we need to gateway SANs from FC to Ethernet which can't be routed and hence not good for wide area applications like remote backup.

Don't go down the road of the unified platforms either. Saying you need FCoE to create unified networks is not true and, at best, self serving. Unified platforms happen because of software not Ethernet.

Just don't say convergence, okay.

Software Collectivism

What makes great software? Better yet, why do some companies or institutions make great software for awhile then push out mediocre product? On some level, it might be because they simply run out of good ideas. As software companies become more successful they also become so focused on giving customers what they ask for that they no longer leave room for innovative and inspired ideas. I've seen that a lot. The accountants and the operations people get involved. All the creativity gets sucked out of the process and the result is boring, me-too, and incremental.

The bigger problem may be environmental. The best software organizations often started out as lose associations of people, more like collectives or communes then traditional companies. Microsoft in it's early days was a bunch of guys sharing an apartment trying to score a big deal. It was freewheeling, creative, and irrational. How could this bunch of kids think they could land a deal with IBM, then the biggest computer company in the world? It was nuts but no one told them that.

There is a reason so many tech companies get started in college dorms. You concentrate smart people with no preconceived notions of what is (or more important isn't) possible. No silly meetings, just creative action. Yahoo and Google both started this way. Google is desperately trying to hold onto that part of the culture even as it grows to enormous size and influence. The same is true of Facebook.

What these companies have in common is that they are formed within a commune-like environment with few rules. This is critical since innovation is inherently irrational. You have to be willing to suspend the negative beliefs and inputs common in business. There has to be an acceptance of small failures and forks in the road as part of the process of creating greatness. No one told these “kids” that what they were doing was stupid. The only thing stupid was the amounts of money they made. The open source community was like this in the beginning. A virtual commune if you will. All could participate and contribute whatever they could. Everyone could reap the rewards of the results too.

Collectives are common in the art world. Groups of artists get together in loose confederations to bring individual talents to bear on a project. Once the project is done, the artists move on to other projects and other associations.

Software is like art. It is unpredictable, creative, and inspired when done right. Like a group of artists, programmers need to keep a single and irrational (there's that word again) focus on producing something wonderful without being bothered by the corporate drones. A commune-like environment helps maintain that focus and keeps at bay those who would suck the air out of the room with negativity.

These environments can be recreated in the corporate world. Back in the 1990's I had the pleasure of working in a group like that. We were isolated from the day to day operations of the company, both physically and psychologically. What came out of that group was spectacular with a few failures that we learned from. It didn't last long but it was great while it did.

So, if you want innovation in software, if you want new, inspired, and just plain cool products, then create software communes for your programmers. Keep them away from the corporate vampires that would suck the life out of them. Recognize that software is art not science and approach development that way. It might seem weird to the rest of the company which is exactly the point.

I feel inspired. Maybe I'll organize a software collective to create something awesome.