I think that… there is two different things going on here. One is let say yes, the capabilities that exist on the open web advance far more rapidly than they would relative to enterprise. The challenges is that the environments are different, and therefore, they typically require a different sort of solutions, so that, there is this sort of transitional imitation that… what’s needed for the enterprise has to have go through a phase of being imitated into something else that works for the enterprise.
So I think that it is important that this imitation occurs, and continues to occur. I’ve not seen anything that’s really…. And maybe somebody can come up with a specific example for me, so that I could say “oh yeah, that’s right”. I’ve not seen really anything that’s really open to the, you know, global world, that works really in the enterprise. Because the conditions are different. I mean it’s a little nearly as the same differences as why Google doesn’t work in the enterprise. It’s a different environment.
Did she actually say anything here? It doesn’t work in the enterprise because the enterprise is “different”? Umm, okay. I actually agree, but I’ve got a few reasons for why and how they’re different. I found this while looking for others’ opinions on the same subject. This didn’t work for me, sorry.
The interview was short. The length of time required to unfold the issues with Google would take a bit more, but the short answer is that they’re two different problems. Google is organizing the ‘universe’ of content; an enterprise has a very specific focus carved out of that universe.
Google’s algorithms are based on ‘popularity’ (of sorts). Many times in business the content you really need to find is the most obscure thing that no one else is interested in.
In the enterprise you actually know something about your content and you want to intervene with the taxonomy.
The technology that originally addressed this best was FAST Search. But then Microsoft bought them and buried them (supposedly they’re still trying to integrate the technology with SharePoint, but to do so would require an entire rearchitecting of SharePoint — no way to know if that’s really happening).
That said, as a Norwegian company, they had American counterparts that somehow walked away with the entire code base: Attivio.
The sad part is, most IT groups are managed as if all technologies are self-running. The mindset of technology is that you do what is necessary to ‘operate it’ and fix it if necessary. IT has no real concept of ‘living’ technologies. Search is one of those.