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| Thursday, May 15, 2003 |
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Nice moon off tonight 
| | Unfortunately, we'll be at the tail end of this thing. When the moon rises, it will be in mid-totality. The picture above is how Starry Night forsees it. The inner ring is Earth's full shadow (umbra) and the outer ring is its partial shadow (penumbra). |
| | It's pretty close to our view, though; because we'll be up on the Santa Ynez mountains at nearly 4000 feet. The mountains on the horizon will be the Santa Monicas. So the moon will be rising through the haze over Los Angeles. |
Welcome ablog
Frontiers of Hyperbolia
| | Quentin Hardy's All Eyes on Google is the cover story of the latest Forbes. It's good, by which I mean that it mostly agrees with what I know. There's just one red herring: |
| | And now Google faces the most lethal threat of all: Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT -news -people ), aroused, is taking aim at the popular site. This bears an eerie resemblance to the rise — and calamitous fall — of Netscape, the first commercially successful Web browser. |
| | Will Google be the next victim of a Windows that swallows everything? |
| | The resemblances between Google and Netscape are pixel-deep. Selling browsers was a doomed business from the start. It was like selling the Web, or boxes of air. Bill Gates knew that, which was why he made Internet Explorer free in the first place. It was a brilliant move for which he deserves more kudos than blame. (That damn lawsuit by the feds should have been about something else, such as muscling hardware OEMs, where there might have been a case.) Netscape did have a good and growing business selling server-based software, and making the most of all kinds of disruptive Net-based stuff, such as LDAP. |
| | But, like it says here, Netscape got fatally paranoid about Microsoft: |
| | For a year or two, Netscape looked like it could do no wrong. It was a Miata being chased down a mountain road by a tractor trailer. As long as it moved fast and looked ahead, there was no problem with the truck behind. But at some point, Netscape got fixated on the rear-view mirror. That's where they were looking when they drove off the cliff. |
| | Google is already a helluva lot more substantial than Netscape ever was. What it's doing with advertising is brilliant and without equal or precedent — not because its business methods or technologies are cool, but because it plumbs the possibility that there just may be forms of advertising that users actually like, or even demand. That's because Google genuinely wants to do right by users. That's what I've gathered from Day One, and I've seen nothing yet to change my mind about it. |
| | Even if Microsoft buys Overture and Looksmart (as Hardy suggests it might), the company won't be able to duplicate the user-centric place where Google comes from. I also doubt they'll be able to beat Google on performance. I have yet to look up anything on AlltheWeb, Overture's best engine, that beats what I'll find on Google. Once in a long time, I'll find an answer on AskJeeves that isn't on Google. I'll give those folks credit for that one. |
| | Hardy has an interesting sidebar on Gary Flake, the chief scientist at Overture. Flake is highly dismissive of Google. And maybe what Flake's up to is as cool as it reads: |
| | "Web search is the most challenging field in computer science," says Flake. It calls on skills in operating systems, network architecture, artificial intelligence, linguistics, probability theory and fuzzy logic. A relevance ranking may evaluate relationships among words, page links, even a page's word count. He aspires to a search system with the ability to index 100 billion documents without falling apart. |
| | Flake plans to add machine learning, which improves each search by drawing on past efforts. Data from human editors who currently review key words for their relevancy to Web pages will be keyed into the machine learning process. |
| | If all that stuff flies, maybe it'll give Google something it desperately needs, which is competition. Maybe, if Google is lucky, it'll meet a defeat here and there. Nothing is more instructive than survived failure. |
| | At least success does not appear to have gone to Google's heads, as it did with Netscape. |
| | Of course, there is that smoking hole where Netscape used to be. That may provide humility enough. |
| | And Microsoft isn't going to swarm Google from the center, they're going to attack from the desktop. The vehicle will be Longhorn, the next version of Windows -- which has a local-global search engine built in. |
| | Last I heard, Longhorn was three years away. |
Another Great One gone
| | Back when the Knicks ruled, I was a huge Dave DeBusschere fan. The guy was a smart, tough, flat-out-great basketball player, because he made his team better every time he stepped on the floor. He was also a good enough pitcher to play for the White Sox as well. |
| | His book about his time with the Knicks was one of the best of that breed. |
| | He also served as general manager of the Knicks (choosing Patrick Ewing in the draft) and commissioner of the late American Basketball Association. |
| | And at 24 he was the youngest coach ever in the NBA. That was when he was a player with the Pistons. |
| | Hard to believe he was 62. Even harder to believe he's dead. Bums me out. (Even more, because I'm only six years younger.) |
What you get is what you see
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