Today...A Change

Today, I decided to expand my blog to cover more than just what Google needs to do to make itself better. Although I do spend an inordinate amount of time using Google and its products, things like Pandora are also a big part of my life.

Most of the time, I'll still stick to talking about the general field of information understanding and the role technology plays in making information more accessible and, more importantly, more useful. But sometimes you'll see me rant about something unrelated.

Like today.

I wanted to comment about something Mark Benioff said in his recent Forbes interview. He mentioned that before you really create your business, you need to create your metaphor.

"Salesforce.com's AppExchange is the eBay of enterprise software; AppStore is the iTunes. Early on, Salesforce.com was Amazon.com meets Siebel Systems."

The potential for Dilbertisms is definitely there. I'm not sure saying "Inxight is the Oracle of unstructured data" ("grey is the new black?" "Zune is the new Edsel?") quite does it for me...although he does make a point that it's a good sound bite to a journalist. But human beings do seem to latch onto concrete metaphors or at least some way of relating something new to something old.

For example, I always describe my company, Inxight, as making software that "reads" electronic text and describe all the relevant people, companies, places, events, and other information hidden in there.

Nowhere do I discuss "natural language processing", "linguistic analysis", "meaning-based computing", or other common industry buzzwords. If your grandmother can't understand it, you're doing something wrong.

All I want to know is what does it do...and, more importantly, what can it do for me?

So, in the aforementioned Inxight example, I'll add a second, user-specific sentence. Inxight's software "reads" electronic text and finds all the relevant people, companies, places, events, and other information hidden in there so you can discover answers to things like "what companies are mentioned most often in conjunction with mine?"

I still haven't figured out what our software can do for my grandmother. But that's ok, since she doesn't have a budget to spend anyway.