Welcome Back!

Welcome back from your summer vacation and welcome back to my blog.

Today's thought is short:

• Yahoo!'s mission is to connect people to their passions, their communities and the world's knowledge.
• Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.
• Business Objects' mission is to transform the way the world works through intelligent information.

Business Objects is the leader in organizing structured information (and, now, with the acquisition of Inxight, becoming capable of organizing text as well). Their new On Demand service? A nice complement to either Google or Yahoo's offerings.

Ergo, Yahoo or Google should merge with Business Objects?

Discuss!

(The views expressed in this blog are my own and not that of my employer)

A Retraction...

After a few weeks of consideration, I've decided that Business Objects has the best marketing -- ever!

And this has nothing to do with the fact that they've just announced their intent to acquire the company at which I work (Inxight).

Seriously, the marriage should be worthwhile for both companies. I've been touting for awhile the notion that in order to truly organize the world's information, you need both structured data and unstructured data. In order to truly have business intelligence, you can't just look at numbers; otherwise, you'd just have a lot of computers sitting in offices as opposed to highly paid executives. (Hmm...)

If we posit that text analytics (Inxight) organizes the world's unstructured information, and that traditional business intelligence (BOBJ) organizes the world's structured information, what challenge does that open?

Making it accessible and useful.

I'll be thinking about this for awhile. I probably won't be blogging about it for awhile, to prevent revealing information I'm not going to be able to share.

Bring it on!

BOBJ and Random Thoughts

Business Objects now posts on its site a new tile (Guess they must have taken note of Valleywag). However, I'm still not sure Light is contagious is quite right either (achoo!) Why not just put the tagline (Let There Be Light) on the tile and leave it at that?

As a follow-up to yesterday's comment of mine (the BOBJ globe should assemble from facets), I stumbled on this today. So I guess that's already been done by someone else.

I decided my goal for the day would be to find out what firm was responsible for BOBJ's new image. In discovering that Eleven Inc did "Think Liquid", I can see a lot of parallels between the campaigns (and not just in Marge's participation in both). I'll let you know if I find out!

By the way, why pay for expensive consultants or marketing classes when you can get everything you need to know about brand identity in a one-minute snippet?

Mickey and Minnie now feature animatronic heads. I'm having a debate with a friend on whether it's pre-synched to the vocal track or whether the performer controls them. They seem to move their hands (thumb and forefinger) in sync with the mouth, so maybe it's controlled by the performer? It's very, very cool, but a little unnerving.

My next holy grail of search is having my search engine check the weather, note that it's trending warmer, and go out and discover the perfect cotton lawn a-line skirt for me.

The rumour is going around again that Microsoft is looking at Yahoo! Googlezon 2015 just gets closer and closer to reality...

What is Business Objects Smoking?

Business Objects' recent efforts to enliven their brand are laudable. While it is rather Dilbert-esque to say "we're not a business intelligence company -- we're in the business of making companies more intelligent", I get what they're saying. I'm sure Marge "Think Liquid" Breya had an uphill battle internally. It's always hard transforming a technology company into a "real" company.

But I'd have to turn in my marketing hat if I didn't point out several things could use some refinement.

First off, when I saw the new website, the first thing that came to my mind is exactly what Valleywag said a day later -- "No Light. No Vision" is not the first thing you want people to associate your brand with.

Also, what's up with the logo's "ball and circa-1999 swoosh" combination? And why does the ball have facets anyway? If you're going to do that, at least animate the facets coming together to make up the whole -- don't just fly the ball in. Have the guts to lose the old swoosh. Lose the ball. And then you have a classic (albeit boring) logo. Then you can start over again.

For a really cool modern logo and marketing, I like Silverlight.

PS - For a fun drinking game, try taking a shot every time someone in the BOBJ video says "bold". Note to companies everywhere: If you have to say you're bold, you're not. And, honestly, I think only we marketing people would "notice the thin line, the spectrum". At least the camera doesn't dodge all around like in those 1990's "edgy" videos.

Would GOOG ever buy BOBJ?

The Oracle-Hyperion purchase has sent the world into a tizzy about the remaining players (BOBJ and Cognos). While both IBM and HP have been proposed as potential buyers, I can't help but wonder... Would Google ever buy its way into this market?

Think about it. You're not really doing "Business Intelligence" unless you take all information into account -- not just the sales figures and the inventory levels, but the information trapped in emails, analyst and news reports, and blogs like this one. And you're not really "organizing the world's information" if all you're doing is manually OneBoxing your way into the world of structured data.

• Think of a Google Analytics/Crystal Decisions Mashup for getting graphical views of related actions - not just your website traffic, but how that traffic translated into regional sales.
• Think of having a BOBJ report being automatically suggested as you're putting together a presentation about inventory levels in Japan.
• Think of expanding Google Apps to go beyond email, word processing and spreadsheets – encompassing SaaS business intelligence applications.

With Google's NIH policy, it's unlikely.

But FAST is already tiptoeing around this by saying it's moving into BI from the aspect of search. Google could totally own this if they ever decided they were about more than just advertising.

I'm just sayin'...