Parisista

Several blogs are reporting about Google experimenting with Digg-style voting of search results. What I found intriguing is the URL of the experiment. Here it is unhyperlinked:
http://www.google.com/experimental/a840e102.html
Look at the last part. It reads “a840e102” which looks like some encoded message where the engineers are trying to convey their world dominance. Here is a screen shot of an analysis of probable meanings. I like the cannabis one :D)

You can read some of them as:

1. A twice the dose of cannabis produces 100 times better search experience
2. A unifying-democratizing way of producing a 100 times better search experience. Just like the Tibetan script Phagspa unified the various languages
3. 840 is one of the smallest composite number with 32 divisors. Shows the technical prowess of one of the algorithms employed in the experiment or maybe just dump of a highly complex issue in maths, just like they used the value of Pi in their IPO

Tag:google

a@google.com, b@google.com, … How cool? I haven’t seen any company giving out such short e-mail address to their employees. It’s nothing less than a prized possession of a 2-character domain name.
Who is getting these e-mail addresses at Google? You have to be an inventor of some programming language or a computer science theorist to get one; Robert Pike has one. (Rob has a famous Unix Programming text book to his credit, one of the computer engineering bibles)
So far, b, c, e, f, g, h, i, j, k and r have been confirmed to be taken; at least, that’s what my puny little investigation has inferred, for others, I’m waiting for my new year greetings to be reciprocated.
How did I get here? Well, I was looking for some UTF-8 conversion routines when I landed onto Ken Thompson‘s page, and somehow got pushed around onto Rob’s page.
Investigative journalism? Not a bad bullet item for new year’s resolution.

Google is righteously attacking Microsoft on it’s own turf with ‘Software as a Service’. Today, it’s Desktop Search, Google Base, etc. Tomorrow it’s going to be Excel on the Web, PowerPoint, Word, etc. The “standalone” consumer software esp. productivity applications between the boxed retail price ranges of $100-$300 are a solid target.
Office apps are prone to attack because a normal user of Microsoft Office does not use more than 80% of the features (which furthermore justifies a price-point of $20-$40 per year for all you can eat productivity apps. buffet). It’s a serious challenge for Microsoft. The onslaught is internal vs. external — on one side Google is spreading the “FUD” (a la Microsoft’s yesteryears tactics against ISVs) and on the other the steady stream of Microsoft Office’s revenue which is just shy of $11 billion. A bulk of this money comes from the enterprise licenses and MSDN subscriptions.
The survival strategy for Microsoft should be a combination of one or more of the following:
1. Offer a single user Microsoft Office (Word, PowerPoint, Excel) license for $50 bucks or less.
2. Have a supplanted offline/online version which allows users to install components on demand — it must be easy to segregate the components used by power users and average users.
3. Make the basic Microsoft Office applications an integral part of the Operating System (remember WordPad vs. Notepad?)
4. Have more than just the basic templates for Word, Excel, PowerPoint — Deliver things like spreadsheets which helps small businesses with their finances, taxes and day-to-day accounting (Small business data predominantly lives in Excel). Charge them a small fee for support on using these spreadsheets.
5. Charge money for support and not for software. Remember, smart web-hosting companies won the “commoditization” war by focusing on support and nothing else.
However hard Google or anybody tries (Google just signed a contract with Sun regarding OpenOffice); cracking the Enterprise market would be difficult. Microsoft must keep delivering there. Very few are going to use a free service, however fantastic it might be. E-mail as a free service is a different beast — it’s used for personal stuff. And yeah, nothing needs to be done now — Only if the “FUD” becomes a threatening reality.
Not just MS Office, the same stragey applies to pretty much all the consumer software applications which fall in that range and have an attractive revenue stream.
Happily, I work for none of these two companies!