Three promises from a Conference

Taken from blurbs for Fastforward '08 in Orlando next week:

Next-Generation Innovation in Search Technology - FAST
If the network has become the computer, search is in the process of becoming its interface. - Bjorn Olstad (CTO, FAST)

At your desk, solus/sola, you might imagine you need a virtual office. You amid your email, your fax, your folders, your explorer, etc. All those windows mirrored you to yourself. As the network interface, Google is becoming the new Windows.

Google adopted the approach of becoming the invisible servant, the thing that gets out of your way so you can find or make your way. I am the way to your way, says Google. Such a lucid pane that we forget it is there. Difficulty of separating Google from the network could be a metric of its power.

Speaking of metrics:

The Impact of The User Revolution on Your Organization
With The User Revolution upon us, it increasingly becomes critical to be able to measure the potential impact of this powerful change trend on the future of your business and its role in the industry. Unfortunately, the value of many of the intangibles that power The User Revolution – skills, information, social capital, etc. – cannot be captured and measured with traditional metrics such as Return on Investment (ROI). In this session, John Hagel, widely respected author and business strategy guru, introduces us to a new set of leading indicators that can be used to measure and predict the impact of The User Revolution on your company.

A metric that spans corporate investment, intangibles of Users, predictive indicators? The golden fleece.

Rising Expectations – New Patterns for Interacting with Information
In the rapidly changing world of online professional information services, user expectations of breadth, accuracy, and timeliness of information have gone through a radical transformation over the past several years. At the same time, the information environment itself is expanding dramatically. In this session, Clare Hart, visionary head of Dow Jones Enterprise Media Group, looks ahead to the future of information work and the intelligent workforce and shares her views on how changing expectations and online behaviors will create new kinds of interactions.

Again, the user focus. Microsoft thought it knew what the User wanted, and believed that by being very clever, it would gain market share. And so it did. An island model. Google anticipated that it could not anticipate what the User would want and do with its algorithm. It really had no product in any material sense - nothing shrink wrapped, nothing that could be fixed. That lack of fixity and product, provided mobility off the island.

Anticipating user expectations -- as opposed to giving users the tools then getting out of their way -- is the Marketing Guru Mantra. It worked for broadcast. Can it work in something that might not even qualify as an "environment?" Or is the expectation that one can adequately and profitably predict, guide and monetize expectation no longer a reasonable thing to expect?

Microsoft is the generation of Woody Allen. Google is that of Cloverfield.