Is Enterprise Search Becoming a Commodity?
Since the introduction of the Google Mini and the IBM/Yahoo partnership in enterprise search, some have wondered whether enterprise search is becoming commodified, i.e., that crawling information and presenting search results in a reasonable ranked order is easy to do and is “good enough” for the enterprise. Others dissent from this view, including enterprise search vendors themselves.
I’d like to analyze the issue by using the framework of Clayton Christensen’s wonderful books on technology strategy, a key insight from which is that technology becomes commodified only when its capabilities overshoot what customers need, or believe they need.
Two corollaries are that:
- A technology can’t be unilaterally commodified just because a vendor introduces a cheap low-end product. Commodities are a function of technology and customer needs. Only if you believe that a low-end product is “good enough” can a technology become commodified.
- Technologies can exit commodity status if customer needs, or their perception of their needs, change. (Think of the evolution of cell phones and how often “good enough” became “outmoded” after new capabilities were invented.) So commodification isn’t a one-way dead end, but a two-way street.
I don’t think that the state of enterprise search technology has overshot corporate and government needs. On the contrary, since it involves mission critical access to information and corporate productivity, there is no sign that information productivity has plateaued, and enterprise search in general isn’t “good enough” to sate customer appetities, with some exceptions.
One area where enterprise search is close to commodified is university web sites, where simple, “good enough” search is a significant improvement on previous, flawed or nonexistent search, and where the costs of mediocre (= good enough) search are so invisible that nobody cares much. I predict, however, that enterprise search at university websites will decommodify when university executives understand that diffuse costs in productivity and external image are real costs even if they can’t be easily quantified or even noticed. How long this special case of decommodification will take is anybody’s guess; several years, say.
Enterprise search in general isn’t good enough, anywhere. Given its mission-critical nature, this will ensure non-commodity status well into the future.
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