Ours at Stanford, day six and seven
On the sixth and seventh day, the last days we stayed at Stanford (previous issues here: first , second , third , fourth and fifth ), we intensely helped the guys from Stanford Business School to work on the presentation of our project as part of their training class and could communicate only with representatives of Yahoo Research and Microsoft Research.
We spoke with a former student of Garcia-Molina, who works at Microsoft Research, and who previously did research very similar to ours. He told us a lot of what is being done and done on the topic of our work, and when we told him about our results, he said that, they say, yes - we are on the right track. Then I had a logical question for him: if we are on the right track, then it means that he was on the right track too, and why, then, is he sitting at MS Research and dealing with a very narrow topic instead of making a new search engine? We have not received a direct answer to this question. There was a feeling that very talented people work at MS, but at the same time they have too good salaries and bonuses to strain and try to do something revolutionary.
Communication with a representative of Yahoo Research was more productive in terms of a common understanding of the market. The essence of the conversation was as follows.
Yes, many small IT projects managed to get around established market leaders, but these workarounds were not only due to technical skills, but also due to a common understanding of the strategic situation. Large corporations wage wars with each other as they were previously waged with each other by countries, he explained. And a small player, entering the market with his product, will be able to effectively participate in the battle only if he can skillfully bypass hot spots where the interests of corporations clash and win victories in some small battles, helping some of the corporations to participate in their struggle , gradually increasing their own power.
For example, now, in his opinion, there is a fierce battle between Google and Microsoft on the market. Its essence lies in the long-standing idea of Larry Ellison that Microsoft's main source of income is MS Office, and that Microsoft can be defeated only through the offer of an alternative to the office. Accordingly, in fact, now the efforts of Google, which is very eager to win over MS, are aimed primarily at undermining the income from the office, and not at all at the search (that's why we don’t see strong improvements to the Google search engine), but the Google Docs project for Google is now the highest priority. In turn, MS is fiercely defending itself from Google and is trying to do everything to undermine Google’s revenue from advertising - the truth, as we see, is not very successful so far. Given this situation - for example,
So, the general results from the trip we have are:
We spoke with a former student of Garcia-Molina, who works at Microsoft Research, and who previously did research very similar to ours. He told us a lot of what is being done and done on the topic of our work, and when we told him about our results, he said that, they say, yes - we are on the right track. Then I had a logical question for him: if we are on the right track, then it means that he was on the right track too, and why, then, is he sitting at MS Research and dealing with a very narrow topic instead of making a new search engine? We have not received a direct answer to this question. There was a feeling that very talented people work at MS, but at the same time they have too good salaries and bonuses to strain and try to do something revolutionary.
Communication with a representative of Yahoo Research was more productive in terms of a common understanding of the market. The essence of the conversation was as follows.
Yes, many small IT projects managed to get around established market leaders, but these workarounds were not only due to technical skills, but also due to a common understanding of the strategic situation. Large corporations wage wars with each other as they were previously waged with each other by countries, he explained. And a small player, entering the market with his product, will be able to effectively participate in the battle only if he can skillfully bypass hot spots where the interests of corporations clash and win victories in some small battles, helping some of the corporations to participate in their struggle , gradually increasing their own power.
For example, now, in his opinion, there is a fierce battle between Google and Microsoft on the market. Its essence lies in the long-standing idea of Larry Ellison that Microsoft's main source of income is MS Office, and that Microsoft can be defeated only through the offer of an alternative to the office. Accordingly, in fact, now the efforts of Google, which is very eager to win over MS, are aimed primarily at undermining the income from the office, and not at all at the search (that's why we don’t see strong improvements to the Google search engine), but the Google Docs project for Google is now the highest priority. In turn, MS is fiercely defending itself from Google and is trying to do everything to undermine Google’s revenue from advertising - the truth, as we see, is not very successful so far. Given this situation - for example,
So, the general results from the trip we have are:
- As numerous investors and representatives of large corporations convinced us, there is nothing unrealistic in making a new search engine and successfully launching it in the US market, and you don’t need big (own) money for this - there are a lot of investors who understand that as a company - Google will probably continue to be very successful, but Google’s domination in the search is not forever, and in the next 10 years one or more successful alternative projects will definitely appear.
We are on the right track, and it’s important The final result of our trip is our own motivation. Therefore, we decided to hire more people to work on Nigma in our Moscow office (by the way, we are waiting for a resume from programmers at jobs@nigma.ru , details here, but for full-time programmers, salaries will, of course, be higher than those indicated on this link), and we will concentrate even more on our American search engine.
We reached an agreement with Stanford to conduct joint research on the development of a new search engine, and with investors to finance them, when we are ready for the commercial launch of the project in the states