Why the BI vendors are integrating with Google OneBox
I’m hearing the same thing from multiple BI vendors, with SAS being the most recent and freshest in my mind — customers want them to “integrate” with Google OneBox. Why Google rather than a better enterprise search technology, such as FAST’s? So far as I’ve figured out, these are the reasons, in no particular order:
- Price.
- Ease of installation (real or imagined).
- The familiar Google brand name.
- The familiar Google UI.
- Google OneBox’s ability to search relational records, reports, etc. along with more tradtional record types.
The last point, I think, is the most interesting. Lots of people think text search is and/or should be the dominant UI of the future. Now, I’ve been a big fan of natural language command line interfaces ever since the days of Intellect and Lotus HAL. But judging by the market success of those products — or for that matter of voice command/control — I was in a very small minority. Maybe the even simpler search interface — words jumbled together without grammatical structure — will win out instead.
Who knows? Progress is a funny thing. Maybe the ultimate UI will be one that responds well to grunts, hand gestures, and stick-figure drawings. We could call it NeanderHAL, but that would wrong …
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One Response to “Why the BI vendors are integrating with Google OneBox”
[…] BI vendors had the good idea a few years ago to build out their collaboration capabilities, but generally didn’t follow through on it, SAP somewhat excepted. Bad choice, in my opinion. The use of text search to get at BI results is something of a plausibility argument for my views in this area. […]