Google Competition? Cuil
CUIL seems to have spent some of their 33mil on PR today and wound up with some great coverage. My personal try of it was a little quirky since it was finding references to my search for ‘Michael Katz Message Partners’ in email headers from mailing list posts but it was pretty impressive nonetheless.
All I can say is that I hope that they are successful. I love Google searches and I appreciate the free services, but that company made way too many billionaires to be benign. They have far too much private information about us to be trusted in my view. They control what we see on the Internet and their hidden algorithms can destroy your web presence or shoot your traffic to the moon for no real reason it seems. Of course they heavily skew traffic to big adwords buyers but that is another story.
I am especially annoyed at their anti-competitive Postini pricing which stinks to high heaven of antitrust violation in my view. Their bargain-basement pricing is having a major negative effect on the email filtering market, and since the revenue that this produces for them is negligible at best it really makes me wonder about their true motivation. Some billionaire doesn’t really need to make a lot of money from this service and shareholders don’t see a ton of upside from its profitability, but it sure is a kick in the ass to smaller companies trying to make a living when a monster gives away their services at a loss.
So I say kudo’s to Cuil and I hope they can succeed at humbling the arrogant giant that is Google.
A New Era for Email Security Appliances?
Yesterday I saw an announcement that Trend Micro is going to cease selling the InterScan Messaging Security Appliance (IMSA), InterScan Web Security Appliance (IWSA), and InterScan Gateway Security Appliance (IGSA) in favor of software appliances and managed services. Pretty interesting development for such a major player to retreat from a hardware strategy but it is such a cluttered market with so many undifferentiated offerings that it must make business sense for them. If a Chinese company can’t make money selling hardware, where presumably labor and hardware costs are so much lower, then I think this a real harbinger for the industry.
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