Thanks for the response.

I don’t believe that I’ve said anywhere that it is easy or simple, in fact, I would contend that it is the opposite, that it is really difficult to get this right. But it does not mean that it cannot be done.

That said, what exactly did Powerset accomplish? It was basically a PoC done over a VERY controlled data set. PoCs done over controlled data sets are at the best misleading. If they are having trouble dealing with what essentially is semantically structured data, they’ll have very little hope when it has to work in the open internet.

The point about declining cost curves is one that holds true for anything, not just for Powerset.

Incidentally, it is “triples” and not “tuples.” It was used with a particular intent and was not used in conjunction with databases.

Shyam

Powerset started with a grand vision. That vision couldn’t possibly be completed in a couple years. They have made great progress and proven the vision on a small scale; Wikipedia. The next step is scaling it up to handle the whole web. That will take many millions of dollars and a lot of time. More time than startup investors are willing to wait. Microsoft is willing to invest for the long term.

The technology involves a lot more than crawling “tuples” and parsing queries. There is decades of research invested in this, and hundreds of man years of development from Powerset too. It is not as simple as “slapping a parser on top of….” But believe what you will. Many things are simple in concept, but nearly impossible in practice.

The compute infrastructure required to do this semantic processing is huge and expensive…about 100 times more expensive. The cost curves must continue to come down and the technology must continue to improve to realize the full potential of Powerset. If it was already done and proven the price tag would have been billions of dollars. Time will tell if Powerset was a bargain or not.

Let us see a bit of objectivity here. What exactly happened with the Powerset sale? Microsoft bought a company that was indexing Wikipedia and created a query parser that supposedly understands your intent.

I read Don’s post on the matter yesterday he was dithering between, “it is the query parsing” and “it is the index!” as the value that Powerset is bringing to MS with the acquisition.

But for all practical purposes (promise/potential does not have an automatic turnaround into realization anywhere in the world), it was still technology that worked demonstrably on a single website from which people are already crawling RDF triples (Dbpedia.org).

Slapping a good query parser on top of that and getting paid $100 million for it is what Visa would have called “priceless.”

The technology is great. But, it takes enormous amounts of capital to execute the plan, apparently more than startup investors are willing to bet. Powerset got a great exit for investors and employees.

How many companies have acheived an exit of that size in the last 12 to 24 months? Not many. Barney and the Powerset team did a great job, and will continue to do great things at Microsoft.

Enjoy your time in Israel…and stay out of the noon day sun :-)

Don