Look at Your Corpus

I've been reading The Mythical Man-Month, a classic IT book from first published in 1975. It's about the lessons learned from huge IT projects. A considerable part is really old (what was IBM OS/360?), other parts are timeless: How to manage big projects? How to make sure a project built by huge teams doesn't feel like patchwork to the user?

It is actually the "20 year anniversary edition" (which is 24 years old itself...) and the author delights in pointing out how far we have come: the WIMP standard has taken over! Interfaces governed by windows, icons, menus, pointers instead of command lines. It's a given today, but (like the author predicted) now going away too: Smartphones have no need for windows, menus and icons, but there are gestures now, for example.

What is special in Google's way of implementing things? Doing everything in a browser isn't really that new. The newness, to me, is making the most of the corpus. (The what?)

Let's take a look at the corpus, why it defines Google and how Google has built most of its products around it. And where it is heading!

OS/360 apparently ran here (and in the building)

Pre-WIMP days: Command line interfaces

This corpus has a lot of value to be unlocked.

The corpus ...

... is a fancy word describing a mass of knowledge contained in fragments. It is unstructured (or it would be a body of knowledge) and vast, so there is value in knowing what it contains. Google's mission is still "to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful."

We will have to talk more about the corpus in the future - it's key to understand many concepts in G Suite.

... is central to many of Google's efforts:

AI thrives off corpora
Search makes corpora useful
Suggestions are based on corpora

... is your digital self

Your contacts, emails, events, documents, maps - all part of the corpus you have access to.

Growing the corpus by sharing

You can grow the corpus available to you in a lot of ways - every email you receive, every event on your calendar and everything you upload becomes part of your corpus. That's a rather laborious way of creating knowledge.

A more efficient way is by sharing. Working on a shared document adds value to many people's corpora. Making a Site (like this one) available also helps a lot of people at once.

Searching the corpus

A corpus gets more valuable with size - but finding information becomes more costly. Effective ways of retrieving information unlock its value - which is Google's business model. You need good search to make use of your corpus.

Yet search is hard: Every one of the ~250.000 PwC users on Google has their own corpus, separated by Chinese walls to be respected at all cost.

Search as an interface

Here is then how G Suite products are unique: they are all built for sharing and built around search.

You do not need a rolodex animation when an algorithm presents you with 4 best guesses.

You do not need folders when you can search. Folders in Drive are for controlling access rights.

You do not need flags or folders or labels in Gmail to find the email you sent your boss.

The supreme interface

is Cloud Search, of course. It is underused at PwC, but it really should be everybody's homepage. If all G Suite products are built around search, Cloud Search is its brain and it's time we start using it. Thank you for reading!

#cloudsearch #cloudsearchPublished 2019-03-07 by Holger Matthies.Modified 2019-06-27 by Holger Matthies.Written listening to Richard Durand - The air we breathe

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