Opinions requested

[Avi Rappoport]

At 4:37 PM -0800 3/8/1999, Tim Bray wrote:
> At 09:02 AM 3/8/99 -0800, Jerome McDonough wrote:
>>I share your skepticism, but we can hope.  If nothing else, there appears
>>to be at least the dawnings of an understanding among the major DBMS
>>vendors that there's a huge market for text management/retrieval products.
>>Some of the approaches taken by the object-oriented database folks, like
>>Informix's data blades, struck me as having promise.
>
> There's the rub.  *Is* there really a huge market for text
> management/retrieval?  The history of software is littered with the
> corpses of companies who tried to make a go of it in that area; I
> know from personal experience that up to and through the year 1996,
> there was *not* any such huge market.  Will XML change that?  It
> would be nice to think so. -Tim

The Web has certainly raised the profile for text retrieval, and the 
amount of text online is larger than its ever been.  A lot of 
text-management turns out to be going on in relational databases, and 
those are pretty big business.  But the large content-management 
companies -- Verity, Open Text, Fulcrum (bought by PCDOCS recently 
bought by someone else) -- seem to be going through wild stock price 
variations recently.  I've no idea what the future market will be: I 
find it all mystifying!

BTW, Lisa Rein has written a report on the Query Language '98 
workshop at W3C last year:

http://www.xml.com/xml/pub/1999/03/quest/index.html

It looks quite comprehensive to me, and all the position papers 
indicate that the topic is a hot one.

Avi

________________________________________________________________
Avi Rappoport, Search Tools Maven: <mailto:avirr at lanminds.com>
Guide to Site Indexing and Local Search Engines: <http://www.searchtools.com>

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