In fact, in basic research such as bioinformatics, physical sciences, and space sciences, PB-level "big data" has been generated and used very early, but it has never triggered a wave of big data. In the past few years, "big data" has been very ambitious. Many little-known companies have to say "big data". Why?
There is an old saying in China, "The world is full of prosperity, all for profit; the world is bustling, all for profit". The reason why big data has attracted the attention of all parties today is that it contains huge economic "benefits."
It is no exaggeration to say that the pursuit of commercial interests is the main driving force currently driving the development of big data. To a large extent, the current scientific value of big data is nothing but a by-product of commercial interests.
Foreign giants such as IBM, Coge, Amazon, Facebook, and eBay, and domestic Internet elite companies such as Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent, are all driven by commercial interests to greatly promote the development of big data processing technology. Since 2005, IBM has invested 16 billion U.S. dollars in 30 big data-related acquisitions, which has promoted stable and high-speed growth in its performance. Through data mining, eBay can accurately calculate the return that each keyword in the advertisement brings to the company. Through the optimization of advertising, the advertising cost of eBay product sales has been reduced by 99% since 2007, and the percentage of top sellers in total sales has risen to 32%.
More than 100 petabytes of data were collected on the servers of the data platform division of Alibaba, a Chinese Internet giant, which is equivalent to 40,000 Seattle Central Library and 58 billion books. Its data service business can provide customer data information services for various commercial institutions and research institutions of the national government, involving economic situation forecasting, consumer behavior analysis, commodity market research and other fields. Its core is the Alibaba e-commerce platform for more than ten years Customer transaction data. Although many companies are engaged in big data operations, in view of their different levels of "investment", they are roughly divided into the following four types.
(1) The first type of company is represented by Google, Amazon, Facebook and rising star Linkedin. The characteristic of this type of company is that it has both big data and big data thinking. Driven by commercial interests, they actively solve the problems encountered in data analysis, innovate continuously, and practice Popper's concept of "Science starts with problems", making this type of company the "backbone" supporting big data research.
(2) The second category of companies is represented by Accenture, IBM, Oracle, etc. and startups Hortonworks and Cloudera (the two companies are the main maintainers of Hadoop). The characteristic of this type of company is that it does not have big data, but it has big data thinking and technology, and knows how to help companies with big data use it. This type of company can be regarded as a big data professional service company. Today, when the social division of labor is increasingly subdivided, this type of company is very marketable.
(3) The third category of companies is represented by financial institutions, telecommunications industries, and government agencies. Their characteristic is that they hold big data, but do not have big data thinking or technology, and do not know how to use them, so that big data has become their negative assets to some extent. This type of company is a bit like a rich man who "guards the gold mine and does not mine", who neither believes in professional outsiders nor has capable family members.
(4) In fact, there is another type of company that should not be underestimated, such as International Data Corporation (International Data
Corporation, IDC), McKinsey, Gartner and other famous information consulting companies. They are big data advocates. They play an extremely "strong and colorful" role in rendering the atmosphere of big data boom. Many reports on big data are released by them.
The reason why they are doing so vigorously stems from the word "profit". In a word, they don't "fudge" and others don't take it seriously, so no one asks them for consultation. Therefore, they may have no work and no food to eat, so they "yell" particularly vigorously.
Such consulting companies (or think tanks) may be relatively unfamiliar to the Chinese public. But in Western countries, such consulting companies can be described as hot. Many companies are out of business and cannot find or find out the cause, they will find some "professional" consulting companies to "check the pulse" and "check". Such consulting companies are really a bit like some professional diagnosis and treatment institutions, specializing in various "difficult and complicated diseases."
We know that if a person is sick, if it is a minor illness, it can be cured by checking the information and the whole point of over-the-counter medicine; but when the illness is serious, it is difficult for an individual to find the root of the disease, so he has to go to a professional hospital.
Compared with Chinese companies, corporate management in Western countries is more willing to believe in the power of professional "diagnosis". If the company has a problem, they will consult a professional consulting company to fix the problem, and the consulting company will provide a better solution to the problem. The consulting company can also get valuable consulting fees.
Just as some U.S. military manufacturing companies continue to promote the "China threat theory" in order to obtain weapons orders, in order to obtain more commercial orders, some large consulting companies are sometimes not very "authentic" and will also adopt "problematic problems." There is no problem, and there is a strategy of "making problems."
But generally speaking, due to their high degree of professionalism, consulting companies, especially large international consulting companies, have insights into the future of the industry, which are really not comparable to ordinary companies. Therefore, their insights are still worthy of attention and respect.