Wolfram Alpha has been available for testing over the weekend and is due to go live today. Initial reports, possibly inevitably, compare it with Google, but that comparison is not helpful. Google is a (the?) search engine trawling the web to return information. Wolfram Alpha appears to do some trawling, but relies quite heavily on a curated database for source material.
It is billed as a computational knowledge engine, which seems to be a pretty good description. The power of Wolfram Alpha comes from applying the computational capabilities of Mathematica, the Wolfram software engine combined with access to a large database. The limitations in these early days appear to be due to the restricted data (vast, but US-biased and often lacking precisely what you are looking for) and it’s ability to understand natural language queries. The strengths are in computing mathematical or statistical problems.
So, does it have a role in business? First impressions are that it has a limited role. Certainly it can quickly compute comparative data for listed companies, even recommending what proportion of an investment portfolio should be invested in a stock, or group of stocks. However, this is software that has emerged from the world of mathematics and physics, so this is where it is strongest.
In academic terms, business is a branch of social science , so by definition, Wolfram Alpha can only offer insights where quantitative data exist and much of business is based on the messy, unpredictable actions of people so a computational knowledge engine will always be limited in it’s application in this field, but many aspects of business can be expressed and measured in figures and the quantitative analysis offered here is no less than a revelation.
