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Microsoft Buys Search Engine, Going After Google?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the yeah-sure-why-not dept.

obsolete1349 writes "Microsoft has just bid 1.2 billion dollars for FAST (Fast Search And Transfer [Microsoft to use a self-recursive acronym?]), an enterprise search company. 'Microsoft can bundle FAST with its Microsoft Office SharePoint Server' with its soon-to-be-customers Comcast, Disney, Microsoft, Pfizer, and UBS."

11 of 256 comments (clear)

  1. Recursive acronym... but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    FAST -- FSAT

    Is it just me, or did they spell FSAT... er, FAST... wrong?

  2. self-recursive acronym by Yuioup · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Microsoft has been using one for quite some time now:

    http://msdn2.microsoft.com/nl-nl/directx/aa937793(en-us).aspx

    Q: What does XNA stand for?
    A: XNA's Not Acronymed

  3. And the rats are leaving the ship... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It seems that quite a few FAST employees are currently submitting their resumes to other companies here in Norway at the moment. I've seen more than a couple during the last couple of days.

    Funny, that.

  4. Didn't someone already buy FAST? by Anal+Surprise · · Score: 4, Interesting

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/02/25/overture_buys_fasts_web_search/

    Overture bought FAST's search arm before Yahoo in turn bought Overture.

    Now they grew a new arm, and are selling that one to Microsoft?

    Outstanding.

  5. Microsoft is now its own customer by openldev · · Score: 2, Interesting

    "with its soon-to-be-customers Comcast, Disney, Microsoft, Pfizer, and UBS" I understand why it is said, but it is just very silly ...

  6. Re:I don't get it.... by repvik · · Score: 3, Interesting

    In the good old days, before Googling became a word, there was competition in the search market. FAST had AllTheWeb.com, and at that time the difference between FAST and Google wasn't big. FAST has had quite a few great minds employed, but Google beat them to the punch. I liked FAST, and I used to work for them maintaining linux and *bsd servers. Great company :)

  7. Re:That's ok... by BillGod · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Microsoft needs to buy a search engine. A couple months ago I wanted to download XP SP2 on a pc that I just loaded. Since it was just loaded and I opened IE it defaulted to Microsoft's site. I searched for "windows xp service pack 2". After the 4th link that I clicked on that WAS NOT a download for SP2. I went to google. Searched the exact same phrase. First like was the download site at microsoft.com There's something to be said about that.

    --
    MISSING - Sig file. 2 years old black and white and very funny. If found please email me.
  8. Chaos in the the Enterprise Search market by ccleve · · Score: 3, Interesting

    This acquisition is going to mean some chaos in my industry. Full disclosure: My company, Dieselpoint, is a Fast competitor.

    The enterprise search market is an industry unto itself, entirely different from web search. In this industry we sell search software for data inside a company, as opposed to general web search. In some ways, it's a much harder technical problem to solve than web search, because we deal with a much wider variety of data, security schemes, navigation rules, platforms, programming environments, etc.. Total industry size is between $1 and $2 billion, depending on how you count.

    Enterprise search is interesting to larger firms like Microsoft because it touches everything in the enterprise. Everybody wants easy-to-use search for everything -- the intranet, the email archive, the content management system, the ERP system, the HR system, the CRM system, the works. It's a hard thing to do well, and the company that does it is difficult to dislodge. Being the company's internal search engine is a good strategic position to be in.

    The industry is currently very fragmented, and no one has the upper hand. Fast was probably the most dominant competitor, though not the largest one. The largest one is Autonomy, but that has morphed more into a portfolio company with a lot of legacy products than a company focused on search. Fast was really the up-and-comer, and despite the financial difficulties, the one we had the hardest time selling against. Everyone else is secondary.

    The acquisition means some chaos in this industry, for one major reason: Fast is no longer a viable cross-platform solution, and won't be considered for many corporate deals. There's going to be a scramble to take over the mantle.

    Cross-platform capability is critical for corporate deals because, again, everybody wants to search everything. It's tough to do that if you only run on a Microsoft operating system. And while I'm sure Fast will continue to claim they'll support all platforms, who will believe them? This is Microsoft, after all. Non-Microsoft operating systems, Java, and the rest of the non-Microsoft-controlled technology will receive only short shrift in the future.

    So this is really big news for our little industry.

    Chris

  9. Re:What they are going after... by UnknowingFool · · Score: 2, Interesting

    So wouldn't this mean that they are trying to match Apple's desktop search technology. After all Microsofts were wowed by Spotlight when it first appeared.

    --
    Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
  10. Re:What they are going after... by Wowsers · · Score: 2, Interesting

    FAST is a search engine designed for searching unstructured data files such as word and email folders Maybe Microsoft could apply it to their whole Windows OS's, files seem to be scattered in no logical places all over the drive. \Windows \Documents and settings \My Documents to name three locations that Microsoft decided to scatter user files, and that doesn't even take into account if you keep your files on another partition or drive all together, because it still shoves some of your documents in those three folders for no logical reason.
    --
    Take Nobody's Word For It.
  11. Re:That's ok... by unlametheweak · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Google's early success was in building a pared-down, uncluttered and effective search engine portal, with a really damned good link-in to advertising. While everyone else was making their main pages cluttered monstrosities where the advertising they were selling was sublimated into news and interest garbage, making their pages incredibly difficult to read and use, Google figured out that the real secret was the other way around. They very much were "Our job is to search sites for you. You know how to go to your news page or your entertainment page, and we don't need to do that for you." Yes that's one of the things I was thinking about when posting. Perhaps I should have articulated that point. Larry Page fought for Google being the simple site (on the front end that is) that it is today when asking investors to finance his company (without the picture ads and portal style pages of then leaders like Yahoo). It's the thinking behind Google that makes it innovative, and not just the product itself.