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Microsoft Phasing Out FAST Search For Linux, Unix
viralMeme writes "Microsoft plans to begin phasing out Unix and Linux platform support for its FAST enterprise search products, as of its next release. According to a Thursday blog post from Microsoft Distinguished Engineer Bjørn Olstad, 'We’ve continued to sell, support, and update the Linux and UNIX versions of FAST ESP, and we’ve designed the next wave of FAST products (scheduled for release in the first half of calendar year 2010) to include a cross-platform search core that has been extended to take advantage of web services and support mixed-platform deployment models. With our 2010 products scheduled for release in a few months, we’ve just started to plan for our next wave of products. As a part of that planning process, we have decided that in order to deliver more innovation per release in the future, the 2010 products will be the last to include a search core that runs on Linux and UNIX. Many of our customers run FAST ESP on Linux and UNIX today, and we recognize that our future focus on Windows means change. To ease the transition, we’re investing in interoperability between Windows and other operating systems, reaffirming our commitment to 10 years of support for our non-Windows products, and taking concrete steps to help customers plan for the future.'"
The total *revenue* last year in enterprise search is just 1.1 billion dollars, according to Gartner, according to the article. It is going to touch 2 billion may be in 2013, again according the article. Considering that Microsoft gets 6.5 billion dollars *profit* per quarter, this is chump change. Further, Google is synonymous with search. It sells the Google Server in a Box, that does mail, calender, shared docs all behind the firewall of the client, unreachable by either the pings from the internet, or by subpoena. If this market segment grows, it is going to be growing the way Google wants it.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
It must be metric, the imperial innovations are called "Software Patents".
Actually the full name of the company is Fast Search And Transfer (FAST).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_Search_%26_Transfer
I can't speak for the commercial side of FAST ESP, but I've worked with it in the public sector where it's used in some big projects for the NHS here in the UK (but running on Windows platforms as the government is in bed with MS and the NHS is so intertwined with the company now there's little other choice). I didn't develop for it directly, just some interface stuff, but the general consensus was that it's needlessly overcomplicated in order to sell consultancy services, and needlessly wasteful of resources in order to sell hardware.