Microsoft Buys Search Engine, Going After Google?

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."

Re:Recursive acronym... but...

[CyanDisaster]

I'm thinking FAst Search and Transfer...FAST...

Hope be with ye,
Cyan

MS paid too much for bad software

[indulgenc]

FAST has been losing money like crazy, and Microsoft completely bailed them out by over-paying for the buy out. The acquisition does not make any sense. A company that is incapable of profiting from its products normally indicates that the product is lacking.

-i

FAST?

[oahazmatt]

Microsoft has just bid 1.2 billion dollars for FAST (Fast Search And Transfer

Wouldn't that be FSAT?

That aside, I see Microsoft as a company that's losing direction by pulling itself in too many at once. The company seems to be Hell-bent on conquering every corner of their market, and then any markets they hadn't originally targeted. I feel that a lot of their recent releases on their broad spectrum of product lines have been rather mediocre.

I can see why the company may believe it is necessary to incorperate this into their other products, but didn't Microsoft already introduce a search engine that was supposed to compete with Google? Wasn't that what Live [live.com] was for?

Re:MS paid too much for bad software

[INeededALogin]

A company that is incapable of profiting from its products normally indicates that the product is lacking.

or...

the market is saturated
the market is not ready
the company can't market

If the technology is good then Microsoft probably wants to use it and prevent Yahoo, Google and others from buying it.

I don't get it....

[misleb]

How can a search engine that nobody has ever heard of be worth 1.3 billion? Especially if they only plan on integrating it with Office. How hard coudl it possibly be to develop a search engine for Office from scratch? Certainly it wouldn't cost anywhere near 1.2 BILLION. And when you buy someone else's engine, you still have to integrate it with your software which, depending on how different the code bases are, can be nearly as difficult as just doing it from scratch. So.. WTF? I'd understand if they were buying some big name engine to get a Brand and customers and such. But this? Sounds like a money waster.

-matthew

Re:self-recursive acronym

[sammy baby]

Plus, FAST doesn't really qualify as a recursive acronym. The F in the acronym FAST stands for the word fast, not for the acronym itself. Contrast with GNU (GNU's Not Unix), or PINE (Pine Is Not Elm) or...

Oh wait - nobody cares. Nevermind.

Re:FAST?

[yancey]

I agree completely. Microsoft does not seem to be innovating nor does it seem to have any sharp vision of the future. The consumer is beginning to notice that new versions of Windows and Office don't have much to offer over the old versions and even the free software is catching up. Microsoft does indeed seem to be running scared and buying up any sort of tech in any area of the industry that is the least bit innovative before the competition can get to it. Search, we got that. Games, we got that. Touchscreen, we got that. Multi-touch, we got that. We hear you Microsoft! You've got everything the competition has. Now, what do have that they don't, eh?

Re:MS fails in every online business but Xbox

[the_B0fh]

And by not screwing up, do you mean that they're actually making money, or losing $6billion over the past few years also count as not screwing up?

Damn, I *SO* majorly didn't screw up last year, only went over my budget by a couple of million.

Re:self-recursive acronym

[Jugalator]

DRM: DRM Rapes Music? ;-)

(or Movies, your choice)

Re:What they are going after...

[rucs_hack]

so its more as an alternative to google desktop search then? I thought microsoft already had one of those. Not that I've ever used it, so I can't say how good/bad it is.

Doesn't matter anyway, they can buy all the search engines they want, but Google have mindshare they can't buy. Perhaps they're just worried Google might buy it, or someone else, so they bought it up to keep it away from competition.

Re:That's ok...

[MightyMartian]

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."

If there was an innovation to Google, it's that it went back to basics, back to Webcrawler and went from there. You go to MSN.com or Yahoo.com, and it's the same old game. They're still in "The only way to beat Google is with MORE STUFF!!!!!!!!"

Not that Google doesn't have lots of stuff, but it really doesn't insult a user's intelligence by pasting it all on to one page. It's really a design philosophy, and probably the single most successful one in the history of the web.

Re:Recursive acronym... but...

[bihoy]

Just curious, but to be a recursive acronym shouldn't it be "FAST Search and Transfer". Otherwise wouldn't the word Fast simply be a synonym for speedy?