cominvent

Note: Links are to Norwegian sites.

In a recnt post on Shahzad Rana’s (Microsoft’s most profiled OOXML promoter in Norway) blog, he comments on Håkon Wium Lie’s (Opera Software’s tech director and profiled standards promoter) wording in a comment to VG TV. Here, Lie introduces the term “Microsoft tax” to explain what happens when ordinary people feel forced to purchase MS-Office to read documents from the government or their kid’s scool. Lie says that the consequence of widespread use of Microsoft Office’s new document format OOXML, could be many more years of vendor lock-in since OOXML allows arbitrary non-standardized, non-open extensions. An example is if a parent recives a document from her kid’s teacher, which contains an Equation binary object, which is not part of the OOXML specification, and thus cannot possibly be implemented by other office packages wanting to support OOXML.

Futher, Rana asks Lie to produce some evidence of an OOXML document from a teacher to a student or parent that is only readable on Windows and MS Office, whereby Lie refers to an OOXML document that Rana himself had sent by email. A funny thing here is that Rana had to rename the .docx file as .doc to be able to upload it to WordPress. This caused a lot of trouble for the users, thus examplifying even stronger what kind of trouble the new format would cause for ordinary people. Rana should of course have zipped the file, or better, modified WordPress to accept .docx files for upload. But a MS supporter is probably not used to the idea of freely being able to modify ones own GPL software

Today, the deal where Microsoft buys FAST, was completed. That means that the Norwegian search engine vendor Fast Search & Transfer is now a fully owned subsidiary of Microsoft.

The FAST ESP product will continue to be offered on all current platforms, and the FAST sales and tech organization continues to operate almost as before, so customers and users will not experience any noise around this transaction.

FAST, when under the MS umbrella, will of course increase focus within the MS Office Sharepoint segment, and will together with MS engineers make an even smoother packaging of the technologies to new and existing customers of high-end Sharepoint sites with large data volumes.

Expect to see continued innovation from FAST in the years to come, and expect also to see a shift towards stronger support for the Windows platform. It is a known fact that the Linux platform has been the most stable up until now for ESP, but now this might shift as Windows versions will get the major focus in QA and patching.

Let us not hope that the Linux, AIX and Solaris versions will be discontinued. I don’t expect that to happen in the short term, as the press release clearly states that they will be supported, and also this blog post by MS’s Kirk Koenigsbauer in the Sharepoint division states that “We’re making a pragmatic decision to continue to delight a core part of FAST’s customer base that has chosen the Linux/UNIX OS. You can bet that we’ll innovate on Windows, too, and over time we hope customers will see .NET as a preferred platform choice“. Let’s hope that lasts for many many years to come, so that history can be re-written in this area.

Congratulations, Microsoft, with an excellent new member organization

Congratulations, John Marcus Lervik with the new role of leading MS’s Enterprise Search Business!

See also official press release and FAST’s customer FAQ

As of feb 8th it is official, Microsoft has aquired 97,2% of FAST, and can now legally force the buyout of the rest. Microsoft have been very active on the acquisition front lately, also trying a hostile takeover of Yahoo to gain a share of the global online advertising market which Google currently dominates. There is definitely a cosolidation in the search market towards fewer, bigger players.

With the FAST ESP technology, Microsoft will be able to compete better in the Enterprise search space. It is strange how come the world’s largest software firm does not manage to be innovative themselves, but have to buy other companies all the time to be able to really compete. It will be interesting to observe MS’s long-term roadmap for the FAST technology.