Microsoft buys search company
APPARENTLY DESPERATE to somehow prop up its flagging Interwibble search business, Microsoft announced recently that it will buy Powerset, a startup that has developed semantic search technology based upon natural language processing.
Semantic search software uses linguistic algorithms to deduce the meaning of questions presented to it and formulate appropriate responses from data residing in a knowledge repository. Powerset has written search software that uses Wikipedia as its respository.
The Vole is obviously hoping that Powerset might help it regain momentum to challenge Google, the reigning search and advertising market leader.
Since it was rebuffed in its bid to acquire Yahoo's second-place search operation, Microsoft probably decided that it had to do something... anything to save its online search facility from fading into the ignominy of irrelevance. ยต
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Maybe if microsoft made a decent OS (well better than vista...) instead of trying to make everything that is profitable, now they would have a profitable OS...
This is the same pattern that Microsoft used to take out WordPerfect, Lotus123, and any other software package that competed with them.

They buy a small software company with a fairly good product, link it to their operating system and force people to use it and destroy the competition by saying the other software will not work as well as theirs and theirs is embedded in their system.

I am not sure that this will work this time though...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_acquired_by_Microsoft_Corporation

The "mainstream" tech media is labelling this as a new strategy from Redmond. Apparently they bought the "innovation" line.
Why doesn't Microsoft just start a new fresh internet company them selves?

Seriously though, If thought bought "Micro.com" It would cost them a few hundreds pounds, it'd be easier to type than "google.com", and if they design it correctly (keeping to a simple, blank, quick loading interface with no ads to start with) they could easily over take google with some clever advertising (just show a nice empty page as your advert - none of this stupid over-the-top animations of surfer-dudes flying through clouds of blue stuff on a 'search' for some amazing 'wave')

If they can't buy someone who can do it for them, they should do it them selves the lazy people!

Good night :)
What are you talking about, Darlene?

Microsoft developed Word and Excel in-house, they didn't buy them from someone else.

Neither Word nor Excel were "linked" to the operating system. Windows sold without either product. Mac versions were available for both products.

No one was forced to use Word or Excel. WinWord and Excel were both easier to use than their DOS competitors. In the case of 123, they eventually realized this, and instead of writing a native Windows app like Excel, they just shoehorned a Windows wrapper around the DOS 123. Not surprisingly, it was clunky and had bugs. By the time Lotus was able to fix those issues, the vast majority of people had moved on to Excel. No one was forced to do this. 123 and WordPerfect just dropped the ball.
Maybe Microsoft could lobby that only OSes with a verison of Windows can connect to the internet. Wait, then the Hotmail would go down. Wait, still no harm done :)
Surely a company as big as MS should be able to write a search engine?
Heres one under GPL3 for them
If search_string contains technical terms
Response.Redirect(www.msdn.com/pleaseupgradetovista)
else if search_string contains aword payed for by client then Response.Redirect(www.clienturl/werecommendvista.html)
else Response.Redirect(www.msn.com/pleaseupgradetovista)

sorry about the formatting - should have used OOXML but that would have taken 2.3GB
To be fair, Microsoft didn't do all the development work on Word in house. Word is based on some work that was done by Bravo at Xerox PARC in the very early 1980's - some of the developers subsequently moved to Microsoft and continued their work resulting Microsoft Word.
Excel is however a more inhouse MS developed application.