Jake was chatting about the Microsoft/Yahoo merger, describing how little sense it made. I agreed mostly, until I remembered something Steve Ballmer said about Google in 2006. This was when Google was poaching Microsoft talent:

"Enterprise search is our business, it's our house and Google is not going to take that business."

ummmmm.... what!? I was totally confused... because Microsoft most certainly did NOT own enterprise search. Neither did Google. Nobody did. FAST and Autonomy/Verity had some claim... Oracle had a solution or two... but in reality nobody in the world had a product that satisfactorily solved this problem.

How do I know? Well, I was a content management developer, helping create the most flexible product in that market. If anybody -- and I mean anybody -- had a halfway decent search engine for the whole enterprise, I would know. We evaluated dozens, and all fell short for multiple, multiple, so many reasons. Usually flexibility, security, insufficient context sensitivity, encoding bugs, performance... or perhaps I'm just being hyper-critical. Nevertheless, we integrated with several of them, and made work-arounds for their limitations.

Anyway... considering Microsoft's recent acquisition of FAST, and the purchase of Yahoo, this means one thing to me: Microsoft is finally getting serious about owning enterprise search. With Yahoo, Microsoft also gets Omnifind: a "free" product made by IBM that's specifically designed for enterprise search. Unless this is a desperate move, that's the only sane excuse for spending so many billions of dollars for Yahoo. They're trying to do for enterprise content what Google did for web content... That could easily be a $10 billion market.

Of course, I'm not particularly impressed that they will actually succeed. And even if they did, they would be "forced" to have an open API that allows easy integration with non-Microsoft products... otherwise, they wouldn't really have an enterprise search product, would they?

Either way, by 2010 they might have something interesting to show off...