Where there is Smoke, Fire is FAST to Follow

It is not the best of summers so far for enterprise search player Fast Search & Transfer (FAST – now owned by Microsoft) as additional squalid (TC piece HERE – with lots of details and a translated text of a Norwegian article) and one might say ‘dirty’ details from FAST’s accounting issues continue to be reported. The Norwegian press seems to smell blood in the water and are circling like true pack of ‘hack’ jackals.

Let’s hope that somehow the company gets through this maelstrom and can capitalize on the synergies (that I pointed out earlier in the year) that they can bring to the Microsoft in the media space. Just imagine having a network of publishers with all that content, all those users, all that site search traffic and with technology provided by the ‘publisher’ friendly folks from Redmond (not the Googleplex)? There is a serious play waiting to be exploited using those content assets with MSFT tech resources that still allows the publishers to stay in control… I will call this the ‘meta network’ concept for now (need to flesh it out and post back at a later date on some details).