Anyone who's followed me over the years would not mark me down as a Microsoft lover. As long ago as 1980 Steve Ballmer used to visit me and tell me of his dreams for Microsoft. I liked the man, I was taken aback by the vision—even more so when it came true—but I never actually liked the company.

Having said this, my software company (Caxton) embraced Microsoft enthusiastically when CP/M died and MS/PCDOS took over. And so it's been ever since. I use Microsoft software. Heck, I still publish some as a hobby.

So what to make of the latest news, that Microsoft is to buy search company FAST? I am stunned. Truly. I take my hat off to Microsoft for this move. Forget about the staff meltdown that FAST has experienced recently, the fact is that this company has a great reputation and some solid clients. I'm sure it's not beyond the wit of Microsoft to win key developers back, if it wanted to.

Enterprise information has always been siloed and this drives users crazy because there's no easy way to gather together all the information they need. Search companies like FAST and Autonomy provide the means to overcome this problem. With the arrival of social computing into the enterprise, the siloing is accompanied by massive amounts of unstructured information, in all manner of different formats. This is a problem which can only get worse.

IBM has its UIMA interface which sits atop the silos and gives a way to reach in to unstructured information. This is quite apart from its search engines. Oracle and Autonomy, too, have their ways of grabbing what they need. They add words like 'secure', 'discovery' and 'meaning' to their product names to make them more comforting to the buyers. But Microsoft: it's been playing around at the entry and low end with its own search offerings.

Now, in a single stroke, the company puts itself in contention with these other major players. Assuming the deal goes through, it immediately removes one of the major stumbling blocks with large scale implementation of SharePoint Server—that of being able to draw information together from multiple hierarchical silos. If the integration with SharePoint is done well and if the missing bits of the social computing stack are added, then Microsoft will have leapfrogged the industry and incredibly strengthened its position.