Jan 08 2008
Microsoft announced Tuesday that it will offer US$1.2 billion in cash for Fast Search and Transfer (FAST). FAST is a leading player in the enterprise search market, born out of AltaVista / AllTheWeb in the early dot-com bubble.
This is a big announcement, likely to trigger a consolidation in the search market.
Coverage in TechCrunch and ZDNet.
Apr 21 2006
Scott Guthrie writes about some cool new IIS7 features and APIs:
#5 especially is great. Finally, we can build some rich programs to administer IIS and web applications without having to resort to ADSI or WMI..yuck!).
#1 will also be interesting in relation to url rewriting. This would mean that you wouldn’t have to use wildcard mapping to send every request to ASP.NET.
Nov 30 2005
CNET reports that Microsoft is “developing a free online service that will allow people to list items for sale, events and other classifieds type of information that can be shared either with select groups of friends or anyone over the Internet”.
Okay, so now everybody wants to play. Google recently launched Google Base, which is its version of classifieds advertising system. Craigslist has been running all over the US drying up the local newspaper’s “rivers of gold” from classifieds advertising, although their foray into Australia has been very weak. Fairfax’s cracker.com.au has seemed to be more successful, with over a half million unique visitors per month and hundreds of thousands of postings in the main metro areas.
The classifieds market (jobs, cars, houses) is finally tipping (in Australia). With such a transformational shift happening, plenty of players are rushing in to try and cut out a bit of the market for themselves.
The next 5-10 years are going to be interesting indeed.
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