Last week we heard from various sources that Microsoft had announced they would only be continuing to develop its recently acquired FAST Search technology on Windows. This had long been feared by some in the sector, and it must be worrying for existing customers.
Platform choice can be a key issue for those looking to implement advanced search, as there may be significant existing in-house expertise and investment in a particular platform. Our Flax solution works just as well on Windows, Linux or Solaris. It’s sad to see such a powerful technology as FAST become so narrow in focus, but it’s not particularly surprising after the Microsoft acquisition.
UPDATE: more coverage on this from The Register
I’ve been always very impressed with FAST ftp search back in the day, now they’ve been sold to someone like Microsoft, it’s a shame. They only have one agenda but to push it’s products under licences. This signals the death of Fast in my eyes!
Same happened with Hotmail, it originally was fast and reliable using UNIX – then Microsoft took over and well….you can guess the rest…
We’re happy to support customers running both Windows and Linux (and in fact Solaris and most other operating systems) but we prefer Linux/Unix as it’s much easier to find and solve performance bottlenecks: it’s also a lot easier to calculate scaling costs when you don’t have license fees to worry about!