Shoring up an oft-lamented and widely noted deficiency in their enterprise software portfolio, Microsoft announced last week their acquisition of FAST Search and Transfer.

Microsoft's existing Enterprise Search products enjoy much the same reputation as their Live Search or Desktop Search products... which is to say, a waste of time and processing cycles for anyone seriously looking for something more complicated than a basic document title. And sometimes even for that. A friend who works over in Redmond guiltily relates that every few months he will try firing up Live Search to find some information (C# coding references, natch, a product the company produces and ought to be able to catalog), only to find frustration instead and end up returning to Google for his answers.

In a world where storage becomes increasingly cheaply available and hierarchical file structures both increasingly unwieldy and beside the point with information stored in a wider variety of data structures, Microsoft has no choice but to improve upon their search capabilities if they hope to compete in the new paradigm. Considering the lack of success internal engineering teams have had with this project, an acquisition was probably the sensible move. It remains to be seen what sort of timeline and how successful any integration with existing Microsoft products will be, as is nearly always the case with their acquisitions.