Powerset Sells Out to Microsoft: Six Months Ahead of Schedule!
By DONNA BOGATIN • Jul 1st, 2008 • Category: BIG PICTUREThe Powerset hype saga is finally resolved: YES, Powerset IS a Google killer, thanks to Microsoft.
Business Week is one of the many mainstream, and not so, media to have dutifully replayed the Powerset VC-backed PR line over the past two years: “Powerset: Move Over, Google.“ The big Google push, though, will now have arrive to via a Microsoft detour!
Powerset is spinning its (not so big) sale to Microsoft as a pragmatic merger for resource optimization.
Powerset product manager Mark Johnson was not so coy last Fall, however, when, giddy over the Powerset staged “launch” at Arrington’s “house,“ he was sharing at blogs the more prosaic, but realistic, mission of Powerset: Sell-out, quick!
Mark Johnson, circa September 2007: If we sell to a top 5 engine by 2009, I’s say that we’re doing pretty well.
Mission accomplished! Six months ahead of schedule.
It is clear why Powerset wants in Microsoft, but not so the other way around. Couldn’t Steve Ballmer rally his own troops to build a Wikipedia search tool? Wouldn’t PARC/Xerox have licensed their technology to Microsoft? Isn’t Redmond able to recuit their own ‘rocket scientists.’
SEE: “Powerset and Wikipedia: NO Factz, NO Truth” and Google Cloud Apps: Software ‘Opiate of the Masses’ (Googler rocket scientists?)
Don Dodge, a dedicated Microsoftie, to the “next big thing” rescue (not at his blog, but via a TechCrunch comment):
Powerset’s Natural Language search is not about applying NLP to the search terms. Rather, it is about applying that technology to all the web pages in advance, and adding metadata to each page. It takes a tremendous amount of computes and storage to do this for the whole web. But, once it is done the results are truly amazing. Powerset did license some technology from Xerox PARC, but Powerset has built most of the technology themselves.
Lastly, Powerset’s technology can be used in web search, enterprise search, voice search, and many other applications. Powerset is not just about competing with Google. There is a lot of money to be made in other markets.
Thanks for the insights, Don!
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DONNA BOGATIN is the Founder & CEO of STARTUP ALPHA
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