OpenSource Connections
Category: Solr
Today, Microsoft announced that it was abandoning development of the FAST search engine for Linux and Unix. Given that Microsoft paid $1.2 billion for FAST, the move is an apparent revelation of a strategy to get non-Windows based users to move to an enterprise Windows platform rather than to continue to support FAST.
This move seems to be risky. The Microsoft bet is that its FAST customers are more loyal to FAST than they are the operating platform, and the perception of switching costs are higher for moving from FAST to another enterprise search engine rather than the opposite–a loyalty to the operating system and a perception that search engines are interchangeable.
Microsoft might be right for most of its customers, but this announcement will certainly be grist for the mill in IT departments over the coming weeks. Many companies built their IT infrastructure around a Linux-based platform, and being forced to change to a Windows environment may be a pill that is too hard to swallow. The alternative will be to look to other search engines, which can do nothing but help Solr and Lucene. With an established user base, enterprise grade support packages from companies like Lucid Imagination, and a significantly lower total cost of ownership than the FAST + Windows package, Solr will appeal to many a CTO who might otherwise have continued to gladly pay the licensing costs for FAST but is now forced to reconsider his or her decision.
Rather than supporting FAST on both platforms at the cost of a few developers, Microsoft may lose many more customers and revenues because of its insistence on one platform. It will be interesting to see how companies like Lucid respond to the new opportunity.