As an afternote to my previous posting: Reading Adobe’s press release, one can only guess why Google and Yahoo! were invited to the ‘open’ Flash party while Microsoft is not mentioned. I have a strong sense of Déjà Vu here — remember what happened to Sleeping Beauty’s parents when they didn’t invite the 3rd witch to their daughter’s birth party?… Muhahahahahaha indeed.Cnet.com’s Ina Fried picked up the trail as well – she reminds us that Microsoft has been working on their very own searchable, Silverlight technology. Fried then links out to Mary-Jo Foley’s delicious comparative piece on the issue. Foley quotes Microsoft’s assertion that it “designed Silverlight from the beginning to be easily accessible by search engines.”
And, as if planned to spoil Adobe’s party, Microsoft’s announced the acquisition of Powerset – a search company that applies its “natural language processing to search, aiming to improve the way we find information by unlocking the meaning encoded in ordinary human language.” As it happens, the Powerset engine is much sexier than this dead-dry description.
Somehow, I don’t foresee a prince’s slumber-ending kiss of love to this story. Looks like the witches will simply slug it out. With luck, content-delivery will be a final winner in this contest.