Microsoft has the Power(set)

Powerset’s Sr. Product Manager writes:

We’re excited to announce officially that Microsoft has signed an agreement to acquire Powerset. ... With any startup, the challenge is to take the seeds of an idea and grow it into a viable company. At Powerset, we transformed our idea into a world-class semantic search platform, demonstrating the future of search with our Wikipedia search experience. But building a large-scale semantic search engine is expensive, requiring an engineering effort and computing resources beyond what most start-ups could ever imagine. Because our goals around improving search align so well, Powerset has decided to team up with Microsoft. We believe that this is the fastest way to bring our technology to market at a large scale.

Read more on Microsoft’s Live Search blog.

It’s not surprising to see Microsoft gobble up a company that has strived to be a Google-killer from its inception.  It will be interesting to watch Microsoft continue battling Google and to see how this latest acquisition comes into play.

(Maybe I gave up on compling too soon, eh?)