Microsoft News Tracker

Microsoft today gave fair warning of an additional offering in its myriad volume purchasing plans called Select Plus which will be available in Fall 2008:

Select Plus is a natural add-on to customers’ existing Enterprise Agreements and an alternative to the traditional Select License to consolidate transactional purchasing across multiple agreements. Customers can easily purchase and manage additional licensed products and services on a per-project basis as well as instantly qualify for the next discounted price level through increased purchase volume. Because Select Plus agreements never expire for transactional purchases, customers can experience more flexibility while eliminating the need to renegotiate and renew their contracts.

There are more details as well as comparisons to existing plans at the Volume Licensing section of the Microsoft Web site. Not unexpectedly, there are pluses and minuses to Select Plus which Eric Lai assesses at Computerworld. If your enterprise is large enough to consider Select Plus, you undoubtedly have a purchasing department for whom the tradeoffs will be grist for their mill.

As had been rumored last week, Microsoft has acquired Powerset, a semantic search and natural language processing startup based in San Francisco for an undisclosed sum said by sources to be in the neighborhood of US$100 million. Microsoft SVP Satya Nadella explains the rationale:

Powerset will join our core Search Relevance team, remaining intact in San Francisco. Powerset brings with it natural language technology that nicely complements other natural language processing technologies we have in Microsoft Research.

More importantly, Powerset brings to Live Search a set of talented engineers and computational linguists in downtown San Francisco. This is a great team with a wide range of experience from other search engines and research organizations like PARC (formerly Xerox PARC).

We’re buying Powerset first and foremost because we’re impressed with the people there. Powerset CTO and cofounder Barney Pell is a visionary and incredible evangelist. When he introduced our senior engineers to some of the most senior people at Powerset — Search engineers and computational linguists like Tim Converse, Chad Walters, Scott Prevost, Lorenzo Thione, and Ron Kaplan — we came away impressed by their smarts, their experience, their passion for search, and a shared vision.

That shared vision is to take Search to the next level by adding understanding of the intent and meaning behind the words in searches and webpages.

There’s more on the technology there and on Powerset’s web site (including this demo video), but the big picture is to offer a better search to users than Google’s in order to whittle away at their share. I would have to observe that Powerset certainly isn’t the first or only company to try to apply semantic concepts or natural language processing to Web search - just Ask Jeeves.