You have to laugh, MS buys this company because they've over-inflated their revenues, then has to pay a fine because of it. How to not have your cake and not eat it.....

Joke, well I guess it's one them

LOL

and no one thought of it already, im truly amazed.

Should report it to the Federation Against Software Theft.

Their software must really suck if they didn't see this coming. Microsoft has bought a dead duck which was previously just lame.

Weren't they the original ftpsearch people?

Nah M$ will never know how anyone who has had to deal with their products feels. The all encompassing ballmer brand bull shit brainwashing (tm, patent pending, copyright 2008, etc etc) system ensures this will never happen.

I used to work for a rival to FAST. We were told to, in sales presentations to customers, hype up the fact that (a) FAST were being investigated for all fraud and (b) over emphasize how poor their software was, rather than how good ours was. Our managers used to send round snotty emails gloating about our high-profile customers and FAST's unknown ones. Theres a write -up here:

http://www.paullee.com/computers/autonomy.php

Quite a catalogue of FAIL on the part of Autonomy, there, and I don't think you're the only one to have seen this kind of shit going down in the software business or, in fact, in any job where the skilled people are "managed" by people with the intellectual skills and instincts of a primary school bully and the social skills of a chimpanzee on heat: "wanker management" as it was once called in a former workplace of mine.