After a week on the beaches of the Outer Banks in North Carolina with family I feel refreshed and recharged — perhaps not recharged enough to ride up l’Alpe d’ Huez, but I digress…

During my week away there were a few notable acquisitions made by Microsoft, Yahoo and Google.

First up is MSFT acquisition of my current favorite personal search tool Lookout, which integrates well with Outlook and complements my archive of NewsGator subscriptions nicely.

Perhaps this and the other acquisitions by Yahoo and Google were driven simply by one-up-man-ship.

But in MSFT’s case, I think the purchase of Lookout was partly, as Joel Spolsky nicely put, “one of those “HR Acquisitions,” wherein Microsoft buys a company for a few bucks because it’s the only way to hire someone they want.”

Also, since the personal search promised in Longhorn is still years away (2007?), I suspect Lookout was an easy feature steppingstone.

I expect Lookout will tie into MSN’s new web search shortly as well. This doesn’t bode well for X1 and others in the space.

Additionally, Anil pointed out that Lookout uses a variation of the Apache Jakarta Lucene full-featured text search engine library, which is something I didn’t realize.

Apparently this marks the first time MSFT software is licensed under an Apache license. (Is that really true?)

In other news, Google’s acquisition of photo management software vendor Picasa seems to be another move in Google’s quiet quest of becoming a consumer portal.

I find it intriguing that Google choose a Windows Application Developer and Service Provider (ordering prints). I wonder if Google’s plan is to migrate this “service” into GMail? It seems to be a natural fit.

Lastly, Yahoo’s purchase of the well liked and little known Oddpost Web-based Mail Client seems like a definite knee-jerk reaction to the elegance of Google’s GMail web client.

From what I remember of Oddpost, it certainly gives Outlook 2003 Web Access a run for the money. We’ll see if it can scale to user needs of Yahoo Mail.

Oh yeah, one unrelated final thing…

This year’s Tour de France is again incredible — with Basso as Lance’s new threat and the amazing tenacity of Voeckler! Wow! This is a supersport!

I’m very saddened that Tyler had to dropout. Tyler, you’re still Tyler “Freakin” Hamilton. We’ll see you next year! Regards to Tugboat… he will be missed.

Related Posts

• Personal Search Synergies -- After the excitement of the last week, I’m finally catching up on work and subsequently blogging. In particular last night I had a few minutes to check out one of the latest Desktop/Personal Search applications. Specifically, Lookout Soft’s email search...
• Blinkx Contextual Search -- Om Malik praises the new contextual desktop search tool called Blinkx, which is currently available in a downloadable beta client as well as a web only interface. Om goes on to cite some attractive examples such as… “BlinkX is all...
• The New Yahoo in Town -- So far I’ve found Yahoo’s new search to be for the most part comparable with Google in most respects. Even the interface is minimalist. Well, that is in relation to other more gregarious Yahoo interfaces. I even like the XML/RSS...
• Microsoft Targeting Google -- Some interesting quotes from this article on CNET News.com about Microsoft new search initiatives: “The fact that Longhorn is on the horizon raises questions to whether search services will be integrated into the Longhorn experience and what the ramifications will...
• DoS for My Yahoo -- looks like another DoS for my.yahoo.com … sucks. ...
• Yahoo Acquires eGroups -- wow! "Yahoo! to Acquire eGroups" … here's an interesting quote from the press release … "The acquisition combines the Web's largest online community with a leading provider of email group communications." … hmm, the web's largest community? i wonder if...
• Google introduces Froogle -- “Froogle is a new service from Google that makes it easy to find information about products for sale online. By focusing entirely on product search, Froogle applies the power of Google’s search technology to a very specific task: locating stores...