Fast Troubles Linger

I've written a fair bit about Fast Search and Transfer on this blog (e.g., The Blood-Letting Begins, Fast to Restate 2006, Fast Search Train Wreck: Who's Accountable?, Microsoft Bids $1.2B for Fast) and I've done so for a number of reasons:

Competition. While MarkLogic is not a search engine we did end up competing with Fast at several major media (i.e. publishing) accounts, so they had my attention.

Seen this before. Fast reminded me of MicroStrategy, against whom we successfully competed at Business Objects, but whose tactics caused me more than a bit of angst over the years. (One might argue this comparison was prescient.)

Speaking out. I felt that despite the presence of evidence (e.g., financial analyst reports from a Scandinavian bank that did some pretty convincing analysis) that things were awry that everyone (i.e., industry analysts, customers) seemed to turn a willing blind eye first to the indicators of the problems and then to the problems themselves -- either dismissing them entirely or as characterizing them as simple "accounting issues."

Knew the right way. Also, from my near-decade's worth of experience at Business Objects, I had a strong sense for what I felt was the "right way" to run a European software company. Basically, play by the same rules as everyone else -- dual list on the NASDAQ and report financials under GAAP.

Anyway, with the Microsoft acquisition, I figured the story was done. While I was always amazed at the valuation -- particularly for a company in the midst of an accounting scandal -- the problems were well publicized and I figured Microsoft had to have looked into every angle.

A recent story in Portfolio, entitled Fast Troubles for Microsoft, suggests this was perhaps not the case. Excerpt:

some accounting matters

completing the deal

Aftenposten,characterized

Microsoft's Fast Search Deal: Did It Do Enough Diligence on It? [via Zemanta]
Fast Search Acquisition Completed by Microsoft [via Zemanta]
Microsoft bids $1.23bn for Norwegian search firm [via Zemanta]
The Fast and The Curious

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