I learned of the Microsoft-DATAllegro deal from DATAllegro e-mail sent at 12:57 pm EDT on July 24. Ten hours later, at 11:11 pm, I thought I'd see what others had to say. The search for views was more illuminating than any additional analyses I found. Take a look... if you don't mind snarky blog articles —First, the results of a Google search on "Microsoft DATAllegro." Call those results the Google View of the Deal if you will. There are stories to track down on the first page and on subsequent pages of search results even if most of them are fairly redundant news reports:

Next, the results delivered by Live Search, the Web-search presence of the world's largest software company, which we'll characterize as the Microsoft View of the Deal:

Not a single hit on the Microsoft-DATAllegro deal, and I checked the first five pages of results. The top-ranked link is to a September 8, 2005 article, a PDF file despite the two-line summary that not so helpfully starts "Microsoft Word - Datallegro 9-8-05 -Mark T - formatted _2_ _2_.doc. ends."

The third and fourth hits send you to my buddy Curt Monash's DBMS2 blog, even if not to one of the several articles he posted on the deal. All the same, good ranking Curt!

Keep looking at the Live Search results page. It headlines three sponsored sites: a Microsoft Windows Vista link followed by "Free Cooking Magazine" and "Gogi Juice."

Gogi Juice?! They must drink a lot of that at Microsoft and/or DATAllegro, because four of the five sponsored sites in the space to the right of the search results are also for Gogi Juice. The odd-ad-out is "Hugh Downs Reports," "Little known heart attack symptom many people tragically ignore."

The search for views on the Microsoft-DATAllegro deal was more illuminating than any additional analyses I found.I learned of the Microsoft-DATAllegro deal from DATAllegro e-mail sent at 12:57 pm EDT on July 24. Ten hours later, I thought I'd see what others had to say. The search for views was more illuminating than any additional analyses I found. Take a look... if you don't mind snarky blog articles —