Microsoft's COO seems to be paranoid about Google stealing the 'enterprise search' market from Microsoft, and so he should be because if Google has its way search technology, and Google search technology in particular will become the primary interface to everything in the corporate IT system. At the Microsoft Developers Conference this week COO Kevin Turner, who joined Microsoft from Wal-Mart 11 months ago, has been widely reported saying: "Enterprise search is our business, it's our house and Google is not going to take that business."
CEO Steve Ballmer said something similar earlier in the week, but without invoking the spectre of Google. "Search from the desktop to the enterprise to the Internet is a business of great importance and a market of great importance to us."
His elaboration of this idea, branded "outlandish" in one report, was that "Business intelligence, the portal, workflow, content management, collaboration market. Everybody likes to call it something different, but that's really now one category, one market that we're entering in full force this year."