Microsoft is buying 37 percent of the Norwegian search engine company Fast Search and Transfer. Not all Fast employees are equally enthusiastic.

Computerworld Norway reports that there are quite a few Fast developers that have “a negative religious relationship to Microsoft”. This is a quote from Fast’s Director of Technology Bjørn Olstad.

Other companies may use this opportunity to recruit Fast researchers, he says. He does add however, that most employees are positive towards the coming acquisition.

Computerworld believes that Microsoft will locate its search technology development to Norway.

Indeed, most Fast spokesmen argue that Fast will not be assimilated into Microsoft. The company will rather continue as a separate entity, closely integrated with Microsoft.

Petter Merok of Microsoft Norway is very happy with the latest development. Bjørn Olstad was his professor at the university in Trondheim. Merok believes that the acquisition will help Fast sell its technology around the world.

This is an argument often heard among Norwegian companies searching for a foreign owner.

According to research done by the research institute NIFU STEP (and Per Koch here at Pandia was the coordinator of one of these projects) buyouts like these does not weaken the local research base. Multinationals are looking for human capital, and you cannot easily move Norwegian families to California.

By actively searching for new owners the companies get access to global markets and the technology base of the new owner.

Merok was the man behind the first meeting between Fast and Microsoft in the winter of 2006. Microsoft will now establish a competence center for search in Norway. Google and Yahoo! have already established such units in Trondheim, the birthplace of Fast.

Merok does not explicitly say what Microsoft platforms will make use of Fast technology. Still, he does indicate that many platforms are relevant:

“We have a common platform, and there is an intense interest for search and what software can be used for on cellular phones, on the Web, in Sharepoint or in other Microsoft products. These are going to be interesting times, both for all in Fast and for our own developers.”

It seems to us that the main ingredient in the recipe for success will be Fast’s ability to survive as a research environment in its own right.

Microsoft has a culture that is good at profitable imitation, rather than innovation, and it desperately needs to get up in front in the search race if it is to compete with Google. If Fast becomes just another regular Microsoft unit, they will most probably fail.