Microsoft has decided to cooperate with the UK company Autonomy in the corporate search/data mining area. As far as I can tell this is the first time that Microsoft has looked at an external company to provide a key part of its product.

Furthermore, as the Register points out, this is a way for Microsoft applications to gain access to data stored in non-Microsoft formats of all sorts, something that has traditionally been a weakness for Microsoft.

What the article doesn't point out is that this is likely to be positioned as a key differentiator to other appliance types of corporate seach tool - ones from companies like Google for example. It is also, I think, a key validation of the categorization/classification technologies that Autonomy has been pushing for a while now. It seems to me that automatic classification/categorization has been a niche technology for a while, and maybe this will prod it into the mainstream and possibly lead to Google buying a classification company just to catch up. There are plenty of little startups around that will no doubt be only too happy to help the big G....