Filtered Search and Community searches

So this week we worked on the plans to support the move from the standard MSCOM search interface to the more advanced filtered search that is currently at http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/searchbeta. We are making some improvements along the way that should also help with relevance and performance which are major customer concerns.  I do focus on help, because we still have a lot of work to do in this area, but I think users will see some improvements over the current version of search.  Scheduling of this release is really tied to the schedule of the new end to end publishing system.   There are a lot of dependencies to make the system all work smoothly, so there is a lot of work ahead.  We have had a lot of great discussions lately around the UI and the experience we are working should be more refined than the current experience.  

On another note I was reading over at Tom Peters' blog and I was interested to see the article he had linked in his news wire section it was titled "Why Microsoft-only development is foolish business logic"   In summary he stated, "Any company that focuses on Microsoft-only platforms may gain access to the vast majority of Internet users but in doing so, they also secure Microsoft hegemony."  It is an interesting set of thoughts but I am inclined to disagree with the author, but if you get a chance to read it, it is worth contemplating.   Let me know what you think if you read it. It is at http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2005/08/23/why_microsofton.html.