How Do You Think They Felt in The Morning?

Last Wednesday, thegoodseed sent two "reporters" to a WebGuild seminar on enterprise search. On the panel were: Andy Feit from Verity; Laura Ramos from Forrester; Miles Kehoe from New Idea Engineering; Paul Whitelam from Endeca; Torbjorn Kanestrom from FAST Search & Transfer; and yes, a rep from Google -- Matt Glotzbach, who for some reason (we couldn't tell why) looked extremely uncomfortable up on the stage. Toward the end of the session, someone asked about the future of desktop search. Practically everyone on the panel thought it was a no-start market, but Matt ... poor Matt ... kept quiet. We understood the situation much better in the morning, when Google announced its desktop search tool. (For a lively analysis of the business implications of this announcement, go to John Battelle's 10/14 blog entry, right here.)

Expect the new Google tool to educate the market about desktop search, and encourage other companies -- and we don't mean just Microsoft -- to more aggressively enter the fray. After they calm down a bit, that is.