Here is a copy Steve’s reply to me:

Rebecca from Vivisimo

Yep, you are absolutely correct. I emphasize that most users of search systems are dissatisfied. Why? Few vendors believe this. Few IT professionals really care about Buffy and Thad in marketing. Few senior managers know much about internal information. Will this change? Yep, search enabled applications. The financial noose is tightening around the necks of many vendors, and those who are not delivering services that generate a happy face inside the “o” of ROI will be following in the footsteps of Wikia and Yahoo. So, make users happy, and Martin White and I will stop focusing on this fundamental problem with search and retrieval in an enterprise.

I tried to continue the conversation with Steve on his blog, but my reply has yet to be posted, so I’ve included it here:

Steve – I don’t disagree that many folks out there are not happy with their internal search solutions and the fault lies in both camps – vendors who produce products that are difficult to configure, install and maintain as well as IT professionals that don’t bother to get business user requirements upfront and treat search as a static application that can be set up once and left to run on its own with no further care and feeding.

But I agree with Daniel that are plenty of exceptions and if you really want to help organizations figure out how to do search right, you’d do well to talk to some of them – find out what they are doing and why their users are happy and then share these ideas with your readers. I’d be happy to point you to some to get started.

And sure, search enabled applications are a good solution for many problems and this market segment will continue to grow. However, there are many organizations that have a vision of providing unified access to information via one interface to solve a wide variety of business problems and there are search vendors out there that have solutions that will enable this.

As far as the financial noose tightening around some players in the market, well that’s just business – especially high tech. Some market consolidation in enterprise search is inevitable as companies gravitate towards the stronger players and search companies with inferior technology, poor management or weak value propositions get weeded out of the market. There has been positive news coming from vendors in the space, but I recognize the news value of focusing on the scandals and failures versus the successes.