Joel Spolsky observes that Microsoft bought out the company that makes the best search add-on for Outlook not to improve searching in Outlook, but rather to improve MSN’s search engine. They’re killing the search add-on that everybody seemed to love effective immediately.

So, Joel has updated, and Anil mentions that the searching component in Lookout was actually Jakarta Lucene, an open source text search component. So who knows why Microsoft bought Lookout?