Microsoft's road to the cloud is paved with parallelism

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More Investment

Two words. How long?

This new commitment is certainly a good direction, but it's
hard to see it as leadership at this late stage. The move
into parallelism is a great equalizer. The laws of
diminishing returns are applied across the boards. Legacy
software will require rewrites. The requirement to reinvest
in parallel aware software, and or abandon software for
services, will break Microsoft's lock on many businesses.
Marketplace balance has not traditionally been Microsoft's
friend.

The new standard ? post Vista - is shipping software, not
this weeks codeword. If the Vista stumble leads to
overcompensation and another round of unduly raised
expectations, it will be a drastic mistake. Confidence is
already waning.

If parallelism is stagnant or late relative to competitors,
Microsoft can no longer count on it's past ability to avoid
competition by hosting competition. It can no longer count
on an aura of inevitability.

The commitment, or lack of it, is being played out in the
game console space where Microsoft's short term strategy
of multiple processors operating within traditional
programming models led the XBox 360 to a quick lead.
The PS3 however, with it's multiple cores and it's difficult
but forward-thinking programming model, has cordoned
off more room for growth. The gap has begun to narrow.
As it turns out, this wasn't a sprint.

Meanwhile, OSX Snow Leopard has made a commitment to
parallelism, recovering efficiencies, and scalability both up
and down. The iPhone is a physical manifestation of what
seems to be advancements to the consumer. Regardless
what arguments anyone has?it's an effective magic trick
that ? to invert Arthur C. Clarke ? is indistinguishable from
technology. Codewords will not compete with this device.

More investment is now required for less return. The gold
rush is over. A marketplace that demands growth may look
elsewhere for it.

Posted by: Harry Bardal   Posted on: 07/31/08 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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