The future of the computer through the eyes of Microsoft strategists

At the EmTech conference , held these days at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), one of the speakers was Microsoft chief research and strategy officer Craig Mundie. Technology Review magazine asked him to tell about his vision of the future of personal PCs, and I added some words to his words.

The next big shift in the field of personal computer software, Craig, considers the transition to a mixed scheme, when client devices (desktops, mobile computers and telephones) with one foot will rely on the usual local programs, and the other on Internet services. The application architecture for all platforms should be unified. This approach to the design of computer systems in Microsoft for over a year is definitely called “Soft + Services”.

Alexey Fedorov, who heads the group in the Russian Department of Strategic Technologies at Microsoft, says that “in general, the evolution of the operating system involves replacing a number of components with the corresponding services that are likely to be implemented as part of the development of the Windows Live platform. So, in the next version of the client operating system - Windows 7 - applications such as Mail, Movie Maker and a number of others will be implemented as services. ”

Mandi is confident that existing programming principles should be revised. Habitual procedural languages ​​do not cope with the tasks of parallel computing, simply because of their structure. Another problem: to make programs work correctly on the whole range of various devices. This will require a new class of utilities that will make sure that the algorithms on this device work exactly as intended. This will allow you to easily synchronize the work of applications on huge servers and the most modest smartphones.
')
Applications created according to new principles will give you the same impression of use, no matter where they are installed - on an mp3 player or in the on-board computer of the machine. And they will all play their parts in a big concert together with online services. In this opinion, Craig Mundy is not alone. According to IDC estimates, already in 3 years, 25% of all business applications in the USA will be published as Internet services. Their users will be able to access their business information from any suitable device with access to the Network. Salesforce's well-known customer relationship management (CRM) system is a great example of such an application.

Moving from theory to practice, Mundy described the project Live Mesh, which for several years has been led by his colleague Ray Ozzie, the chief software architect at Microsoft, who in a duet with Craig took on the functions of the departed Bill Gates. As part of Live Mesh, the concept of cloud computing is implemented, as the company sees it. Despite the current perception that the cloud should consist of “silly” client devices that implement only the interface for accessing large application and data servers, the main role of Mesh is in coordinating the “orchestra” of offline and online applications.

The established model of the use of PC is still far from obsolete, sums up Mandi. It does not need to be broken to the ground, it is necessary to improve it in an evolutionary way. And today it is still too early to abandon devices with their own computational capabilities and drive everything "into the wire." Well, as they say, "who by his old age did not become a conservative, he has no reason." But the cause of young radicals now is to look for ideas to get around Microsoft at a sharp turn, which the software industry is currently doing.