Bitwrangler

Microsoft Woes of the Future?

In a recent Gartner article on Microsoft Windows Broken Nature here they say:

"Microsoft's operating system (OS) development times are too long and they deliver limited innovation; their OSs provide an inconsistent experience between platforms, with significant compatibility issues; and other vendors are out-innovating Microsoft . That gives enterprises unpredictable releases with limited value, management costs that are too high, and new releases that break too many apps and take too long to test and adopt. With end users bringing their own software solutions into the office...well, it's just a heck of a sad story for Microsoft. "

If you couple this with their big time push over the last 3 years or so to go into HPC (they presented at the Salishan Conference last week for goodness sake) and the HPC environment's desire to push past Petaflops and on to Exaflops by 2018 or so it paints a very scary potential future.  One should never under estimate the influence of the 30Ton Gorilla in Redmond, but is this influence going to be good for genuine HPC?  When we start talking about multiple thousands of nodes and millions to billions of concurrent threads, the OS becomes a big time issue.  Between OS size and OS jitter, we already have significant trimming to do in the OS Kernel on the node.  This is in direct opposition to the normal ways of Microsoft.  

Scary.  Very Scary.

Posted at 06:48AM Apr 30, 2008 in Sun  |  Comments[0]