An MVP Look at the Future

Bill Gates gave a speech to more than 1,700 Microsoft Most Value Professionals (MVPs) who attended the annual Microsoft MVP Summit held in Seattle a week or so ago. One thing that was notable about the keynote was that was Gates’ last address to the MVPs as Microsoft chairman. That doesn't mean that we've seen the last of Bill. He's actually a good speaker and will be stumping for one issue or another that's dear to his heart.

The other notable item, at least for me, is that I wasn't there. It wasn't because of Bill, and certainly not because of the coffee. But the boss said something about staying in the office for more than 15 minutes at a time. Still, I did receive a transcript of his speech, and it did touch on a variety topics -- some of which are obvioius, and others that are interesting. If I were to sum up the thrust of his comments, I'd say Gates was talking about transition. Here's what he said in, more or less, his own words:

Transition #1. Using a slice of spectrum, Wi-Fi has exploded into a huge thing. Now we're looking at adding new spectrum down in the lower end, what we call "white space," and making Wi-Fi even better than it is today. In fact, if we get that to happen, the idea of having cities that have full Wi-Fi coverage will become far more economic than it is today.

Transition #2. Moving from 32- to 64-bit. This transition is smooth with upwards compatibility. In fact, more and more of the chips that get pulled are capable of 64-bit. And so as the device drivers move across, we'll see first on the server a big wave to high percentage use there, then with about a two to three-year lag, that will happen on the client machine as well. In terms of a single machine, that should handle us for a long time to come.

Transition #3. Parallel programming. The speed of machines is going to depend on this parallel programming. Which means the operating system will take on higher level tasks. And so that as applications are calling the operating system, the sophistication of doing this parallel programming will be handled in the operating system itself. And so we'll take the graphics layer and move it up to a much higher level of API. We'll even take things like some of the physics capabilities and make those available in a standard runtime in the operating system, high level visualization, 3-D capabilities, those things built-in.

Transition #4. We'll have capabilities around databases, not just classic disk-type databases but also in-memory databases where you're manipulating XML type data structures in a rich way. And so often the things that applications had to do themselves, they'll be able to turn over and let us do in a parallel fashion using rich runtime libraries that we create.

Transition #5. TV will change. Shows themselves can be quite different. Instead of the news just being everybody sees the same, if you want to see more about soccer or the weather or skiing or various international issues, that's what you'll see, and other people will see what's interesting to them. The ads will be based on your interests, and even if you are intrigued by what they say, you can interact and get more information. And so the Internet is taking all the ways that information is distributed and changing them. Video in a sense is the final frontier in terms of size and bits, particularly as we move up to high-definition, the most challenging, and now today the ability to edit those things is becoming very possible.

Transition #6. Microsoft will change. The company can take a long term view out into what it should be doing to have breakthroughs in software. MS has a group that's doing software for robots. And it's just like at the beginning of the PC. The company doesn't exactly know what the breakthroughs will look like, or what the most popular applications will be. There are many possibilities, ranging from toys to helping elderly people in medical situations, to security type applications, manufacturing applications. But having software that takes the idea of planning and sensors and vision, and all the data and even robots working together, that that's an interesting software challenge

Transition #7. The software that Microsoft is creating fits into the whole theme of how software is changing -- a move towards Web Services. When we used to think about software, we always thought about a piece of software running on one machine, and all of its data had to be there. Well, today we think about software running essentially across the Internet, and instead of just a subroutine call on one machine, we can make a Web Service call that will find a resource and connect up to other machines.

Transition #8. The shape of the datacenter will change. Companies are building datacenters that today have hundreds of thousands and in the future will literally have millions of computers. And the way we do that to make sure that even if any one computer fails, that the system automatically recovers, those techniques can be applied in datacenters even going down to very small ones. And so taking the advance in hardware, and not only using it for performance, but using it for reliability is a very big deal.

Transition #9. In the future eventually when you actually write a piece of software, you won't know what computer it runs on. There will be management software that looks at all the pool of resources and decides, based on the responsiveness you want and which machine is working and the hardware parameters required, and decides how many machines to run it on, and therefore gets that right type of capability. So, things like emergency recovery, you'll often be able to take your software and run it on machines that you rent instead of your having to do that yourself. Information will be geo-distributed so that a problem at any one location can't cause either the software running or the data to be lost.

Transition #10. Three-dimensional models will start to be a very standard thing. Today, when we think about shopping on the Internet, well, it's still this flat, 2-D type interface, but because of the advance in graphics and performance, we'll be able to create stores, stores that match the real store or stores that don't exist at all, but have been custom made based on the interests that you have.

Transition #11. Microsoft has a goal of making business programming require a tenth the code that it requires today. Microsoft is now using a process called "Quest" process where they write their dreams about software, and say what will the office look like 10 years from now when the cameras and the screens and the communications are different, when there is no PBX but it's all done over the Internet, how will that look. What will the home look like as the projection screens and the Internet TV and the great mobile devices are there? And so we write that down, and we see what software breakthroughs or business intelligence or workflow or security will be required to do that, and then we match the quest with the product plans and see that they're moving towards that ultimate capability.

What I have called "transitions" doesn't constitute his entire speech, and in all likelihood I missed his main points. But you get the idea.

Posted by Jon Erickson at 04:31 PM  Permalink