Microsoft says it has been asked the question many times: "Aren`t spreadsheets, word processors and browsers enough personal computing?" The company disagrees, with a $6.8 billion R&D budget to prove it, and it received thunderous applause during demonstrations of future products at this year`s Professional Developers` Conference in Los Angeles.
Dr Rick Rashid, senior VP of research at Microsoft, speaks of an "almost apocalyptic view of computing" prevalent in the media. "They ask - can computers do any more tasks credibly? It has been a problem for me for some time [to get past this attitude]."
Microsoft has five research labs, including one in Beijing and one in Cambridge, employs 700 researchers and engages 179 PhD interns. "Our mission is to move the state of the art forward, transfer really good ideas into product development, and, in short, to make sure that we`re not done."
Wave of innovation
Rashid speaks of the move of software development "from art form to science. We have [for instance] seen the move to automated software testing tools, but also to static analysis, which makes it possible to allow mathematical proof of the capabilities of software without testing it."
Specifically, Microsoft`s three main areas of innovation are focused on the presentation, storage and communication layers in Longhorn, the next guise of Windows, expected in 2006. These are codenamed Avalon, WinFS and Indigo respectively.
The presentation layer concerns graphics advances and uses for graphics processors for general computational tasks rather than just in games and other graphic-centric areas. To demonstrate this, he showed new water-rendering software with significant rendering advances, such as deepening of reflections with positional change of the onlooker.
As regards storage, Rashid stated that most new data is stored on hard disk drives. Work done in storage includes SkyServer, "a kind of reverse of the TerraServer project". SkyServer is a mapping of a "third of the universe", and as an online tutoring tool contains 100 million objects (celestial bodies), 10TB of pictures and 1TB of catalogue information.
It is proof, says Rashid, that "SQL Server is a pretty good way to store this information, that Web services are a good way to present this (through IIS) and .Net is a good framework to build distributed apps such as SkyServer, which can exist in a federation of Web services".
The communication layer advances in Longhorn were presented as new ways to relate contacts, group shares and other areas of "social computing". Rashid ordered a demonstration showing visually and logically compelling ways of presenting personal interrelationships in a dynamic and interactive way, on a site called Wallop. The site is membership-based, with membership granted on invitation only.
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