Microsoft & Parallel Computing: What Are They Up To?

Mon 9/20/2010 11:02 am. I have blathered endlessly on Microsoft’s dubious parallel computing efforts; see my imaginary-letters-to-the-editor page and endless linkage. But perusing a recent issue of MSDN entirely devoted to how one should use multi-tasking to make one’s programs sing and dance — the right way, as opposed to how they told us to do it last year or last week — I asked myself, why do they keep hammering this by-now all-but-hopeless cause?

And the answer is pitifully obvious: because they didn’t make a clever music player or a beautiful smart phone, but created the usual incompetent junk that seems to be their fate. ... As far as I’ve heard, they haven’t made much money off of the Xbox game console yet!

The point is, Steve Jobs and Microsoft/Bill Gates both saw long ago that Moore’s law would curl-up and get sick, and that, more-or-less consequently, desktop computers were going to get real cheap and not much faster. Jobs, as all the world knows, forged on into the far reaches of music players, smart phones, and now, whatever the iPad is.... Microsoft did all of these things and failed.

Consequently, Microsoft has to keep flogging multi-tasking as the only way to make their pitiful operating system / business software products attractive into the future. If Windows phone 7 or whatever it’s supposed to be turns into a howling iphone-beating success, MSDN magazine and all the works of Microsoft will suddenly be propagandizing for the Mobile World of Tomorrow and pfft! for that old-fashioned multi-core desktop / laptop stuff....

And that is how the age of my precious beautiful personal computers ends: definitely not with a bang....

Nonsense, Owen!

Yeah I realized it’s all bilge. Microsoft is well aware it isn’t going to convince anyone to keep buying Office 2017 or Windows 37 by flogging multi-core. Office can be as multi-tasking as they want it to be — which is unlikely to provide much of a performance boost anyway; I mean, calculate your heart out, spreadsheet! ... Basically, Microsoft’s consumer products are a lost cause, and presumably they know it....

Nope, they’re flogging the multi-tasking NET, the anti-java, and they’re doing it so corporations will continue to use and invest in the ever-more powerful Microsoft script language.

And I am fooled again! ... Like where I excoriated the software guru plague for years without realizing it was a corporate excrescence! ... And as it is again here with the pitiful MSDN and the NET multi-core supposed super-script. I’ve been reading the ridiculous magazine’s multi-tasking propaganda forever, and thought I was so clever to resist their blandishments— but they weren’t even talking to me, or anyone like me! ... They’re conning the corps....

And so my precious world of personal computers will end indeed not only with a whimper, but brought low by my evil lifelong nemesis, the faceless mediocre boring corporation! ... Bitter, bitter, bitter....

1. Actually the release of Vista suggests Microsoft missed the boat even there, since the appalling product was clearly designed to run on hardware that had magically gotten much faster; only it didn’t....