Dan Warne12 September 2007, 3:01 PM
INTERVIEW - PAGE 2 |Microsoft's Craig Mundie on what's coming in future versions of Windows.
APC: So, moving to something different: given so many of APC's readers are Windows users and fans, can you give them a sneak peek in to the future of Windows in to the next version?
Craig Mundie: I can't really give you a sneak peek into the next version of Windows per se. My time horizon is actually kind of longer term than that, so what I might do is to talk about the kind of things that I think your readers might be interested in – the time horizon beyond the next version of Windows.
APC: Sure.
Craig Mundie: One of the things that is changing over the next five to 10 years is that the industry will fundamentally change the architecture of the microprocessor and with that will create a new level of capability in these machines.
I think it is likely that in that time horizon that the current price and power levels that we think of as today's microprocessors, are likely be 50 or even 100 times more powerful.
These should give us the basis of making qualitative changes in what people expect from these computer systems. So things that the industry has traditionally struggled to achieve, like perfect dictation or multilingual support, will be changing the experience of man/machine interaction significantly.
Some of these things may be on the horizon at levels that will surprise people. If we can master the necessary architectural changes, it will provide computing capability that is substantially greater than anything we have experienced today.
So despite the power of the machines that people have on their desk today, we really still think that this whole evolution is in its infancy and over that longer time horizon, we are likely to see some fairly dramatic changes.
That is one of the reasons we keep investing in new technologies for writing and expressing programs, new models of integrating them and for operating them across the internet or multi-machine environments.
We are very enthused about that on a longer cycle basis and expect that that the Windows franchise will continue to move forward to avail everybody of these capabilities.
APC: So, speaking of the changing architecture of microprocessors, one of the big hurdles the software industry is facing at the moment is adopting new programming methods to take advantage of parallel processing. Have there been any leaps forward within Microsoft recently in that space?
Craig Mundie: Well they are out there although most of them are not public yet. We have been very focused on this in our research organisation for the last five or six years and we're increasingly optimistic that there will be tools that will facilitate the construction of highly concurrent systems.
One area that your readers might want to explore as a precursor to some of this is the robotics SDK that the company started delivering on the web last December. It is a new product for Microsoft, and an area that we haven't historically been in, but many of the tools and technologies that are in our robotics studio SDK, are precursors of the kinds of tools that the broad developer community will find interesting as they have to construct larger scale, highly concurrent applications.
The Robotics SDK, for example, has a visual programming model where people can wire-up concurrent applications that are actually running concurrently on multiple machines but which are heterogeneous in architectural sense.
It has a concurrently controlled runtime that basically deals with a lock-free synchronisation architecture, along with a new set of system services that operate in a highly distributed architecture.
Many of these things would be interesting to your reader, not because they reflect specifically what we would see in the traditional Windows environment, but because they show that the company is advancing the state-of-the-art in programming models and tools. I think these things will ultimately inform the more mainstream developer environment.