Windows can solve world health: Microsoft
Ian Grayson17 May 2007, 8:27 AM
How do you solve the health problems plaguing billions of people in the third world? Easy! Give 'em a Windows Mobile-based smart phone.
 Craig Mundie: Windows -- the solution to the world's viruses |
How do you solve the health problems plaguing billions of people in the third world? Easy! Give ‘em a Windows Mobile-based smart phone.
While others ponder tricky issues such as providing access to clean drinking water and food, the technical minds at Microsoft are figuring out how Windows Vista can help the situation.
In a presentation to the throng of assembled hardware developers at WinHEC, Microsoft chief research and strategy officer, Craig Mundie painted a scenario where a Windows Mobile-powered phone could help a struggling mother cope with the stresses of having a sick child. Touching stuff.
While avoiding getting bogged down in practical details (where would she charge her phone?), Mundie outlined a system whereby symptoms could be entered into the handset and initial medical advice provided by an automated central system.
If necessary, the mother could travel to a doctor’s surgery where a Vista-based kiosk allows a more comprehensive check of the child’s condition. Based on a blood scan, further advice would be delivered by a doctor via video link. You know, all those high bandwidth video links lying around in third-world countries. Meanwhile, the same video is downloaded to the mother’s smart phone for later playback.
While such products would obviously open up a new large and lucrative market for Microsoft, Mundie focused more on how they could help improve healthcare delivery in disadvantaged areas.
“This kind of technology allows us to reach out to the three billion people that need government or agency support,” he says. “It is the only way we can scale in the way we need to to help these people.”
Mundie also whetted the appetite of the roomful of hardware developers by outlining Microsoft’s vision for squeezing more performance from processor chips.
Without giving technical details, he said future versions of Windows will incorporate “speculative execution” that uses spare CPU cycles to perform tasks before they are requested by the user.
“Most processors are underutilised, and if we don’t do something things will become even more lopsided,” says Mundie. “We’ll move from 3 per cent utilisation to 0.3 per cent utilisation cent during the next 10 years.”
Mundie says computers will increasingly know where they are and what tasks their users might be about to perform.
“They become more and more like a great personal assistant,” he says. “They will bring forward things you might find interesting and didn’t even know that you needed.”