Microsoft has missed two boats. The shift of the consumer to smartphones and tablets. The shift of the enterprise to the cloud. All of the top management staff have been appointed under Steve Ballmers' reign. Unless they get someone totally new in who will do a root and branch cleanup then the place will continue to be run by career politicians and continue it's downward slope. I can't see them getting out of this one easily.
Posts by FourYorkshiremen
2 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Nov 2013
Investors on Microsoft: What, Ballmer, leaving? Hand me my wallet
Eat our dust, spinning rust: In 5 years, it'll be all flash all the time
Friday 15th November 2013 23:57 GMT
Re: I don't know about...
Disruptive innovation in the consumer space is accelerating this. Smartphones all use flash not disk drives. The competition in the consumer market is intense and drives prices down a lot more so than the disk drive competition in the enterprise which is now concentrated in 2 companies. As a result flash now in a position to replace disk drives. Another observation is smartphones do not seem too bothered about RAM speed. As a result are we going to be stuck with DDR4 for the next ten years and fast block IO. I wonder in 5 years memory will become the bottleneck and IO will be fine.
Another thought is we now Flash will replace Disk Drives (the latency benefit is massive for databases). The massive improvement in latency for Random IO is going to have a major impact on Databases. RDBMs will gain from improved Random IO with their ability to implement indexes dynamically. While I'm at it when are Database vendors and Intel going to get together to use all the silicon a bit better. Maybe this is something one of those UK fabless chip designers may do.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
