WinHEC 2007 Day 1: Craig Mundie: 'Clearly Something is Going to Give'

By Scott M. Fulton, III, BetaNews

May 15, 2007, 1:39 PM

LOS ANGELES - At the keynote sessions at WinHEC this morning, Microsoft's chief research and strategy officer Craig Mundie took over the stage from Chairman Bill Gates. There, Mundie spoke about the evolution of computing in certain vertical markets, beginning with the health care industry.

In perhaps one of the most...unique breakthroughs shown thus far, Mundie demonstrated a touch-screen checkerboard that would be used by an elderly person in a home care system whose various rooms are linked together by home servers and Active Directory. There, an elderly lady can play checkers using physical checkers on the touch-screen board, which is horizontal. The computer player uses red checkers, and although Mundie described it as another human in another room, in the demo, the voice and reaction may be provided by computer.

After losing to the sub-human, the human player may next be reminded by the checkerboard of events that go on during the day. In perhaps the world's first demonstration of a pharmaceutically capable checkerboard, the table then reminds the elderly player that it's time to take her medication. A diagram of the medication then appears on the board, complete with trademark and health warnings (just like on the evening news). For the user to continue, she can place her pills on the diagram to confirm the medication she's about to take. Once the size and weight have been verified, she's allowed to proceed. Mundie did not say whether RFID technology is in use to verify the specific pills.

10:30 am PT - As the pharmaceutical part of our program ended, Mundie demonstrated some of Microsoft's work in developing a cell phone user interface for the illiterate, for use in phones distributed in emerging markets. The demonstration showed a cell phone that first tries to engage its user in Sanskrit script, before switching to English voice and pictograms.

But then Mundie started getting serious about the technical challenges. The free lunch for microprocessor technology has ended, he stated, as even in the "manycore" era, clock speed will not exceed 3 GHz. The solution to making programs faster will be to adopt parallelism, as Mundie finally admitted: after so many cores, users will not be able to see the speed increases in applications unless programs are developed to explicitly exploit parallelism. (There may have been a little bit of applause from someone who, I surmise, represented the Itanium coalition.)

Because applications must manage multiple connected pieces of hardware simultaneously, and that hardware is all running central processors of some sort, applications may need to become more asynchronous, Mundie said. Architects may find there's a limit to how well statically-typed languages work in such an environment, he admitted. He did not name any dynamic languages as alternatives, such as IronPython or ASP.NET AJAX, though he may as well have.

Multiple dynamic language scripts running simultaneously will lead to a tremendous security problem going forward, Mundie said. "Clearly something is going to give; the question is, what?...We need to find different ways for people to interact with computers besides point and click."

10:50 am PT - Mundie closed the keynote session by challenging developers to come up with new models of programming that take better advantage of parallelism, as well as the apparent fact that while the network appears to be converging, the devices themselves aren't. Mundie's comments follow up on statements made by Bill Gates earlier in the day.