Scott Loftesness
Scoble’s speaking in parables.
In commenting on Ole Eichorn’s excellent Longhorn post, he says: “one thing Microsoft has done throughout its history is to deliver major platforms that outstrip hardware a bit.”
No kidding. Microsoft has never invested in performance (one of the key points of Ole’s critique) — they’ve always relied on hardware vendors saving their bacon with more memory, faster processors, etc. Smart decision: it’s worked.
Where this strategy is most likely to fail with Longhorn is in the file system where the magnitude of disk I/O performance improvements are relatively miniscule compared to the rest of the system components. A piggy WinFS is quite likely to be really bad news for Longhorn.
As for Scoble’s comments on Longhorn using the graphics processor, it’s good to see Microsoft will be catching up with Quartz Extreme — in a couple of years.
Related posts:
The Little Boy Explains
Scott Loftesness put it well: “Microsoft has never invested in performance – they’ve always relied on hardware vendors saving their bacon with more memory, faster processors, etc… Where this strategy is most likely to fail with Longhorn is in the…