We’re Multicore

Sometimes I really wonder what Steve Ballmer is thinking. Actually, recently I’ve been wondering about that every time I read a transcript of what he says.

Today Ballmer’s Microsoft analyst day kickoff presentation took the cake:

And last, but certainly not least…in a sense I think about us as a business that we might characterize as multicore. If the new generations of microprocessors are all supposed to have multiple cores on a single chip, Microsoft has multiple core capabilities or operations or businesses in a single entity.

I hope Pat Gelsinger read this too. Pat recently spoke at Stanford about Intel’s multiple core strategy and, in the the Q&A, he mentioned having had a very difficult meeting with Bill Gates a couple of years ago where Gates went semi-ballistic once he understood what Gelsinger was telling him about moving away from ever increasing speed in single processor chips and having to move to multiple cores per chip just to deal with the heat issues. According to Gelsinger, Gates didn’t think Microsoft knew how to optimize its software for the “multicore” environment.

And then today, Ballmer describes Microsoft as a multicore company. Go figure…and smile.