Prognostication
This week saw some of the heavy hitters of the technology industry share their visions of its future with HEXUS.channel.
We started with Microsoft’s director of communications for unified communications and Microsoft Online, Clint Patterson, who wanted to tell us about the software giant’s plans for moving its delivery model online.
Microsoft is calling this strategy Software Plus Services to distinguish it from the commonly used term ‘software as a service’ and represent the fact that it can include installed as well as browser accessed software.
Neither Google nor Yahoo! were mentioned in the interview but it’s clear that Microsoft isn’t going to let its inability to buy the latter stop it from taking the online fight to the former.
Also on Monday we got a bit more information out of Intel concerning its much heralded entry into the discrete graphics market – codenamed Larrabee. Graphics guru Jon Peddie posted his initial thoughts on the announcement on his blog soon after and he seemed to think that, despite NVIDIA and AMD/ATI currently holding a duopoly over the discrete graphics market, Intel could definitely make Larrabee work commercially.
In a subsequent blog post, Peddie corrected some of his earlier calculations but made the intriguing suggestion that Larrabee might even end up benefitting NVIDIA and AMD/ATI. What is this madness? I hear you cry. Well, he reckons all the marketing spend and general hullabaloo surrounding the launch of Larrabee might end up boosting the PC gaming market so much that everyone will be better off.
