A (More?) Positive Outlook?

I consider myself kind of a critic. I think we need a lot more criticism in the industry as well as in society as a whole. I try to be constructive even though I miss that mark and have no editor to question me before I hit "Publish Post".

Given the New Year around the bend (as I write this, I'm about 11 hours away from 2005), I am going to post something positive about the mainstream of the industry. Shock!

Here's to a 2005 where we can learn more about Microsoft's Bigtop...

Bigtop consists of three components, all written in C#, according developers who said they were briefed by Microsoft. These are:

Highwire

Highwire is a technology designed to automate the development of highly parallel applications that distribute work over distributed resources, the aforementioned sources said. Highwire is a programming language/model that will aim to make the testing and compiling of such parallel programs much simpler and more reliable.

Bigparts

Bigparts is code designed to turn inexpensive PC devices into special-purpose servers, according to the sources. Bigparts will enable real-time, device-specific software to be moved off a PC, and instead be managed centrally via some Web-services-like model.

Bigwin

According to sources close to Microsoft, Bigwin sounds like the ultimate manifestation of Microsoft's "software as a service" mantra. In a Bigwin world, applications are just collections of OS services that adhere to certain "behavioral contracts." These OS services can be provided directly by the core OS or even obtained from libraries outside of the core OS.

These are terrific goals. Market forces can detract from goals like this. Perhaps better markets can emerge from staying on track; the benefits could be huge.