Technology & Finance
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
Linux No Longer a Four-Letter Word At Microsoft
In fact, the company maintains a Web site for its Open Source work.
From the site:
Microsoft is focused on helping customers and partners succeed in a heterogeneous technology world. This starts with participating and contributing to a broad range of choices for developing and deploying software, including open source approaches and applications. From thousands of lines of code and scripts on MSDN and TechNet, to open source applications like IronPython, ASP.NET AJAX, SharePoint Learning Kit, and WiX on CodePlex and SourceForge, Microsoft is continually growing the number of products released with open source access.
Sunday, July 29, 2007
Almost Everything You Want to Know about Financial Technology
This is an amazingly comprehensive book and up-to-date with stuff like FIXML, FpML, and Check 21 with a lot of history related to financial services, at least marginally. Freedman, the founder of Inductive Solutions, is an adjunct at Polytechnic University.
For students who are doing a course in financial technology, or for newcomers to financial services who have to learn more about either the technical side of the business or, those coming from a business background who need an understanding of the technology, this is excellent.
Complementing Marc Alvarez in Market Data Explained, Freedman gets into identifiers, from securities to credit cards and Social Security numbers. While I can’t imagine reading this book straight through except for a course, it can be a good browse. In a Chapter, “Physical Aspects of Financial Networks” he notes that in a New York power failure in 2003 AMEX had its emergency generators ready to go within six hours but the cooling, which relied on steam from Con Ed, was not available.
Capital Markets - Equities, Fixed Income, Derivatives • Comments • Trackbacks • Permalink
Nathan Myhrvold Chat in the San Jose Merc
Nathan Myhrvold pent 14 years founding and running Microsoft Research. He retired in 2000 and focused on a range of interests from cooking to wildlife photography.
A pretty interesting guy—a few excerpts froma moderately interesting interview with a lot about patents but not much about what his company is doing.
I started Microsoft Research, which is the only computer science research operation of any scale started in the last generation. You have to go back to Xerox Palo Alto Research Center and before that to IBM and Bell Labs. All three of those are not today what they once were.
Intel has invested in some research, he says, but he thinks other big tech companies like Cisco should be in the game.
Now he is either funding invention with his Intellectual Ventures or trolling for patents to file suits—depends on whom you ask.But he says he has never filed a lawsuit, and notes that for someone at HP to accuse him of trolling is the pot calling the kettle black.
Saturday, July 28, 2007
The Future of Software in a New Age of Hardware -- Microsoft's Craig Mundie
Speaking to financial analysts, Craig Mundie, Chief Research & Strategy Officer at Microsoft, discussed the new power of moderate-speed, multi-core computing and the advent of specialized processors along with the general CPU. (See ACTIV Financial and AMD for an example).
As Mundie noted, the world of the application and the microprocessor hasn’t changed much since Bill Gates started Microsoft, well, except perhaps for Windows as an interface.
His own presentation on the Microsoft Web site proves the point—you can read the transcript, a technology that is thousands of years old, look at PowerPoints, 20-30 years old or see moving pictures in a video, largely something invented by Thomas Edison. Microsoft here presents them as three entirely separate forms of information. Newspapers have been able to combine text and images at least since the time of engravings...it would be nice if some of the ideas in his transcript were linked to images on the Web page.
But to focus on his content:
“...chips will start to be architected by arraying different types of computing elements that are fine-tuned architecturally to different parts of the computing mission...the world is going to move more and more away from one CPU that is multiplexed to do everything to many CPUs, and perhaps specialty CPUs.”
He expects this will require a change in software to asynchronous and loosely coupled, hihgly concurrent, contextual—
Computers will soon be 50-100X more powerful than they are today.
“Word, Excel and PowerPoint, they’ll just be 50 times faster. You’d say, well, so, is that really interesting?”
“The net effect is as the machines have gotten faster, but the paradigm of the application was really evolved when Bill Gates started Microsoft and the industry evolved from Lotus 1-2-3 and WordStar.”
Mundie expects that computing will become more personalized, the computer will be able to understand what the user wants, but that will require software that is wildly more complex.
Interesting stuff. Of course, these grand concepts would be more persuasive if a few bits of them were used in the actual delivery of the content.
Innovation in Computing Now Starts with the Consumer
In the Microsoft meeting with financial analysts, Ray Ozzie made a point which is pretty obvious but often overlooked:
“...when I came in, technological innovations first hit within the corporate data center, and it worked its way outward. Nowadays the most exciting things are happening in consumer electronics, and the technology innovations really find their way into IT, as opposed to the other way around.”
Microsoft has moved from the desktop into the data center and out to mobile devices. No one has moved successfully in the opposite direction, from the the data center to the consumer, although Sun and Oracle tried with their network devices, while IMB sold its PC division to Lenovo.
When Rabobank was looking for a partner to deliver across all its channels, from Internet banking to phone and TV, Microsoft was the only company that could do it all, and from a single code base.