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What 6 billion could buy you

What 6 billion could buy you

Posted Jan 9, 2006 16:15 UTC (Mon) by mikec (guest, #30884)
In reply to: What 6 billion could buy you by Los__D
Parent article: Winning the Linux Wars (MCP)

I'll forgive that one point which has its issues - $6B only buys 2 Si plants these days...

However,
a. It is a good point - WTF do they do with $6B? Compared to the innovation from mere $100's of millions in VC funded startups they appear to be spinning their wheels pretty badly - Losing $100's per unit on a stripped down PC (XBox) hardly qualifies as innovation.

b. The reason that "hardware accelerated" OS chips have not appeared is that "Moore's Law" and DV make them obsolete before they could be finished... I don't know if you have noticed, but the clocks rates stopped going up! The barrier to doing hardware accelerated OSes these days is how to know that they actually work...

The "do it in software" mantra is one of captiulation of the verification gods... It cannot be verified prior to shipping, so we leave room to fix it later...

That is not to say that one does not need "programmability", but neither does one need to be able to program that which has not changed in 25 years...


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What 6 billion could buy you

Posted Jan 9, 2006 18:08 UTC (Mon) by jonabbey (subscriber, #2736) [Link]

Microsoft has always included 'product and marketing development' in their 'research and development' budgeting, where 'product' means 'the customer and industry's perception of the bits in the box'.

What 6 billion could buy you

Posted Jan 10, 2006 3:44 UTC (Tue) by mikec (guest, #30884) [Link]

As with most rants, the question was rhetorical ;-)

Though I should point out that those VC funded startups I mentioned are also subject to the laws of marketing.

Even MS seems to understand the lack of return on their R&D dollars these days - thus the monstrous dividend pacakge.

Speaking for myself, if I had $50B to blow, you can bet I'd be doing some research on the moon, it amazes me that Gates and freinds, given that they are by original vocation computer geeks, aren't the ones doing the things that Branson is doing.

Oh well, I guess I will enjoy the nice warm weather here on Earth...

What 6 billion could buy you

Posted Jan 12, 2006 12:59 UTC (Thu) by Zenith (subscriber, #24899) [Link]

Speaking for myself, if I had $50B to blow, you can bet I'd be doing some research on the moon, it amazes me that Gates and freinds, given that they are by original vocation computer geeks, aren't the ones doing the things that Branson is doing.
Well, actually they *are* doing something about it:
http://news.com.com/Geeks+in+space/2100-1026_3-5399507.html
http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/SS1_ALLEN_040620.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Allen

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