Microsoft Looks to 64-Bit Future

Laing spoke during the second day of Microsoft's Windows Hardware Engineering Conference.

The future has been an ongoing theme among the WinHEC keynotes. In talking about the future, Microsoft is telling its customers and hardware, software and channel partners where it will take the technology in the 2009-2010 release cycle—and somewhat in the meantime.

The move to 64-bit has been much shakier than from 16-bit to 32-bit. The transition is slowest on the desktop, where driver and application support is an impediment. On the server, Microsoft offers mixed 32-bit and 64-bit products, with mixed acceptance. But Laing made clear that many new Microsoft server products would only be 64-bit.

If Laing meant what he said and how he said it, Windows Vista would be Microsoft's last 32-bit desktop operating system. Yes, there is a 64-bit version of Vista, but the future would be only 64-bit.

The 64-bit transition is something Microsoft partners—whether they be channel, hardware or software—need to prepare for now. If the successors of Vista and Windows Server 2008 are to be only 64-bit, enterprises need to plan at what point, in the fairly near future, they are going to go 64-bit, whether Windows XP, Vista or Server.

But there's a chicken-and-egg problem, more for the desktop than server. Microsoft partners don't have much incentive to develop software applications and hardware drivers until there is a certain threshold of adoption; similarly, businesses resist moving to a new operating system if there aren't supporting applications and drivers. Corporate resistance to Vista is example of the latter problem.

During WinHEC 2005, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates said the transition to 64-bit would happen "rapidly." Two years later, that's clearly not the case on the desktop.

Microsoft's forward view isn't just 64-bit. Executives at WinHEC also spoke about virtualization and chip development, particularly advancement of multi-core processors.

During his keynote yesterday, Craig Mundie, Microsoft's chief research and strategy officer, spoke about Moore's Law and the law of physics, which limits how many transistors can fit on one chip.

"The hardware community is going to have to think about how to build machines that have a lot more parallelism in them, that have two cores, eight cores, and ultimately many, many cores, and, in fact, the cores will become heterogeneous from an architectural standpoint," he said.

Laing reiterated the importance of multi-core processing during his keynote this morning—and that's something here today, he emphasized.

As I said in the previous post, Microsoft does give some direction to its partners about its future technology direction. Are you listening?

Related Posts:

• Is Vista One Step Ahead? , Microsoft Watch, May 16, 2007
• Longhorn Named Windows Server 2008, Microsoft Watch, May 15, 2007
• What's Inside Windows Server Longhorn, Microsoft Watch, April 30, 2007
• Vista Virtualization Goes Back to the Future, Microsoft Watch, April 2, 2007