… than a decade. Ultimately, we had to start to platformise some of the underpinnings of that, which I think... will be part of how we scale up the services to meet these future requirements.
So, is the goal that some period of time from now developers will be able to — the same way they think of writing a program that sits on top of Windows — be able to write a program that sits on top of the internet basically with Microsoft providing the platform?
In a way it's a little hard to think about "sitting on top of the internet", and that's why I think of it as software and services. Even though it's at the early days, there is a set of facilities that we provide APIs for, for the cloud-based [on the network] service. And so you can write an app on Windows and say, look, go get me a Live ID, go out to the cloud, check this identity, bring it back. And that's an example of a local application that's using a cloud-based service.
So we intend, whether it's identity, storage, presence, each of these capabilities will be part of a cloud-based platform. And indeed, people writing programs, no matter what the locus of execution is, will be able to invoke either the local machine facility or the cloud-based service pretty much with equal capability.
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One of the things you've shown is that, for some emerging markets, one of the answers to getting more people access to technology is that the mobile phone really can be a low-end computer, it can hook up to a TV, it can have a keyboard. Is that emerging as a pretty likely scenario?
It's one that we'll have in the market in the relatively near future. It's not a super-big leap from a smartphone to one that would do that. The big issue is optimising it for low cost because the people who are using these things are not demanding an enterprise line of business app integration. They want a much more simplified environment. So a lot of the focus there is sort of the consumerisation of the smartphone technologies and their ability to make it economical to interface them with these other devices.
But I do believe that for many of those markets, the phone will be people's first computer. It's just a foregone conclusion, simply because the phones start at a much lower price, they have a utility that appeals to virtually every person as telephony always has and as they become more and more powerful. They won't start with a PC, then go to a phone and the television; they're more likely to start with a phone and then a television and then sort of a personally owned personal computer. I think we're going to be surprised at how high the core counts go.
Shared access will probably be the predominating use for many of these emerging middle class and lower demographic people in terms of how they get access to a traditional full PC environment. And I think that's because there's just a cost factor that is more of an issue for them than has been the case in the more developed countries of late.
There's certainly a huge effort to lower the cost of a computer, a full Vista-capable computer, and we have no reason to believe that that trend won't ultimately continue.
For years we got more and more megahertz, the computing industry really began to expect that. That's how systems were designed, that's how software was designed. All of a sudden that's really slowed, and what we're getting is more and more cores, but the software doesn't necessarily know what to do with that.
That's right. We do now face the challenge of figuring out how to move, I'll say, the whole programming ecosystem of personal computing up to a new level where they can reliably construct large-scale applications that are distributed, highly concurrent, and able to utilise all this computing power. And that is probably the single most disruptive thing that we will have done in the last 20 or 30 years.
Obviously it's going to take a lot of different approaches to solve the problem. What are some of the kinds of things that are first?
I think we're going to be surprised at how high the core counts go, and potentially how we see more and more specialty hardware cores put on these single die systems, and how to fashion that into a system is going to be more and more challenging. I contend that it's going to require an evolution in the thinking about what are the apps. If I told you that I could…
