Microsoft has always put the needs of business customers and home users first. There is another sector that relies on computers, one that has been neglected for decades: the scientific community.
Between now and 2020 Microsoft is planning to ramp up its support for the scientific community. Some of the key milestones from their roadmap include…
- Expanding use of COTS (customised off the shelf) software / technology: moving away from ‘build your own’ in science
- Move towards program execution for scientific applications hosted in database (taking the application to the data, rather than the data to the application)
- Data ‘behind’ scientific papers available in machine readable formats
- Symbolic computation integrated into scientific databases and programming languages.
- Development of equivalent of ‘Office’ for Scientists – Integrated suite of easy to use, standardised, well maintained applications spanning mathematical libraries, algorithms, data management, scientific paper writing, visualisation and theoretical tools (e.g. symbolic maths) that work together well.
- Broadly available domain-specific computational frameworks, components, reference architectures