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Bigtop

Stefan Tilkov,

Via Patrick Logan: I bet this is going to spread through the blogosphere like the influenza virus that has been plaguing everyone around me and now finally reached me: Microsoft’s “Bigtop”, which definitely sounds interesting:

  • Highwire: Highwire is a technology designed to automate the development of highly parallel applications that distribute work over distributed resources, the aforementioned sources said. Highwire is a programming language/model that will aim to make the testing and compiling of such parallel programs much simpler and more reliable.
  • Bigparts: Bigparts is code designed to turn inexpensive PC devices into special-purpose servers, according to the sources. Bigparts will enable real-time, device-specific software to be moved off a PC, and instead be managed centrally via some Web-services-like model.
  • Bigwin: According to sources close to Microsoft, Bigwin sounds like the ultimate manifestation of Microsoft’s “software as a service” mantra. In a Bigwin world, applications are just collections of OS services that adhere to certain “behavioral contracts.” These OS services can be provided directly by the core OS or even obtained from libraries outside of the core OS.

Unfortunately, this paragraph sort of reduces expectations a little:

Sources said Microsoft will likely make some sort of preview version of the Bigtop code available to the company’s software-development partners by 2006. If and when the final version debuts, it won’t be much before the end of the decade, sources added.

In other words: nothing that is to be taken too seriously — right now, at least.

On January 2, 2005 3:43 AM, Michel said:

stop to take that kind of buzz seriously !!!

it’s just some description of cluster/grid computing services and nice names.

and what about “software as service” mantra ?!! it has nothing specific in microsoft software , and it’s the saying of ibm and sun too (and it’s always just old good plain software )

about “These OS services can be provided directly by the core OS or even obtained from libraries outside of the core OS.”

it’s just the SAME crap than for “CAIRO” (in mid 90’s the new windows will be a “revolutionnary object os”, its project name was “cairo”, of course it was just marketing lies. it was just experimental office with a new ole version ) ,

they said the EXACT same thing ! gah, it really pisses me off !

in 90s object was the whole marketing fuss, now, it’s contract based development (a “new” paradigm in development, not something amazing , it’s just a model, like MVC or object or others stuff)

please please please never take seriously ANY marketing speech (and by all means, never believe microsoft, they did that every 5 years !!!! from 20 years)

only believes REAL products, REAL code source in YOUR hand, you can very USE and say “wow, it’s really useful and good”.

thanks.

On January 3, 2005 12:07 PM, Stefan Tilkov said:

What makes you think I took it seriously? :-)