Message to Wall Street and Sand Hill Road: Please divert a billion or two of the funny money pouring into virtualization software this week into a place where it is more sorely needed—parallel programming languages.
Rick Merritt
Computing Editor
The heady IPO of VMWare this week made this little company a $20 billion concern that the San Jose Merc said is now the third largest software company in the Valley behind Oracle and Adobe Systems. Jumping on the bandwagon Citrix Systems bought XenSource for $500 million—a whopping 500 times its annual revenues according to one market analyst's projections.
Virtualization is key for creating more secure computers running at higher utilization rates, but it's not rocket science. Once again the business community is showing its lemming DNA by jumping off a cliff in a mass hysteria of profit taking.
What this industry desperately needs right now are new programming languages and methods for handling the 16+ core CPUs coming down the pike really, really soon. Don't take my word on this. Listen to Jim McGraw, a veteran of the parallel computing community who tried unsuccessfully for a decade to get the Sisal language off the ground.
"I'm not happy with any of the parallel programming languages available today, but the cost and time it takes to develop a new language is enormous. It's a pretty depressing situation, frankly," he told me.
Posted by Rick Merritt on Aug 16, 2007 01:12 AM in Computing
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