{"id":646348,"date":"2013-03-12T14:33:22","date_gmt":"2013-03-12T18:33:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gigaom.com\/?p=618318"},"modified":"2013-03-12T14:33:22","modified_gmt":"2013-03-12T18:33:22","slug":"microsofts-next-chapter-putting-bing-tech-inside-our-homes-and-data-centers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/646348","title":{"rendered":"Microsoft\u2019s next chapter: Putting Bing tech inside our homes and data centers"},"content":{"rendered":"

Two terms kept popping up as I watched a slew of Microsoft executives show off the company\u2019s future at its annual TechForum media gathering last week. One was \u201cmachine learning.\u201d The other was \u201cBing.\u201d<\/p>\n

I would have been surprised had I not sat down with Microsoft Technical Fellow Dave Campbell the night before the event to talk big data.\u00a0After all, I was in Redmond \u2014 home of Word, Excel and a, shall we say, misunderstood new operating system \u2014 not Silicon Valley, where \u201cmachine learning\u201d now rolls off the tongue as easily and often as \u201cstartup\u201d or \u201ctriathlon.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

However, a single rhetorical question from Campbell resonated pretty loudly and got me in the right frame of mind for what I was about to hear: Who else, he asked, has a top-tier web service business (complete with the hundreds of petabytes of data those services collect) as well as a top-tier enterprise software business?<\/p>\n

He could have added to that list a consumer software business, 30 percent of the world\u2019s long-distance calls, a mobile device business, one of the world\u2019s most popular gaming platforms, a large-screen touch-display business<\/a>, and a motion-sensing device that ties into \u2014 and can control \u2014 all of them. They all came into play at TechForum, as various company presidents, engineers and now-adviser-to-the-CEO Craig Mundie demonstrated a future where everything is connected and trying to learn what we like and what we\u2019re doing.<\/p>\n

Bing is the key to it all (even if it can\u2019t touch Google)<\/h2>\n

Microsoft\u2019s Bing search engine is at the core of everything the company is trying to do in the field of machine learning and cutting-edge big data. That fact makes it an important part of Microsoft\u2019s future even if it never gets close to Google search in terms of revenue or users. \u201cIts long-term value is just as much as a deep infrastructural element,\u201d Mundie said during a Q&A session kicking off the event.<\/p>\n

What he means is that Bing is valuable because the technology developed to power it ultimately stands to make Microsoft a lot more money in other areas. Qi Lu,\u00a0Microsoft\u2019s Online Services Division president (and an integral part of the maturation of Hadoop inside Yahoo<\/a> earlier this century), describes Bing\u2019s primary architecture as less of a traditional keyword index and more of an \u201cinformation fabric.\u201d We\u2019re building a digital society, he explained, so there are digital entities \u2014 people, place and things \u2014 and Bing must be able to capture the rich spatial, temporal and other relationships<\/a> among them.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a><\/p>\n

A research project for analyzing viral web content.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Taking that vision company-wide, Microsoft can take in data from Bing, Skype, Xbox Live, Office 365 and other sources and actually be able to store, process and analyze it in a meaningful ways. Internally, this might be for business-intelligence or product-development purposes. Externally, Microsoft might use data to create experiences that span devices and services.<\/p>\n

Bing also feeds the pipeline for future enterprise IT products, particularly when it comes to data management. Campbell tells the story of meeting a colleague years after he left the SQL database team and went to work on Bing\u2019s infrastructure. At that point, their worlds were vastly different, but the advent of and hype around big data has converged them once again.<\/p>\n

\"Structure<\/a><\/p>\n

Satya Nadella at Structure 2012
(c) Pinar Ozger<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

During his presentation, Satya Nadella, Microsoft\u2019s Server and Tools Business president, said the company now builds internal IT with a design-for-first-party-but-think-of-third-party mentality. As a result, the core of the Windows Azure cloud-computing platform is based on technologies developed to run Bing, as is the Windows Azure storage service. When Microsoft builds a new operating system, he added, it thinks about the project at webscale in terms of what it would take to run Bing using that platform.<\/p>\n

And Campbell told me via email after the event that Microsoft is considering how to productize the various graph, NoSQL and other types of databases it uses to power the features within Bing. Ironically, though, its Cosmos<\/a> and Dryad<\/a> technologies that serve as the core of Bing are off the table: consumers demanded Hadoop, so that\u2019s what Microsoft is currently pushing<\/a> for mass storage and large-scale batch processing.<\/p>\n

Google, of course, is doing something very similar, albeit with less of a focus on enterprise software as a final destination for its technologies (with the exception of its small suite of cloud services such as Compute Engine<\/a>, App Engine<\/a> and BigQuery<\/a>). Rather, the types of advances in data storage, processing and analysis<\/a> that Google has made thanks to products such as search and YouTube are finding their way into Project Glass and self-driving cars. Time will tell whose efforts prove wiser in the end.<\/p>\n

A little history and prognostication on machine learning<\/h2>\n

Mundie said machine learning, especially, has been a core part of Microsoft Research\u2019s focus for years. And although there were some initial struggles, including a dearth of good data and machines powerful enough to process it all, the company and the industry as a whole have come a long way. Among the big areas of improvement he cited were real-time speech recognition \u2014 Microsoft has done some impressive work in this area<\/a>, actually \u2014 and natural user interaction.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve talked for a long time in the industry about IT<\/em> meaning information technology<\/em>,\u201d Mundie said, \u201c\u2026 you might redefine IT<\/em> to be intelligent technology<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Eric Rudder, Mundie\u2019s prot\u00e9g\u00e9 and chief technical strategy officer, elaborated. If you think about all the pictures and other info Microsoft\u2019s devices and services capture, he said, you\u2019ll see a lot of opportunity to learn and build better products. Stepping out of the consumer world, he questioned how one might begin working with a 40-billion-row Excel spreadsheet. Query it, talk to it or somehow use gestures to communicate with it?<\/p>\n

\"Mundie<\/p>\n

Mundie (right) and Skype President Tony Bates (left).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Mundie thinks Microsoft can answer these and other questions \u2014 this despite a relative lack of attention compared with Google\u2019s research efforts and a consumer community he says is \u201cjaded\u201d by the omnipresence of high technology. TV makers are copying Kinect, speech will be the most-prevalent user interaction and cameras as inputs are coming soon, he said. And Microsoft\u2019s machine-learning research will let it capitalize or even lead the way on these movements, he added.<\/p>\n

As I\u2019ll highlight in a follow-up post, Microsoft showed off a lot of these capabilities to the handful of journalists invited to TechForum. Kinect, Office, Xbox Live \u2014 they\u2019re all watching, listening, learning and working together.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s part of a greater transition away from \u201cspecialized gadgets\u201d that process information and into a world full of generally intelligent devices and services that just let people get stuff done. \u201cThe vast majority of humankind,\u201d Mundie said, \u201cdoesn\u2019t really care about the computer, per se.\u201d<\/p>\n

Have research division, will persevere<\/h2>\n

In the end, Microsoft Chief Research Officer Rick Rashid expects Microsoft\u2019s heavy investment into general research of the kind his team does will help it get the last laugh over some of its competitors. He wonders whether companies like Apple \u2014 which already saved itself once \u2014 will be ready to ride the next wave of innovation or the one after that without dedicated general research departments that aren\u2019t necessarily tied to product development. His view is that you can only buy yourself into the next generation so many times.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a><\/p>\n

A project (same as the feature image) called Adaptive Machine Learning for Real-Time Streaming.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

It was Microsoft Research, for example, that developed a method for compressing 32-bit code in the early 1990s \u2014 something that would prove fortuitous when it came time to ship Windows \u201995 and its associated applications despite the fact that most PCs lacked the proper hardware for the 32-bit OS. In terms of establishing the dominance of Office over its peers that had to wait until the hardware caught up, Rashid told a group of reporters during the event, \u201cthat was game over.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOur industry is littered with companies that aren\u2019t here anymore,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n

Touch\u00e9. Microsoft is the butt of a lot of jokes, but as the tech world shifts toward intelligent devices and alternative mode of human-computer interaction, the company\u2019s research into areas such as big data and machine learning suggest it will still be very much around for some time to come.<\/p>\n

To learn a lot more about machine learning and the latest trends in big data technologies, be sure to attend our Structure: Data conference<\/a> March 20-21 in New York. Speakers will include some of the brightest minds in data from organizations such as EMC, Facebook, Cloudera, Quid and even the CIA.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Structure:Data:<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:<\/strong>
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial<\/a>.<\/p>\n