I caught this post on Microsoft bioinformatics research through my PubSub subscription to the keyword "bioinformatics". The post points to the Bioinformatics homepage at Microsoft Research, as well as a streaming video interview (warning: WMV file) with one of the researchers. The first part of the video stream includes an interview with developer Eric Horvitz. During the interview he says something along the lines of "At Microsoft we are held up to a higher standard", not that I'm aware of... David Heckerman, the Bioinformatics guy, claims to have invented the first spam filter ? David discusses the details of the HIV project they are working on and how "Bill" personally pushed the project. Should we be worried that Microsoft is interested in bioinformatics ?
Microsoft bioinformatics research
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Leroy Hood
What, be worried? No.
Microsoft is just trying to find out how to spend some of it's massive $$$ that it is sitting on (which has some Wall Street investors upset). IBM is doing a great job colloborating and setting up on the Life Science scene. IBM is about selling infrastructure, and MS probably is just trying to feel out the market by giving professors some funding. MS may try and look to see if selling parallel MS server setups might work in life science (word is that they are trying to set up higher profile MS clusters, akin to the high profile Linux Supercomputers).
The other thing to keep in mind is that Leroy Hood didn't like how UW was treating him, so he personally convinced Bill Gates to fund his Institute for Systems Biology. Leroy Hood is making waves, so MS is probably looking to see just what other miracles funding Life Science
can do.
I would not expect Microsoft to be publishing any "MS Bioinformatics Office 2005" or anything of the like. They aren't going to try and corner that market. Right now, the Bioinformatics field is too slippery, quick moving, too complex, and too small of a market for MS to corner anything. (Now there is a bad thought: Clippy the Microarray analysist, "Hi, it looks like you're trying to analyze a microarray slide. Can I help?")
Medical records
On a somewhat belated note...
IBM seems to be pushing medical informatics - and pushing hard. Some of their frontmen (Tim Littlejohn providing a somewhat odious example) have been selling this notion to investors. The "argument" goes along the lines of: imagine we could take all the disparate information we have about person X with disease Y and feed it into a giganormous computer; if that's what it takes to cure disease, we're committed to it. It's a frankly naive sell for infrastructure.
That having being said, some of their systems are way cute. I'm just not fully convinced they get the point of biology all of the time. Still, they are trying to make money, so fair do's, I guess...
I totally agree with what you
I totally agree with what you have said here: "Microsoft is just trying to find out how to spend some of its massive $$$". There realy is no concrete "bioinformatics market" yet to make specific investments in. In the video interview they makes a point of mentioning how "Bill" personal took interest in the project and got them access to "the best researchers" and data. I can only assume this was by throwing money at them.
I wasn't aware that Microsoft is persuing the cluster market. All of the accademic environments that I've been associated with use linux based clusters. And of late G5 clusters, with iNquiry pre-installed, for example our new 48 node apple cluster.
While the though of Clippy the Microarray anlaysis is hella funny, I have a sneaking suspicion that some academics I know would actually like such a feature :)
Joy of clusters
Ooh, a new 48-node cluster. That must be nice :-)
I vaguely recall reading that M$ were looking at the cluster market - a bit of Googling trawls up some quite old products named "cluster server". I won't demean this site by providing links or discussing further - suffice to imagine the havoc wreaked on a machine by an M$ OS multiplied by 10, 24, 48...shudder.
I also vaguely recall a colleague telling me that our ANU are upgrading their cluster to something huge like 1600 CPUs and in the process, have discovered that they need a megawatt of air conditioning!