Microsoft's top visionary sees a parallel world

By Daisuke Wakabayashi

SEATTLE (Reuters) - Craig Mundie, Microsoft Corp's chief research and strategy officer, is sure he has a good handle on where technology is going. When is another story.

Mundie, who took over as Microsoft's lead visionary from co-founder Bill Gates in 2006, is preparing the company for a technology shift that he expects will be as big as the rise of the personal computer or the Internet: parallel computing.

"It's a lot easier for us to have a fairly accurate sense of what will happen and even make good technical progress toward achieving it," Mundie told Reuters in an interview last week. "Almost everything we tried to do took longer than we expected."

The overseer of Microsoft's $7 billion research and development budget, Mundie knows firsthand how even promising technologies can take time to develop. After all, he has led Microsoft's efforts in Web-based television and nontraditional forms of computing.

Parallel computing has been hyped for years as the next big thing in technology, allowing computers to run faster by dividing up tasks over multiple microprocessors instead of using a single processor to perform one task at a time.

The technology's full potential is almost unfathomable today, but it could lead to major advances in robotics or software applications that can translate documents in real time in multiple languages.

The computer industry has taken its first steps toward parallel computing in recent years by using "multi-core" chips, but Mundie said this is the "tip of the iceberg."

To maximize computing horsepower, software makers will need to change how software programmers work. Only a handful of programmers in the world know how to write software code to divide computing tasks into chunks that can be processed at the same time instead of a traditional, linear, one-job-at-a-time approach.