Microsoft munches super startup carcass Microsoft has eaten the carcass of Interactive Supercomputing, a creator of HPC development tools for parallelizing applications. That's yet another promising supercomputing startup that has succumbed to the economic Meltdown and the difficulty of finding capital to fund its expansion. Redmond has acquired the company's the …
Looks like MS can't get Azure working properly and has had to buy a company which has got a clue.
"This move represents our ongoing commitment to parallel computing and high performance computing (HPC)" - Usual MS -> can't innovate so they buy someone who can and then assimilate them.
Azure is still stuck in Community Technology Preview.....and I keep submitting jobs to Linux clouds and keep getting high performance from the Linux clouds.....
We need a grid/cloud technology that works today, in fact we had that requirement several years back. The real choice in HPC is red hat Vs SuSe Vs ubuntu. We use red hat, the on-demand scalability and performance is, to a computer geek like me, stunning
This is one of those moves by Microsoft that you just know will hamper progress in this area, rather than helping it.
Yet another external team is brought into Microsoft with a 'not invented here' stack of products, that will have anyone, already involved in large-scale parallel computing within Microsoft, spitting blood and feathers, and harbouring a murderous resentment for the Massachusetts upstarts. Integration of Star P will initially be mandated by management, but all involved will do everything they can to make sure it fails, or looks bad in comparison to the home grown Microsoft stack - while branding everyone else involved in the project 'jerks', 'assholes', and worse. This will be helped by the fact that Star P will be painted as a lame duck, within Microsoft - a product that had to be rescued. Eventually a butchered and beleaguered Star-P will be sold off as a useless asset, into a market where some other, better alternative will have been allowed to arise on its own - by a Microsoft that cannot maintain its focus on any one target for more than the briefest of periods. This will barely matter, however, since, by this time everyone at the Massachusetts office will have been levered out of the door, through a succession of 'limited 3' review scores.
Welcome to the One Microsoft way, guys. Enjoy your stay.
M$ evil, saves people being made redundant and potentially losing homes and causing family breakup, keeps technology going that they already use, evil M$ rant rant.
Not all buyouts are mega corps buying up the competition and closing them down.
We've bought two companies in the last 6 months, without which the 150 employees would now proberbly be sat on the dole queue.
I love the way you spell 'MS' with dollar signs... This is presumably to make me look like the kind of person who spells it with dollar signs, is it? That's nice of you.
Fact is, Star P, the product, has been wound up (as of this announcement). Microsoft has active teams in Dev and Windows, working on the Redhawk and Minsafe farmeworks, respectively - so I don't see how the remnant of ISC fits with any of that (given that they're based about as far away from Redmond, as is possible and still be in the US).
Bear in mind also that Minsafe has grown out of one of the more R&D-ish endevours of Windows Division - and traditionally, the only 'modest' thing about those guys has been their rate of progress. (Far be it from me to suggest that it's a nest of vipers... but if you had to clean it up, Indana Jones wouldn't be you first choice, to do the job.) And as I said in my earlier post, this is a shame, because all this friction will only end up holding things up.
People who write MS with a dollar signs are those benighted souls who think there some kind of 'evil plan': I've been watching Microsoft's behaviour for the last half decade, or so, and have come to the conclusion that there's scant evidence for there being any plan, at all!
So ISC was going like gangbusters on Linux clusters and then they partnered with Microsoft and coincidentally got a new CEO. They went under and Microsoft winds up with their key personnel including the new CEO and the company's intellectual property - to make the product Microsoft HPC only of course. Other investors get nothing. That sum it up?
Another successful Microsoft joint venture!
"Other investors get nothing. That sum it up?"
Err, no.
MS will have bought the company *from* the investors (That's the VC's who set the company up by buying a chunk of it's stock and hence handing it the cash neede to rent offices, hire staff, buy neat hardware and get licenses to look inside proprietery software)
Now what MS paid the investors for it is another matter Could have been cash, stock in MS or a bit of both
Depending on the terms of the deal the investors may have made a nice pile, got away with a smaller loss than expected or be holding a block of MS stock.
The real loosers in this will be employees who did not transfer or who did but did not get stock options. Anyone who loaned the company money but did not get stock (hence not an owner) would also have likely lost.
Ignorance can be fixed. Stupidity is forever.
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