Wow! What a difference two years can make. At the end of 2007, it seemed as though Microsoft’s fortunes were fading. Bill Gates had retired, and Steve Ballmer had taken over as CEO. Ruby on Rails and Google satellite maps were a rage and iPhone/Apple pretty much defined ‘bleeding edge.’

Fast forward to 2010 and how things have changed. Microsoft seems to be on a come back trail. Among its most exciting projects is ‘Natal.’ Natal is the code name for a “controller-free” gaming and entertainment experience from Microsoft for the Xbox 360 video game platform. Based on an add-on peripheral for the Xbox 360 console, Project Natal enables users to control and interact with the Xbox 360 without the need to touch a game controller – by using a natural user interface that accommodates gestures, spoken commands, or presented objects and images.

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/events/ces/videogallery.aspx?contenti

This is like computer vision and makes Wii seem so tame, not to mention Google Goggles!

Another of Microsoft’s projects to look forward to is F#, a functional programming language for the .NET Framework. It combines the succinct, expressive, and compositional style of functional programming with the runtime, libraries, interoperability, and object model of .NET. This is bad news for IBM/ORACLE and Google Go!

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/fsharp/default.aspx

And Ruby folks are trying to act ‘functional’ . . .

http://www.rubyinside.com/functional-programming-in-ruby-2713.html?utm_s

Also on the way is DryadLINQ, Microsoft’s own Hadoop. DryadLINQ is a simple, powerful, and elegant programming environment for writing large-scale data parallel applications running on large PC clusters.

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/DryadLINQ/

With the exception of the recently released apple tablet, there seems to be no “tech magic” from anyone other than Microsoft. Google really has to watch their back now; because with F# on their menu and Simon Peyton Jones & most of the Haskell team on their payroll, Microsoft appears to have won the compiler war. Microsoft is also quickly catching up on the scalability side with DryadLINQ. The combination of F# and DryadLINQ could deliver a knockout punch to Google! What’s more, once Natal rolls out for Christmas, iPhones could be running for cover.