Microsoft’s Big Data Push

Microsoft’s Big Data Push

As technology grows and computers become ever more popular the world has encountered a major problem. Mountains of data that is tremendously hard to analyze in any meaningful manner. But along comes Microsoft flexing its muscles in the field of Big Data and soon will release new software and other products that will allow Microsoft to be more competitive with the likes of Amazon Web Services and Google in the realm of Big Data. This will hopefully allow Microsoft’s advanced research arm, to return to the forefront of technology.

One of the new products that Microsoft intends on releasing is a new version of Excel that could scan millions of posts from social media sites or crunch large amounts of any type data.  This would allow the average Joe to perform data mining on their home PC with just the standard Office suit and some simple key strokes. Also, they plan on releasing a new version of Outlook that could learn users’ habits and tailor Outlook to the users’ needs. They are calling this new software, machine learning software. Microsoft also hopes to use Azure to compete with Amazon’s AWS. The founder of Kaggle, Anthony Goldbloom, says this “Azure is a real threat to Amazon Web Services, Google and other cloud companies because of its installed base,…, they have data from places like Bing and Xbox, and in Excel they have the world’s most widely used analysis software.”   

I believe this is a great step for Microsoft moving them into a field that is still up and coming and not lagging behind or becoming stagnate as other long time tech companies have over the years. With the immense amount of revenue they create Microsoft has the potential to create very helpful software and make it easily distributed it office suit users. Using its huge financial backing and its massive think tank of scholars Microsoft is pushing to become Big Data’s NEXT BIG THING.

 

For a more in depth article please refer to the link in the sources below…

 

Sources: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/30/technology/microsoft-renews-relevance-with-machine-learning-technology.html?_r=0