A Strange Obsession

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

I just spent a few minutes browsing these slides from a talk given in Karlsruhe in September by Microsoft's Fabrizio Gagliardi. The talk's title was "Cloud Computing for Scientific Research", and it's chock-full of big: mega-this, peta-that, and isn't it all exciting? The only mention of anything at the desktop scale is on slide 19, which mentions a plugin to allow MATLAB to talk to the cloud, and Excel views of Azure data. Once again, I'm puzzled (and a bit disappointed) that the world's premier desktop software company has decided to ignore what most scientists care about most. I'm equally disappointed that there was nothing at all in these slides about improving scientists' skills, especially since Microsoft has invested so heavily in improving its own processes. Oh well...