When Microsoft officially threw its hat into the high-performance computing ring this month with a speech by chairman Bill Gates at a supercomputing conference in Seattle, some computer scientists hoped the company could help sort out an arcane but potentially important problem in the market: coaxing more performance out of commonly used programming languages. It's a challenging technical conundrum, but it also illustrates how Microsoft's entry into the market is sowing both skepticism about its influence and hope about the benefits of its deep pockets.
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