Hi, I have never been a huge fan of Microsoft, but I have to admit that with Nadella at the helm, it does seem like an entirely new company doing some pretty amazing and innovative things. Windows 10, Surface Pro 3 and Azure are quickly making a lot of the things we're doing in my FinTech startup obsolete already. I'm increasingly tempted to ride their wave and hitch my startup to MS technologies.
Microsoft recently acquired Revolution Analytics <http://blogs.technet.com/b/machinelearning/archive/2015/04/06/microsoft-closes-acquisition-of-revolution-analytics.aspx> and have integrated R into the Azure SQL suite, which is pretty awesome. They have also done quite a lot with integrating Python. You can guess where I am going with this... I can imagine Julia would have to get to 1.0 before Microsoft would consider incorporating Julia directly into their products. I've asked before <http://blogs.technet.com/b/machinelearning/archive/2015/04/06/microsoft-closes-acquisition-of-revolution-analytics.aspx>, and Keno estimated back in January that 1.0 is 2 years away. In light of the recent discussions around Julia Computing, can you think of ways this could be accelerated or is it just something that takes that much time? For example, if significant funds were raised and the core team could build a small army of senior full-time developers, could this get done quicker? If we allow ourselves to dream, how much funds would be required and what is the shortest path to 1.0? "With US$X million, we could produce Julia 1.0 in Y months." What is the most optimistic X and Y (allowing ourselves to dream)? Best regards, Eric
