Meet Microsoft, the world's best kept R&D secret

"Redmond spends more on R&#38;D than Google and Apple combined. Think about that the next time someone tells you Microsoft doesn’t have a future."<p>Two words, Xerox PARC.<p>At Sun there was a weird joke that Sun Labs was where good ideas went to die. It was frustrating.<p>The point here is that good R&#38;D is a necessary but not sufficient component of innovation, the second is a willingness to productize your work. Strangely the hardest thing about that is <i>not</i> making a product out of it, the hardest thing is making a product you can ship.<p>Good R&#38;D isn't constrained, which is to say that you don't tell the folks doing the research you are only researching things we can sell for a profit, but that is a constraint on products. What happens is the 'Apple effect' where you have a bunch of researchers who can't make a profitable product (Xerox Star) and then a product guy comes along (Steve Jobs) who sees the essence of the innovation, and can strip away the parts where it goes too far and ships that.<p>Its really challenging to build something close to your vision and not ship it, it seems like it is impossible to build something that is close to your vision and then ship something only half as close as that. But that is where the success can be. "Fumbling the Future" [1] is a fascinating read for that reason.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Fumbling-Future-Invented-Personal-Computer/dp/1583482660" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Fumbling-Future-Invented-Personal-Comp...</a>

In this article I see a MSFT strategy unfolding of skipping the current smart-phone mobile battlefield, and leaping directly into full-bore cyborg computing.<p>Bear with me, they've effectively laid out all the pieces:<p>- A "omni touch" interface that allows for interaction without physical input devices.<p>- A variety of leaps forward for Kinect to map and translate your physical environment to a data stream.<p>- A "holodeck" and other tools that overlay interface design onto physical objects.<p>- Foveated 3d graphics and other leaps forward that would drastically reduce hardware costs for graphic rendering.<p>Nearly every one of these projects are directly applicable to the "wearable computer" concept.<p>I wonder if, looking back in 10 years, we'll see that MSFT's currnet weak smart-phone entries were ultimately not that important to their overall strategy.

Spending money on research is always good, Microsoft Research has always had a lot of good ideas and generated some truly amazing prototypes and research papers. It's a good thing for the community in general the have people working on this stuff but it's not necessarily a good business investment for MS if they can't leverage the work into viable products.<p>Many companies like to fund R&#38;D divisions as a means to attract the best minds from the academic community in the hopes that they will benefit from their talent in some way. It's often not directed work but more of a recruitment tool. The best professors bring with them the best students and many of those students end up working on products not just research.<p>However, in my time at Microsoft I worked with the research team on a couple of occasions trying leverage their ideas into real products with little success. We would send them some interesting problems (in one case we asked them to spend some time on snow accumulation algorithms for a snowboarding game) and they would disappear for months and return with a cool demo that was impressive but usually failed to meet the given criteria that allowed it to be used in a shipping product. e.g. speed, memory efficiency, data size requirements etc.

&#62; "Redmond spends more on R&#38;D than Google and Apple combined. Think about that the next time someone tells you Microsoft doesn’t have a future."<p>More like Microsoft <i>wastes</i> more money on R&#38;D that doesn't convert in revolutionary products more than both Apple and Google combined.<p>We've always known Microsoft spends a lot on R&#38;D and they like to make those "20 years from now" videos, but I haven't seen much come out of it. Last year they even bragged about how they had the idea for the iPhone 20 years ago. But so what? How did that help them? At best it helped them create Windows Mobile and the PDA's 10 years later, but that was a niche market, and Microsoft never had much market share with Windows Mobile in the smartphone market, which was a lot smaller than the current smartphone market back then.<p>So I guess the moral of the story is that "lab inventions" don't mean much, and you could waste a lot of money on them, and with very little to show for it in the market. I'm pretty sure the $2 billion dollar Kin project was part of that R&#38;D spending, too.

This should come as no surprise to those that are familiar with MSR (Microsoft Research). I've had the fortune of visiting the place a few times and it is amazing, especially the people they get to come in for research (even the interns are geniuses).<p>Even if you don't know of MSR, this should be of no surprise if you have any recall of the news you read over the years. A lot of the work they do has appeared in the NYTimes and such. For example, I remember very clearly that about 6 years ago, Bill Gates basically said that robots are the future. It didn't take me long to find articles and website to remind myself of what he said (see link below). Although Bill Gates is no longer CEO, he is still chairman and you can certainly bet that MSR will be leading the way in this research.<p><a href="http://tech.blorge.com/Structure:%20/2007/01/07/bill-gates-robots-microsoft-robotics-studio/" rel="nofollow">http://tech.blorge.com/Structure:%20/2007/01/07/bill-gates-r...</a>

Microsoft’s 9B R&#38;D budget is mostly an accounting convenience. They include all product development in R&#38;D.

My irony sensor gets kind of pegged when I see all these interesting Microsoft research projects using the Kinect and Kinect-related sensing technologies, but Microsoft had to go and <i>buy</i> the original tech from PrimeSense.<p><a href="http://www.cultofmac.com/67951/how-apple-almost-got-microsofts-kinect-game-controller/" rel="nofollow">http://www.cultofmac.com/67951/how-apple-almost-got-microsof...</a>

Microsoft is this generation's Xerox PARC if they can't ship whatever is in their R&#38;D labs.

"As far as 99.9 percent of the world population is concerned"<p>I bet a large percentage of the population in the world doesn't even know about Microsoft.

You can see Microsoft Research's contribution to shipping products at <a href="http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/about/techtransfer/product-development-contributions-2011.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/about/techtransfer/produ...</a>. You will be surprised how much stuff has came out of MSR.

If the tech world has proven anything at all it is that:<p><pre><code> huge budget != disruptive innovation </code></pre> At least not as a rule.<p>Think about how most (all?) of the top tech companies you know about started: garages, dorms and kitchen tables. HP, Apple, Microsoft, Google, eBay, Facebook, Twitter, etc.<p>Sure, some needed huge money to scale, but the genesis of the idea-turned-product did not require millions or billions to generate.<p>Sometimes you have to wonder if hunger is far more valuable than money to spur innovation. I happen to think so. And, while I do not diminish the work being done at companies like MS, sometimes I feel that they are just throwing money at PhD's who are having a great time playing with interesting tech but simply don't have the drive, hunger and urgency to make something more than a great research gig out of it.

I'll grant you that my personal anecdote is a few years old, but...<p>Maybe 8 or 9 years ago, I talked to the Dean of the University of Colorado Comp Sci department. I could only remember Benjamin Zorn as a faculty member, so I dropped the name. By then, Zorn had gotten hired away to Microsoft R&#38;D. The Dean of the Comp Sci department made a number of references to Microsoft R&#38;D as a "research roach hotel" - researcher's go in, but no papers ever come out.<p>If Microsoft R&#38;D is a secret, then it's Microsoft's own problem, I assume.

As a current student, these are the types of projects that made me want to study this field. Does anyone know if it's even possible to get a job at one of these R&#38;D centers with just an undergrad degree? What sort of things can I do to make myself a more viable candidate for one of these research labs?

"The point here is that good R&#38;D is a necessary but not sufficient component of innovation, the second is a willingness to productize your work"<p>This is my biggest beef with MS. They consistently wait for other companies to innovate, then wait to see if the market will support it.<p>Only when they see an advantage to developing their own version of a product will they enter a market. You can look at their MP3 player the Zune, you can also look at how long it took them to get into the smartphone and tablet markets.<p>I'm wondering if there are any concrete examples of them releasing a product which has utilized their arm of R&#38;D for a specific product and pointed to it as a reason why it's available to the public. Similar to how Google always touts their R&#38;D teams for developing a myriad of their products.

If this P&#38;D budget was splitted on long-term-10-years-go-to-market products and really useful and fast increments on current Microsoft products, maybe Microsoft could be the current Google. Or Apple ;)<p>It's weird a company have the funniest R&#38;D labs and its main product - Windows - still sucks with 80' Windows Registry structure or a file system which fragments a lot.

People have to realize it's not how much money you spend, but how well you spend it, that matters.

Microsoft is part of US military and weapon manufacturers like Boeing, and doing projects for them. Most of MS research is related to military if you look close. Also now it is protected from any acquisition.

Awesome, now bring it to market. Until then, as a consumer, I could care less about Microsoft.<p>All their amazing R&#38;D didn't make W8, their phones, or their tablets any more enjoyable or purchasable.

Interesting to see such an amazingly positive article on the front page at the same time as the scathing Forbes piece. I wonder if that's really a coincidence.<p><a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/rogerkay/2013/01/02/microsoft-is-fast-turning-into-a-sideshow/" rel="nofollow">http://www.forbes.com/sites/rogerkay/2013/01/02/microsoft-is...</a><p>Since most of these revolutionary systems aren't available as actual products, I have to assume that Microsoft buys people and ideas mainly to keep them from interfering with their monopolies.

Whats even more clever is that the 9.6 Billion only actually "cost" 4.8 Billion (R&#38;D Classified Work is a 50% tax deduction)

I love their R&#38;D department. If only they could mutate Ballmer into a human being using bio-engineering..

What academics (eg Microsoft Research) mean by "innovation" is "what lets us publish papers".<p>What ordinary people mean by "innovation" is "what cool new things can be made available that noticeably change Grandma's life".<p>Most academic work is <i>USELESS</i> for this because it ignores too many constraints, making the market hostile to it. Richard Gabriel did a piece on this, called "Money through innovation reconsidered".<p>Don't buy academic hype.

They should throw some money at making adfs a better product

This is silly. Microsoft doesn't have the culture for any kind of innovation at this point.<p>-ex-microsoftie

Microsoft Research was founded by Nathan Myhrvold. Maybe it's just a patent trolling scam?<p>Cheers,<p>BW

Microsoft should have spent some of that money improving the quality control of their software.<p>To learn that changing the GUI of Windows 8 was not that good of an idea.<p>Microsoft should have used R&#38;D to make products more affordable.