Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Research Turns 10
Alec Muzzy writes: "Did you know that Microsoft Research, the first research laboratory started by a software company, just turned 10 years old? Their website is currently featuring some highlights of their research in the past 10 years and how it is applying to the new products Microsoft is making today - for instance their work in Real-Time Fur will be used in some XBox games, and Speech Recognition may be in future Pocket PC's. Reading these pages gives you a real insight into what new technologies Microsoft is working on."
I thought Apple was much older than 10 years...
;)
--T
http://www.theMediaBunker.com
In the late 1990s the college of engineering at my university would have reps and engineers from Apple's ATG (Advanced Technology Group) visit to judge projects, talk about the industry, and share stories over a BBQ. From what I understand, the ATG was a research group that had free reign to experiment with software and hardware projects, some of which were eventually wrapped into shipping Apple products. In about 1994 I remember a demo/presentation that included some neat webserver CGIs for "intelligent" searching and document organzation (cool for that time period). We were also shown a cool speech recognition + text-to-speech utility that utilized facial recognition as well as displaying a spooky relaistic animated talking face. I also recall a semi-working mockup of a 3D version of the Macintosh Finder (Apple's Macintosh desktop / file manager). One of the coolest things I remember was that not all of their projects were on Apple Macintosh hardware. Most were, but a few were on IBM RS/6000 (AIX) and SGI Indigo (IRIX) workstations.
Cool stuff.
WTF? Real Time Fur?? How about Real Time Stability?
Microsoft Research comes up with brilliant new ideas and techniques. Then the rest of Microsoft re-implements them badly and in annoying ways, and incorporates technology stolen from other places.
It's kind of silly to have such a good research lab and then barely pay attention to it. On the other hand, they don't ignore it quite as much as Xerox ignored PARC. The real issue is that pure research, while very important for the quality of future software, is generally too far ahead of it's time to be useable by anything the parent company is doing.
I suspect that, in ten years, people will be as impressed by the work that was done at MS Research as people today are with the work done at PARC.
The particular problems that MS is facing currently aren't really interesting to the research people, because they're all tied to the particular set of products that are currently in the process of being phased out. They're interested in things that will still be useful after the commercial implementation gets botched by the inexperienced programmers and mangled by marketting and then the industry moves to the next concept; by the time their work is done, NT will be totally gone and multi-media will be done in dedicated memory on FPGA boards.
between researching security and implementing it. Microsoft has lots of smart people working for it, at least some of whom I'm sure understand completely the security implications of what they do. They just purposely decide not to do anything about it.
Which brings up the next point in that there is often a difference between doing what's "Right" and doing what's profitable. Easy is what sells to most folks. Secure is not. (talking generalities here...) And making things secure often makes them dramatically less easy. Since the primary purpose of Microsoft is to make money, easy will always win out over secure in their world. Good, bad, or indifferrent, that's the way it is. Follow the money trail and you'll understand why MS acts the way they do.
Limux has the opposite approach. Generally in the *nix world, performance (including stability, speed and options) usually wins out over outright ease of use. That's what the users of it demand. Certainly some things are very easy, but in many cases it's a different kind of easy for a different kind of audience. Whether that is good or not is an excercise left to the reader. (i.e. you)
Most people who have worked on both research and real world development can tell you that there are always trade-offs to make between what works under limited conditions in a lab and what works in a production system with dozens of variables. Hypothetically, what if the Paperclip algorithm developed by the researchers actually were pretty smart at learning and predicting the user's behavior but would either eat up too much RAM take up too much time do perform their predictions?
What would you do if you were a PM for Office? Scrap the research opr pare it down to where it works in a reasonable amount of time and uses a reasonable amount of resources but isn't as clever asd you'd like? Real managers and real developers make decisions like this everyday.
Microsoft Research should be figuring out how to improve the performance of NT's Microkernel architecture, improve virtual memory management on multi-media machines and a host of other useful technologies. But they don't. Go figure.
I just looked at the MS Research page which lists the current research areas and noticed the following
- Research into Systems and Networking
- Research into Systems and Performance
- Research into Advanced Compiler Technology
- Research into Collaborative and Multimedia Technologies
- Research into Security
These are just the ones that address your immediate questions. There are several dozen more cool and worthwhile research areas at MS Research. Of course, being a typical slashdotter it is easier for you to bash them unthinkingly than do an ounce of research.PS: For those who think Microsoft isn't interested in the work done by MSR, when I was at a presentation at BillG's house this summer he kept on going on and on about the interesting projects being worked on at MSR and about how of all of MSFT that is probably one place where he is familiar with all the projects being worked on.
They made people rediculous offers to lure them away from their universities and other companies.
One example recruitment I heard went like this.
ring ring
Hello?
Hello, this is Microsoft Research, we'd like you to come work with us
Why should I? I'd never work for the great Satan. [thinking that this would make the caller hang up. But, what would Satan say? You got it...]
Well, what are your terms?
Ummm [trying to think of something completely unreasonable] How about $XXX.XXX [twice what he was getting then.]
Fine.
Ok, I want to work three months, then take a month off, work three months, take a month off...
We can't do that. How about this, you work for four years, then you get four years off at that same rate.
uhhhhhhh, well, ok.
When they set up the CG research group, they promised to have half the papers in Siggraph (the premier forum for computer graphics research) in a few years. This was a little scary, but not as scary as what really happened. What really happened is that these people pretty much stopped publishing at all; and stopped interacting with the rest of the graphics community.
I asked a few of the people there about it, and they seemed happy as clams, they weren't worried about it. To me, it appears that their world had shrunk to be just Microsoft. It's more than a pity, it's almost criminal.
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.