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Microsoft Research Fights Critics
coondoggie writes to tell us Network World is taking a look at why Microsoft Research has to fight so hard against critics. From the article: "When the word 'innovation' is tossed about many may look down their nose at the company sitting on top of the high-tech industry — Microsoft. [...] Microsoft Research incubates not only futuristic ideas but young minds, having hired 700 interns worldwide this year including 250 computer science PhD candidates in Redmond alone, which is roughly 21% of all the computer science PhD candidates in the United States."
That for all its "innovation", Microsoft have never in the whole of history released a truly new product. Everything they've ever produced (right the way down to Microsoft Paint - once upon a time there was a DOS version produced by someone else) has been either bought or rehashed from someone else.
Sure, they've played around with things a bit - changed the interface here and there, come up with slight tweaks, But at the end of the day, it's not the tweaks that get recognised as innovation; it's the whole new products.
FTA:"There are virtually no products Microsoft produces today that have not either taken technology from research, come directly out of research, or been built using the tools and technologies we've created in research," he says.
Does that include Zune? The Microsoft music service? How much research did it take to come up with 'We need to make our own iPod and music service'?
Flame On...
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
Maybe its all of the above?
And what would be wrong with any of those options for a PhD student?
"MSR has grown from an idea to more than 700 researchers working out of five labs around the globe with a budget of more than $250 million. MSR incubates not only futuristic ideas but young minds, having hired 700 interns worldwide this year including 250 computer science PhD candidates in Redmond alone, which is roughly 21% of all the computer science PhD candidates in the United States. It's a program Microsoft officials say is the world's largest PhD. internship program for computer science."
Makes their lack of innovation all the more remarkable.
I wish it could. I'd be really brilliant by now......
I'm not knocking the individuals working for Microsoft, it's just that there comes a point in the lifespan of a company where it's past its prime. Getting a truly 'new' product far enough to the front is a gargantuan task, that ends up requiring patents and huge investment because the entire process is so slow.
Let's just compare Apple and MS here for a second. Apple pulls stuff into the mainstream that's pretty new once in a while. They seem to enjoy it. It's been really profitable. But some of the stuff they do is so new that noone can really catch up until it's too late. (see: iPod, good UI, 'stylish' design)
BR Somehow, Apple listens to new ideas, where Microsoft attempts to implement old ones and takes flack for never getting it exactly right. One wonders where this cultural issue is in M$, and what makes the difference between the two. But that's only an academic question.
My little site.
Great, and as soon as a PhD has -anything- to do with innovation M$ will finally start doing something different.
>>> having hired ..... 250 computer science PhD candidates in Redmond alone..."
But will M$FT listen to a damn thing they have to say?
As it is, it looks less like research and more like unfettered spending to find "yet another" way to dominate.
Or more to the point, my complaint with Microsoft over the last few years is that they seem to have been spending more money on figuring out how to restrict my use of their products, and not very much money on figuring out how to make my life easier.
Now, maybe it's just me, personally, but I'm a home user and an IT professional. I use computers a lot for various things, and Windows seems to be getting harder to deal with. If I have to call Microsoft over another activation problem, I'm going to want to kill someone.... actually the truth is I've past that point a while ago.
Maybe it's just because Microsoft is servicing someone other than me. Maybe there's someone out there who's pleased as punch at the changes in Vista and Office 2007. I honestly think MS hit their peak in 2000, and things have just gotten more frustrating since then. Keep It Simple, Stupid. My needs aren't that unusual or complicated, but Microsoft doesn't seem to be making a lot of headway. Security. Stability. Easy imaging. Effective backups. Compatibility and interoperability. The ability to manage the ever-increasing mail stores. Transparency into what the computer is actually doing so that it can be manipulated more easily for any purpose.
For christ's sake, if you're going to pay so much for "innovation", try to tackle some of the fundamental problems with modern computing, instead of gimmicky wireless sharing for MP3 players, new copy-protection schemes, and snazzy graphics for FreeCell.
I personally like google's recruitment thru challenge questions. It's certainly better than the resume method.
For all the money M$ spends on Research, they sure don't have that much to show for it. Look at the productivity of IBM's R&D compared to M$. One of these days they may figure it out, but until then I am not terribly impressed.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Unfortunately for Microsoft (but true to their character) they have tools for mouthpieces like Ballmer. Microsoft inks a deal in what could only be viewed with raised eyebrows, and Ballmer punctuates that with "they're infringing our IP anyway...". As long as Microsoft continues to be so hostile to the world in general, they get what they sow.
Nobody (or at least most people) argues that Microsoft doesn't come up with original ideas. Their research arm has a ton of truly brilliant people. I mean, Leslie Lamport and Tony Hoare work there. The problem is not that Microsoft can't come up with some innovative stuff. The problem is in how they translate it from their research side to their implementation and then marketing, which is usually pretty lousy.
So you're saying it's ok to lie, cheat, and steal as long as you give a small portion of the money to charitable causes?
How about if I steal your car, and donate the spare tire to Goodwill? Does that make it ok?
Don't be too quick to lionize Bell Labs, as they were the research arm of The Phone Company (AT&T), which itself was the object of scorn for decades for abusing their position of being the only game in town. Just as you argue that Micros~1's research are "ill-gotten gains" from their predatory business practices, one could also level the same argument against the Bell Labs of 40 years ago.
Don't misunderstand; I am in no way a Micros~1 apologist, and would richly enjoy watching the company collapse under its own hubris and technical incompetence. It's simply that, if you're going to slam the company, you need to pick your comparisons more carefully.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
I got this from a post to Scoble's blog last week:
Speaking of XNA (a framework allowing normal folk to make Windows and Xbox 360 games (without the need for a devkit), a great video of it was released last week at Channel 9:
http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=261
The video shows coding, debugging, and deployment of Xbox 360 games using XNA. Although XNA uses C# managed code, one of the sample games shown in the video, XNA Racer, runs at 1080p 30fps with 2x antialiasing.
It's a very cool video. Beyond anything you'd see from Apple, Google, et al.
The notion that Microsoft does no innovation is nonsense.
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
If Microsoft were less predatory and less a bully in business maybe the rest of the world would stop looking down their noses at Microsoft's "research". As it is, it looks less like research and more like unfettered spending to find "yet another" way to dominate.
Clearly you know very little about what you're talking about, but as your comment is in perfect accordance with the dominant groupthink it gets modded up anyway. MSR is actually less restrictive than an average PhD program, you can work on basically anything you want, which is one of the reasons PhDs find it so appealling. It is more or less independent from the rest of MS, and the researchers are certainly not driven by a desire to find "yet another way to dominate". Yet this, of course, is precisely also the reason for the difficulty they are having with technology transfer.
It's one thing to look down on MS because of what they bring to market, and quite another to look down on the great work done in MSR, much of which is free to download and use by anyone. If you want to deride professionals doing great work by putting scare quotes around "research" (really, don't you think that's a little much?), do it for a better reason than your kneejerk conflation of what MSR is doing and MS' business practices.
Umm.. should Microsoft be researching ways to help its competition take it over? Of course MS is going to be looking for the next killer 'thing' (app, console, music player, etc.) to lead the market. That's the beauty of a market - companies have incentives to do things which make the company stronger.
Microsoft research does try to tackle such problems, the dilemma is that their work, as far as I can tell, seems to get ignored when it comes to product development and marketing. What fundamental problems in modern computing is Microsoft research trying to tackle? How about programming concurrent software. Traditionally this is hard, and error prone. What we need is a model of concurrency, and a programming language to support it, that makes programming concurrent systems easy, and make reasoning about it easy. Microsoft is working in that area with C-omega and extension of C# with a better concurrency system. See the tutorials to get an idea of how it works. It's not unique, there are other concurrency oriented languages out there like Occam, AliceML, Oz etc. that handle concurrency well, and other concurrency language extensions, like SCOOP for Eiffel, and JCSP for Java, that seek to add better concurrency models to existing languages. Still C-omea is its own tangent, and has interesting ideas (as do the other similar projects and other languages).
What about the issue of maintainability and quality assurance in software? Certainly that's at the heart of a deep problem, and there are no easy answers. There are things you can do to make better quality assurance easier however. Microsoft's effort on that front is Spec# which adds design by Contract to C# and provides extended static checking (using the Simplify theorem prover) to provide static verification of contracts where possible. This provides another layer of quality assurance, and (by integrating the static checking into Visual Studio) automates most of the work, meaning it requires little extra effort from programmers. Again this is not unique, there's Eiffel which has had DbC but no static verification for a very long time, and there's JML and ESC/Java2 which provides DbC (via annotations in comments) and extended static checking (again using the Simplify theorem prover) for Java - you can even get Eclipse plugins to integrate it into your IDE. Still Spec# is going it's own way (and has much better integration directly into the language than JML, which remains as comments) and has interesting ideas of its own.
The problem is not that Microsoft research isn't doing anything interesting, it's that projects like this tend to get buried, or ignored, or simply have a few ideas shifted into existing products. Things like Spec# offer sufficient gains that Microsoft's marketing department really ought to be crowing about it as a major upcoming feature, and serious effort to properly polish it as a product and get it into C# and VisualStudio should be underway. Instead it remains a page tucked away on MS research with little or nothing said about it.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
but given that Microsoft is one of the few companies with a monopoly, this primes them for real research, doesn't it? Many years ago when other tech companies had monopolies they invested a lot of hard cash into their research and development divisions, hiring many graduates and the like that were noted as being at the top (or potentially top) of their game. Now those monopolies are removed, the shareholders have kicked in saying that the research divisions were not generating enough of a profit margin and were a drain on the shareholders' dividends. Real research takes time.
What I mean is that since I work for a university, it is good for me. Those companies can throw a set amount of research dollars our way since we are basically research sweatshops. I admit that I don't like the idea of Microsoft and love to think of them as crippling the potential of a lot of users, but I applaud them for at least acknowledging the importance of research and taking an active part in their 'responsibilities'.
My two cents.
.
They are absolutely powerful and therefore, absolutely evil.
The real thieves aren't in jail, they're in big business.
Interesting that, on Slashdot, you can't use "steal" to refer to hypothetical losses by copyright holders due to infringement because it's not really stealing, but you can use "steal" to refer to hypothetical losses by competitors due to monopolistic practicies even though it's not really stealing.
/. groupthink today...)
(Sorry, I'm sorta cynical towards
Maybe there's someone out there who's pleased as punch at the changes in Vista and Office 2007.
Microsoft Marketing, the RIAA, and the MPAA.
Next question?
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
If I have to call Microsoft over another activation problem
Why should I as a business owner or shareholder spend my money to do a task whose result isn't a benefit to the business, but to some other company from whom I bought a product? In other words, when a business pays someone to solve an "activation" problem, they have paid someone to insure that Microsoft was paid. The business receives no benefit, but they are out the money anyway.
When Microsoft pours money into research on how to develop technologies that seek to avoid theft of their product, that is fine until part of their solution increases the cost of ownership. When Microsoft pours money into "securing digital rights", that's fine until part of their solution increases the cost of access to content.
Microsoft and others are struggling to survive in a future where computers have nearly unlimited disk space, increasing numbers of processors, vast memory spaces, and high bandwidth to other computers. Very soon we should be able to run multiple operating systems on a single computer at the same time. Running on virtual machines will be the norm, if for no other reason than to allow applications the freedom they need to run and not step on each other or get killed by viruses and compromised by spyware.
Everyone would be impressed if Microsoft was embracing this future and working to leverage all this power for the sake of the user. Instead, Microsoft appears to be working late into the night doing everything they can to insure each day dawns according to the same old paradigms that made them billions in the past.
but who knows. All 'great things' the research has done and would have gone into Vista have been removed again. To many people that means that either research produces crap, because it can't be used, or the company does not give a shit about research.
The fact that so much people are tied up in projects that will nog go anywhere does not realy help.
research is only so great as to what it produces. If you have 1000 people working on it and nothing comes out of it, it was shitty research. If 3 people work on it and you invent sliced bread, or the next best thing, it was great.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
How is the Xbox 360 innovative? It's a machine that was designed for market penetration. There's nothing new or innovative whatsoever.
Compare that to the Wii with it's innovative controller, and the PS3 with it's innovative architecture and cutting-edge technology.
We should boycott these "innovations" until they *really* produce something innovative.
Microsoft research does try to tackle such problems, the dilemma is that their work, as far as I can tell, seems to get ignored when it comes to product development and marketing. What fundamental problems in modern computing is Microsoft research trying to tackle?
All that stuff is great, but if you can't create basic functionality that is simple and robust, sophisticated new developments are pretty useless. That is in fact, Microsoft's ongoing problem-- they're so busy working on the future that they don't spend the time necessary to make the present work very well. No doubt the future is far more interesting, but how you deal with the present is what gets you your reputation.
Just what the world needs, C# extensions. The very existence of C# is a fine example of the standard operating procedure at Microsoft, and why many people hate them. To me, it seems that Microsoft spends a great deal of resources duplicating existing technology (Direct3d == OpenGL, C# == Java, IE == Netscape, etc...) to create platform lock-in. Eventually, their "innovations" may even be better than the technology they cloned, but invariably it took many man-years of effort to get there. If MS started with the existing technology and moved forward from there, we'd all be better off, but that's not how MS plays the game.
Unfortunately, I see Microsoft research as another expression of their business model. Then again, Bell Labs was created to protect AT&T's monopoly, so why should MS be any different?
> a good example might be apple's new 'time machine' feature which allows for incremental backups and easy recovery.
I think you've confused "computer science" with "product engineering". You might occasionally not even understand some of the terms that the researchers use.
>>Just because their work does not percolate down to the products and services teams at MS
So msft spends gobs of money, hiring huge numbers of researchers to do all kinds of research. Msft invents all kinds of stuff. Then msft just throws all of that away, and steals ideas from other companies?
Makes perfect sense to me.
And Microsoft has a Fields Medallist (as well as luminaries like Oded Schramm). Among notable mathematical/computer science results, a Microsoft Research guy found a "indisputable" computer proof of the four color theorem a couple of years ago.
Blame Microsoft for their shady business practices, not for their lack of smart people. Your comparison is stupid.
The only result of what you listed here is more stuff to wipe my ass with.
Calculate this:
Money spent per year at MSR
divided by
Products invented by or improved *significantly* by MSR
And there you have it, the reason no one takes them seriously. It's like MSR doesn't even exist, and everything is controlled by marketing. They should be innovating and whooping Google's bum with all the money spent. But they are playing catch-up to Apple with the Zune, Firefox with IE, Unix with Vista (which had its best features pulled), Sony with the Xbox (although Sony probably overly circumcised itself on the PS3/360 war), Google with the searchy thing, Apache with IIS, Java with
The only areas in which they dominate are Desktop Operating Systems, due to predatory pricing and other illegal activities, and DRM. Fricken WOW! (said sarcastically)
It's all theory that goes nowhere. Hopefully some smart people can turn that research into products, but it won't be microsoft.
#include your rant about how pure research furthers the field and applied research is for moneygrubbing opportunists
With over 20% of the DOCTORAL CANDIDATES, I would expect them to publish more good research than EVERY university. Unless there's a university somewhere that attracts over 20% of the doctoral candidates.
To sum up some other comments: MS Research probably does a lot, but the reason there are so many negative opinions is this:
How much does microsoft spend on research, and how much innovation comes out of it?
compared to
How many times does MS innovate vs. claims of innovation?
Hint: reseach per dollar is seen as very low, innovation per claim is very low.
I'm not saying that's right, but that answers the unasked question of the article, which was, why do they rag on the MSR?
I'm happy to agree that Microsoft's business models are deplorable, and the products they actually bring to market are often shabby imitations. That does not preclude, however, the reality that MS research does actually turn out good and interesting work - which they do. It simply means good work from MS research must not find its way to MS products very often. A quick perusal of MS research's good work and comparison to MS's latest products and you'll see that, indeed, there seems to be quite a gulf between research and development.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
Yes, I know what you were referring to. My point is that I think your implied argument is flawed. (1) Microsoft making heaps of money is largely unrelated to the intelligence of their technical employees, and (2) Microsoft's technical employees really do have the goal of making great software, but they simply aren't able to do it.
For example, tobacco and fast-food companies are making lots of money, too, but that doesn't mean that their products are good or that most of their employees are smart. Big businesses succeed because of a small number of ruthless and smart business and marketing people at the top; the rest of the employees are little more than hamburger flippers, at Microsoft as much as at MacDonalds. Companies where the technical skill of employees can make a difference are small and medium companies, as well as startups.
Done. Here's the first relevant link: (the first link was actually an article about how Apple (a litigious company itself) sued Microsoft over user interface issues:
Did you actually read the article? It clearly disproves the claim that Microsoft sues over its patents.
That said, however, they did have a nearly blank check to do Really Amazingly Cool Research without Corporate demanding that it all pay off in the next quarter. Their like will not be seen again for a long time...
Google?