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Microsoft Research Fights Critics

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the easy-things-to-fix-that-corporate-overlords-don't-want-to-do dept.

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."

55 of 361 comments (clear)

  1. deservedly by yagu · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    I welcome research from any company. I'm guessing I've probably used what amounts to "innovation" from Microsoft, derivative of work from their labs.

    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.

    Their research may be golden, but it's ill-gotten gains, the world thinks so, and the world is probably right. The fact that Microsoft has such a corner on every market that they can hire 25% of the Computer Science PhD candidates only adds fuel to the fires of suspicion.

    In the interim, it's a shame Bell Labs has gone from world leader to nothing... budget cuts, etc. (Lucent)... there was some real research there, and lots of it was shared with the world.

    1. Re:deservedly by russ1337 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      >>> having hired ..... 250 computer science PhD candidates in Redmond alone..."

      But will M$FT listen to a damn thing they have to say?

    2. Re:deservedly by nine-times · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    3. Re:deservedly by El+Cubano · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    4. Re:deservedly by ewhac · · Score: 4, Insightful
      In the interim, it's a shame Bell Labs has gone from world leader to nothing... budget cuts, etc. (Lucent)... there was some real research there, and lots of it was shared with the world.

      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
    5. Re:deservedly by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    6. Re:deservedly by arniebuteft · · Score: 2, Insightful
      >As it is, it looks less like research and more like unfettered spending to find "yet another" way to dominate.

      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.

    7. Re:deservedly by Coryoth · · Score: 5, Insightful
      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.

      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
    8. Re:deservedly by paulsnx2 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    9. Re:deservedly by steve_l · · Score: 3, Interesting

      One issue with hiring the masters like Lamport is that they like to do their own thing, and want a large staff underneath; in industry its harder to get head count than in academia, where you have undergrads, RAs and phd students to suffer at low cost for the sake of a professor.

      The other problem -tech transfer- is the enemy of all R&D labs, and of academia too. There's a lot of good ideas out there, that don't make it out into a world that has the x86 as the primary CPU, A DOS derivative and a Unix derivative as the choices of OS, and C/C++ as the primary programming languages.

      FWIW, I work in a corporate R&D lab in the UK, and getting anything taken up is always a miracle to be celebrated. Except when it takes so long to come to market that they shouldnt have bothered. This is why open source is so much better as a way of doing tech transfer. If you have something good, a patch, a test and the ability to argue your case, it can be in the code tree in a week, and in people's hands the next day, in mainstream distros within a month or two.

      Whereas MS Research? Vista took 5 years. Every new idea in the last three of those years will have been postponed to its successor. So the lag between an idea and product is 3-5 years, compared to 3-5 weeks.

      -steve

    10. Re:deservedly by naoursla · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Microsoft Robotics Studio includes a new technology called Coordination and Concurrency Runtime to help make highly concurrent programming easier. You can download the current preview of Robotics Studio at http://microsoft.com/robotics. There is also information on the CCR at http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=1435 82.

    11. Re:deservedly by rssrss · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Bell Labs has at least two Nobel prizes (Transistor and Cosmic Background Radiation) to its credit, together with tremendous advances in theoretical (Information Theory) and practical (UNIX and C) computer science. Micro$oft is not in the same league, heck, it's not even on the same continent.

      Another comparable is IBM. Yes they were the monopolist villains of their time. But, they also invented things such as RISC and Relational Databases.

      Micro$oft is spending a fortune and coming up with scraps and baubles. My feeling as a stockholder is that they should cut the research budget and raise the dividend.

      --
      In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
    12. Re:deservedly by Kazoo+the+Clown · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

    13. Re:deservedly by benbritten · · Score: 2, Interesting

      >>> having hired ..... 250 computer science PhD candidates in Redmond alone..."

      this is the problem. i dont know how many of you ahve worked with CS doctorates, but they are some of the most obtuse people i know, and dont generally have any idea what it is the average person wants or needs. (which, imho is what drives this industry)

      contrast this with apple, who employ top knotch designers to come up with the ideas, and then hire the big brains to implement it.

      a good example might be apple's new 'time machine' feature which allows for incremental backups and easy recovery. technically MS has had somethign like this for a while now (probably designed by some giant-brained CS PhD) but it is not very user friendly (so not user friendly that i had never even heard of it because nobody i know uses it) whereas, apple took that concept and actualyl made it 'useful' to the general populous, and that i think is where technological innovation is.

      (i am not an apple fanboi, just using them as a contrast to MS, i think there are tons of innovative companies out there, but i have to honestly say that i dont believe MS is one of them, they might create/invent new technologies, but innovation requires a little something extra that MS seems a bit short on)

    14. Re:deservedly by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I've interned at MSR and continue to work with people there. I also know people in Microsoft's product groups. In general, MSR != Microsoft. The stuff they do is completely different and the type of people there are completely different. Of course, there are some liasons between MSR and the company-proper that do tech-transfer and stuff like that and people can move around in the company, but most researchers I know do "pure" research that may or may not have anything to do with any of Microsoft's products. There are probably a lot of people at MSR that agree with the parent post. In fact, I know of MSR researchers that insist on *not* being labeled as part of Microsoft-proper (like on name tags and stuff).

      MSR vis-a-vis Microsoft is more like what Bell Labs was vis-a-vis AT&T. MSR publishes regularly in well known academic conferences, works on many "pure" research problems, and works closely with researchers at universities. In recent times, I've found that most of their groups are pretty open about their work (no NDAs or anything). Quite a few researchers move to/from MSR and acamedia as well as other research labs (Intel, HP, IBM) as well --- a lot of people there are more a part of this community of academics than a part of Microsoft the company. They work at MSR because, usually, they can do whatever they want at MSR. Microsoft will tech-transfer it if they think the research can make them money, but otherwise, as with most research, it will just be published and never be seen by most people outside the academic community (unless you look).

      Although this last point may seem like a waste of talent, it is an intentional aspect of research in general. MSR (and most other pure research labs) does not exist to improve Microsoft's products over timeframes of 1-5 years (although sometimes it does); it exists because out of the 1000s of wacky ideas that researchers come up with and fail, at some point one of them will succeed and end up changing the world for the next 20-50 years. The amount of smart people, time, and money you invest in finding that one idea becomes moot at that point.

    15. Re:deservedly by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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?

    16. Re:deservedly by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

      Having given his foe some "rightious data", tmjdot (or "dot" as his friends on the 'Net called him" eased back into his Relax-tron and pulled his data-visualizers off his head. He puffed on a 'rette and stared up at the cieling. Wasting these guys one at a time was easy enough, but the softies were everywhere. They covered everything and everyone and the virus was spreading.
      The resignation that he couldn't do this alone slowly zipped its way through his meat-grid. He needed help. And fast.
      His mind made up, dot flipped down his goggles, cracked his datagloved fingers, and jacked in. The polyphonic lightshow of a billion voices of data slipping into his crib illuminated his face. He put out the 'rette and headed off for info-environs unknown in search of free-lance data mercenaries like himself willing to wield a weapon against the softie menance. Somewhere out there the binary existed to kill the menace, to get things back to normal. It was just a matter of getting the right programmertavists to riot with it, and getting it in time.

      It was going to be a long night.

    17. Re:deservedly by cayenne8 · · Score: 3, Funny
      "Why should it be my responsibility to constantly re-prove to Microsoft that I've paid them for a product?"

      There are other operating systems, you know.....

      I know of at least 2 of them that don't have activation problems at all.

      --
      Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
    18. Re:deservedly by Coryoth · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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
    19. Re:deservedly by indifferent+children · · Score: 2, Funny
      What makes me think they don't? Using and supporting their products.

      Hey now! Animated paperclips don't invent themselves.

      --
      Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it. --Mark Twain
  2. Not a Huge Surprise by eldavojohn · · Score: 3, Interesting
    A lot of large IT companies looked outside of computer science. I mean, yeah, engineers should be the core of your work force but diversity is always a big plus. It didn't surprise me to see this quote:

    The MSR staff, however, is not just computer scientists, it includes psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists and medical doctors who are tasked with pushing the envelope on state of the art technology as much or more than transferring their technology into new and existing Microsoft products.
    Large companies shouldn't hire these professions just to "push the envelope." Instead, I would hope that all companies diversified as their employee numbers grow. I work in a large IT company and have witnessed the above professions working effectively--especially in the R&D department.

    • Psychologists

      One of the areas of studies the gets some of the most criticism from me. But you know what? When it comes to performing experiments on how people think and react to stimuli, psychologists are pretty damn good at it since all their data has been collected empirically from subjects. And who uses the code and devices we make in the end? Humans. And who better to tell you what the effects will be after a human has used your product for hours on end? You know, I've often wondered how many psychologists Blizzard employs because I can play that game for long periods of time with little or no fatigue on my eyes/brain.
    • Sociologists

      As software becomes more and more decentralized and internet based, communities form around it. Communities identify themselves by it. For instance, I am part of the Slashdot community by merely posting on it. Think about how many sociologists that MySpace must employ to predict/track or protect people from social deviance. How do you handle that? How do you address that? Not really an engineer's department.
    • Anthropologists

      Now that's a word I hear thrown around a lot and abused to mean many things. But most importantly, it's the study of diverse kinds of people. If you're an international company, you need anthropologists to view your projects and make sure that you aren't inadvertently calling your product or displaying something that may limit your market or create bad press. Engineers focus on one type of person when they make their product and so you need people to make sure that it is still marketable to the world.
    • Medical Doctors

      Most likely hired for the sheer fact that baby boomers are getting old. Huge market for healthcare. If you can make anything related to it and sell it, you're in the money for the coming years. I may be a horrible monster for saying this but things like Alzheimer's Disease are multi-billion dollar industries based on treatments. Gene therapy and computational techniques in gene sequencing just make the field all that more lucrative.

      On top of that, you need to think of the disabled using your product and be conscious of their disabilities. Also, what medical problems might be associated with your product or how can you make it easier on the end user. You don't want a million lawsuits if I'm losing my eye sight or getting arthritis by playing WoW, do you?
    I'm actually shocked that list wasn't longer and more astonishing. No music theory majors to look at musical products like Guitar Hero's success? No athletic trainers to combat my country's obesity or offer and IT solution for it? No history majors to ... to ... ok well maybe they really are useless (I'm kidding).

    Come on people, this is the R&D of the largest software company in the world. I'm shocked that I'm not more shocked on what they're up to.
    --
    My work here is dung.
  3. Are they really that interesting by CastrTroy · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Is the stuff that's going on at MS really all that interesting that 21% of PHD students want to work there? Or is the pay just that good? Or are they just looking for a nice shiny star on their resume? It seems to me that there would be a lot more interesting places to work than MS.

    --

    Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
    1. Re:Are they really that interesting by MSFanBoi2 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Maybe its all of the above?

      And what would be wrong with any of those options for a PhD student?

    2. Re:Are they really that interesting by ntropic · · Score: 4, Interesting

      It might come as a surprise to you but one doesn't get a Computer Science PhD to learn how to program, rather one does so to figure out what to solve with a program (unless you are working on Software Engineering).

      I have a close friend who joined Microsoft Research last year after his PhD (which included interning there). He also had an offer from Google and a couple of hedge funds. His reason for taking MSR was that Microsoft, for all it's image does actually allow the MSR guys to pretty much do what they want to explore instead of forcing a direction driven by a profit making application of that work. This results in much research not ending up in products (so you don't see it), but doesn't stifle the people working there. This came as quite a surprise to me but when I look at some of the papers the groups in MSR have published, I wonder how far from the truth that is.

      oh and BTW, they were paying a good 0.6x higher than Google so that would account for some of those PhDs.

  4. Well, perhaps it might be... by jimicus · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Well, perhaps it might be... by swissmonkey · · Score: 2, Insightful

      A filesystem which still requires defragmenting? It may have been a decent improvement over FAT 15 years ago, but it's a little long-in-the-tooth now. There's far better filesystems available (ext3, XFS, ZFS, etc.), and many have been available for quite some time (like IBM's JFS which came on OS/2). Doesn't seem like a big triumph to me in the face of the competition.

      If the only complaint you have against NTFS is fragmentation, then you're an idiot who doesn't know a thing about filesystems.
      Think about the combination between reparse points, streams, journaling,... on regular machines from the supermarket way before anybody else.
      Oh, and Ext3 is a joke compared to NTFS feature wise.

      Huh? You mean like grep, which has been around since the 70s? Or do you mean like machine vision systems, which admittedly are quite advanced and impressive, but certainly don't come from Microsoft.

      Like MS making advances in the field of pattern recognition, such as image recognition, speech recognition, ... sounds like you don't even know what we're talking about here.

      My TI-99/4A had this back in 1981. It was around before this too. There's been lots of research projects (not affiliated with MS) for a very long time dealing with this, such as Festival.

      YEAAAYYYHHH !!! And how many do it as well as MS ?

      Sorry, but you just sound like an idiot, the fact that the field existed before doesn't mean that MS didn't bring a lot of innovation to it, that should be obvious.

  5. "research" by MECC · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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
    1. Re:"research" by EvanED · · Score: 5, Informative

      That's not MSR. That's marketing research. (I don't know what the department that does that is named though.)

      MSR's the group that came up with SLAM, which is now incorporated into the Windows driver framework. It's resulted in (over the last 5 years) two POPL papers (one of the two top-tiered programming language conferences), a PLDI paper (the other of the two), a PASTE paper, a TOPLAS paper, three TACAS papers, three CAV papers, a few workshop papers, and a spinoff project at UC Berkeley called BLAST which is doing things very similar to SLAM. (They've had their own fair share of papers, and probably a doctoral thesis or two, on it.)

      MSR's the group that wrote Singularity, an experimental OS written in C#, that has an ASPLOS paper, two EuroSys papers (one of which got the best paper award), and three workshop papers.

      MSR's the group that wrote Vulcan, a binary rewriter that allowed them to create a program that records the execution trace of another program and play it back later. This is useful in, for instance, temporal debugging. (Think the Omnicient Debugger for Java, except made to work on any program because it operates on binaries. Except that MSR developed two other applications for the recorded traces.) This, and other projects that MSR has done with Vulcan, have resulted in a number of other papers.

      Say what you like about MS in general, but MSR publishes more good research than many (probably even most) university CS depts.

  6. what critics? by idlake · · Score: 4, Informative

    I don't know of anybody criticizing Microsoft Research: there are lots of good people doing good work there. People are criticizing Microsoft's business practices and products. Good research doesn't necessarily translate into good products, in particular if a company's primary goal is market dominance through lock-in and other tricks.

    1. Re:what critics? by Grishnakh · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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?

    2. Re:what critics? by EvanED · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

      (Sorry, I'm sorta cynical towards /. groupthink today...)

    3. Re:what critics? by idlake · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

  7. MS research by El+Lobo · · Score: 2, Informative
    MS research have an incredible number of cool projects. Unfortunatly, MS research are not so narcissistic as Google lab, so they are almost unknown to the average Joe out there. Some of the cool projects they are working on are:


    * Singularity OS
    * Socio-Digital systems
    * Digital geographics
    * Natural Language Processing ...

    --
    It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
  8. Where are the results? by xs650 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    "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.

    1. Re:Where are the results? by gvc · · Score: 2, Informative

      MSR is not a product development group. It is a research organization within Microsoft. MSR researchers pursue curiosity-driven research and publish in the normal academic channels.

    2. Re:Where are the results? by linguae · · Score: 2, Interesting

      That's because, unlike the old Bell Labs nor Google, Microsoft doesn't really capitalize from its research. Look at the research with Singularity, for example. As a future computer science researcher (I'm just a sophomore in college now), I would love to get my hands on a system like this. Finally something new that isn't based off of nearly 40 years of Unix. The goals are quite noble and innovative, and I'm glad that Microsoft is doing systems research, something that seems to have been neglected in computer science for some time (Rob Pike talked about that in his "System Research is Irrelevant" talk back in 2000). However, Vista makes use of absolutely none of this technology, and Microsoft doesn't seem to want to incorporate any of this research in Windows at all.

      MS can be so much better if they actually applied their research to Windows, its flagship product. But since Microsoft has already accomplished its goal, have 90% worldwide marketshare on operating systems, I guess it can get away with incremental improvements every half decade or so. It's not that Microsoft doesn't innovate, look at the research. That's innovation. It's that Microsoft doesn't want to capitalize its innovations and is content on sticking with its Windows (and Office) monopoly.

    3. Re:Where are the results? by metlin · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Makes their lack of innovation all the more remarkable.

      Heh, do you even *know* what the hell you are talking about? Maybe you should try looking at some of the ACM SIG* or IEEE publications in the various fields related to CS.

      MSR produces some of the best CS research in the world. Just because their work does not percolate down to the products and services teams at MS does not make MSR lack any innovation.

      In fact, if you look into most areas, MSR has made some very cutting edge and valuable contributions.

      Maybe you should have a look at the list of publications they have put out since 2000.

      Do not confuse research with development. Then again, given that this is Slashdot, blind and ignorant Microsoft bashing is welcome, even if the person bashing it has absolutely no clue whatsoever.

      Nice.

    4. Re:Where are the results? by Grishnakh · · Score: 2, Insightful

      What's the point of doing research if you're not going to use it for something? That's just a big waste of time and effort.

      When Bell Labs invented the transistor, it wasn't doing it just to do something interesting to some researchers. Bell used this new technology, and the transistor went on to utterly revolutionize the world.

      Making up a new OS and keeping it locked away in a research lab isn't useful; it's a colossal waste of time. It doesn't matter how good it is if you're not going to do anything with it. By contrast, Linux is very useful. It doesn't matter if many of the concepts are based on 40 years of Unix (your CPU is based on 60 years of semiconductor technology after all, and your car is based on 110+ years of automotive technology), it's proven to be a useful vehicle for creating new OS features (filesystems, schedulers, etc.) and then actually deploying them on a worldwide scale very quickly as regular people are able to download this software and try it out at will. Can I try out Singularity? No?

    5. Re:Where are the results? by MP3Chuck · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Well ... I wouldn't count it out yet. Singularity is only 3-ish years old. In fact, from what I understand they only recently reached the stage of having an interactive command line. IANA Computer Scientist, but I'm sure it's got a long way to go before even its base concepts are suitable for mainstream use. Hell, there's not even any clue as to whether development of Singularity into a mainstream OS would even be feasible.

      Not to mention there would be an absolutely massive paradigm shift involved in moving from Win32/64 to a platform like Singularity...

      --
      Who doesn't like free music?
  9. Money Can't Buy Brains. by MrAnnoyanceToYou · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.
  10. Billions and Billions for what??? by stox · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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. "
  11. Thanks. I'll hide my other shirt... by Bamafan77 · · Score: 2, Funny
    "I pwn Steve Jobs" probably won't fly too well around here either. :)

    Relax people, they're (bad) jokes!

  12. Microsoft won two innovation awards just last week by I'm+Don+Giovanni · · Score: 3, Insightful
    MS does innovation besides the stuff at Microsoft Research.

    I got this from a post to Scoble's blog last week:
    Check out the December 3, 2006 entry at the XNA blog, entitled "XNA Game Studio Express and the DEMMX Awards".

    Turns out that Microsoft's XNA won two categories at last week's DEMMX Awards:
    Best of Show: Innovator of the Year
    Microsoft XNA Game Studio Express (Microsoft Corporation)

    Game Innovation of the Year
    Microsoft XNA Game Studio Express (Microsoft Corporation)


    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=2612 54
    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
  13. The boy who cried "Innovation" by Larry_Dillon · · Score: 2, Interesting

    If M$ research has a to fight an up-hill battle, it's because Microaoft has lied in so many ways in the past. Especially when it comes to innovation. From DOS to Internet Explorer, Microsoft has had a habit of:

    1. Buying the second or third ranked player in a market segment.
    2. Rebranding it.
    3. Throwing their advertising dollars behind it.
    4. Calling it "Innovation."

    Worse is when they steal other's ideas and call it "Innovation." How many time have they been sued?

    I hope they are on the path to reform, but it will take a significant pattern of honest behavour before I believe what they say.

    --
    Competition Good, Monopoly Bad.
  14. I'm certainly no expert with private enterprise, by kramulous · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

    --
    .
  15. The research might be great by houghi · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.
  16. deservedly similies by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    "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."

    Microsoft Research is to research what AC's are to slashdot. Burned, buried, and ignored with a few modded up.

  17. Microsoft Research meets Microsoft Marketing by autophile · · Score: 4, Funny

    Microsoft Research! More computer science papers come out of us than from the top universities! We present them at numerous prestigious conferences around the world!

    Now, in partnership with Microsoft Marketing, we are proud to announce... Research4All!

    Yes, Research4All is a unique product designed to meet not only the needs of researchers around the world, but also the corporations that feed, clothe, and entertain them! For only $1299.99, you get access to three -- count 'em, three! -- research papers published by Microsoft Research! But wait, there's more!

    You may read each paper a total of five times, on a total of one computer! And if you should choose to purchase our Paper Edition (for an additional $499 charge), the ink will degrade after six months. And, as an added bonus, the paper is microprinted so that copying and scanning won't work! We are also working with graphics imaging and word processing vendors to recognize certain unique, secret, and patented characteristics of both the microprinting, as well as the sentence structure!

    Research was never this fun!

    --Rob

    --
    Towards the Singularity.
  18. Ph.D. student: MS for internship, then real job by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I'm a Ph.D. student in one of the big universities. I also work as an IT consultant while I'm trying to finish. I have interned in several large companies and now work in a startup. I have also talked to _many_ Ph.D. students about interning at MS and would like to convey those findings here.

    First, nobody finishes a Ph.D then wants to work at MS in order to find an interesting career. New grads or interns go there to make some money, and hope to move on soon. The respect for MS from IT-aware people is obvious from technically-minded forums such as Slashdot. What I find curious is that many people try to sell Slashdot as 'anti Microsoft' and that it has a an anti-MS bias. From my experience, the only bias is that the people whom bother to post on Slashdot know something about IT and the computer industry in general. Sadly, MS is a marketing company, much like Symantec has become. Software is not the focus, and proper software which is acceptable to a computer-aware user base is surely not the goal of MS. Only MS could advertise they have ~21% of the Ph.D. students while the entire IT field knows the students don't want to be there. From my view, their claim is intended to be impressive to the less-informed public, not for the IT crowd.

    In short, computer-aware people know MS is marketing only and do not respect it for its software. However, to have 'dealt' with MS looks good on the resume because it shows you can deal with B.S., much like having a Ph.D. shows. We all know that many more people could earn doctorate degrees if they wanted them, but don't bother and just go have a career with a bachelor's level degree. The extra degree says you can do what needs to be done and work against the odds to make what you envision happen. I view interning at MS much the same way-- proof that those students can beat the odds and work in a less-than-perfect environment (note this is a good skill to have in higher-level employment positions and is why Ph.D.-level people are paid more).

    I have never worked at MS and would not necessarily be proud to have MS on my resume. But it does say something, that you dealt with MS and will most likely appreciate working somewhere else next.

  19. Re:What does it produce? by swissmonkey · · Score: 2

    The problem would instead be that you don't know a dime about what MS Research does and talk out of your ass.

    They're one of the most recognized research lab in the CS world, with plenty of awards and publicly available papers proving it.

    Maybe next time you should do some research before talking about something...

  20. So msft just does pointless research? by walterbyrd · · Score: 4, Insightful

    >>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.

  21. Numbers Don't Add Up by roca · · Score: 3, Informative

    I think the numbers quoted from the article here were bungled.

    > 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."

    http://www.cra.org/CRN/articles/may06/taulbee.html

    suggests around 1200 CS PhDs *awarded* in 2004-2005 in the USA and Canada. The number for the USA alone may be lower than this, but it might also be higher since 20% of departments surveyed did not respond. But assuming 1200/year is close to the mark, the number of "computer science PhD candidates in the United States" must be several times that, since a PhD takes several years and furthermore a lot of PhD students never complete their degree. I think an average of five years of studentship per PhD awarded would be a reasonably conservative estimate; then the 21% number quoted should be more like 4%.

  22. Let's play monopoly by gondwannabe · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Here's the fundamental problem: the object of business is to win all the business. But, if you succeed you become public enema #1.

    What's amazing about MS is how little they accomplish given their resources.

    Windows is still bone primitive when it comes to basic housekeeping: your network administrator disconnects a drive that you 'share', you attempt to import a file into an Office ap and the system grinds to a halt - does windows intercept this? advise you? nay nay nay! You have to go to Google to even find out why it's happening. What about ID7s disregard of CSS conventions? We still have all those cryptic error messages. Blah, blah, blah, blah. Why doesn't Paint do anything reasonably useful after all these years - you can't even constrain a rectangle into a bleedin' square

    What are they working on up there?

    --
    Guns don't kill people, bullets kill people!
  23. When the Functional Programming Revolution hits... by BitwizeGHC · · Score: 4, Funny

    When the functional programming revolution hits the mainstream -- and it will very soon now as the current, C++ or Java way of developing software does not scale complexity-wise without requiring ever-increasing armies of Indians or Chinese to grind out the code -- Microsoft will be ahead of just about everybody else because they've retained the likes of Simon Payton-Jones and Erik Meijer to work in their research department. In fact, LINQ may just be the best thing to ever happen to functional programming because now that Microsoft is doing it, it becomes a legitimate enterprise programming activity.

    Microsoft is an 800-pound gorilla, but do NOT knock their research arm. Whatever it may have been in the past, these days there are definitely people doing interesting stuff at the very cutting edge of computing

    --
    N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
  24. Re:Published Research by dthree · · Score: 2

    The MSR is fighting a losing battle because if they do truely come out with something innovative, it will get lost in a sea of mundane product announcements that ALL are tagged "innovative" by marketing. It's the company that cried "innovative". I just tune the word out when it comes to microsoft.

    --
    "I forgot my mantra."