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."

Comments

deservedly

[yagu]

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.

Re:deservedly

[nine-times]

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.

Re:deservedly

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:deservedly

[Coryoth]

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.

Re:deservedly

[paulsnx2]

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.

Re:"research"

[EvanED]

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.