The State of R&D At HP, IBM, and Microsoft

jcatcw writes "Computerworld surveys the R&D efforts at HP, IBM and Microsoft ($17 billion annually) and raises the question: Are these companies supporting more long-term basic research, or just the usual short-term, product-oriented work? HP is consolidating its focus on a few 'big bet' projects in five major research areas — information explosion, dynamic cloud services, content transformation, intelligent infrastructure, and sustainability. IBM has four 'high-risk' basic research areas — nanotechnology, cloud computing, integrated systems and chip architecture, and managing business integrity through advanced math and computer science. Many of the 272 research projects named at Microsoft Research's Web site are structured with major product lines like Windows, Office, or Xbox in mind, but many also seem to have no likely application to anything the company sells today."

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[Anonymous Coward]

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Narrow view

[jmcbain]

Parent poster has a narrow view of industry research. I graduated with my PhD in CS about six years ago from a top-20 university and have worked in an industry research lab. The primary output of industry research are patents, papers, and products (either new products or improving products). And the research labs at Microsoft, IBM, HP, and Yahoo are all very good at this. Take a look at the top CS conferences in the fields where these companies have a stake, and you will see that industry research contributes a large share of the paper output (e.g. SOSP, OSDI, SIGMOD, VLDB, WWW, KDD, etc.). Further, these companies are spending lots of money sponsoring a wide breadth of conferences and helping to drive fundamental research at a time when NSF funding is low. These companies should be applauded.

Microsoft R&D

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft R&D do make some stuff that's applicable to current products.

One clear example of that is multi-touch surfaces, that will be supported in Windows 7.

Re:Still a Moot Point

[xZgf6xHx2uhoAj9D]

Sorry I didn't think we were confined to the same company. I was arguing against the idea that the research "dies".

A public example is the Glasgow Haskell Compiler. True, it's not actually Microsoft branded as "MS Visual Haskell" or anything like that, but it is developed largely by Microsoftians (most prominently Simon Peyton Jones at Microsoft Cambridge). We all get a pretty decent and very usable compiler out of it; does it matter so much that it isn't branded as a Microsoft product?

... still seems like a bunch, to me ...

[PolygamousRanchKid]

is LEAN. How to get rid of American jobs.

Hmmm ... then what about all this stuff: http://www.research.ibm.com/areas.shtml

Or maybe IBM has secretly invented cell processor AI technology to produce scientific papers ... and "Dr. Who" Cybermen who present them at conferences ...

Note to self: buy more tinfoil, IBM Cybermen are just like totally *everywhere* ...

... well, that stuff about american jobs ... by a sad coincidence, some folks used to call that "Operations Research"

Re:Corporate research then and now

[pimpimpim]

In Germany there a lot of medium sized companies that are family-owned and not registered at the stock market (take Boehringer Ingelheim for example, 40.000 employees). These companies are very robust in their long-term planning. They cannot generate a lot of money at once to invest in research in new tech, but they spend procentually more to R&D than stock-registered companies, and have the patience to do long term high-risk projects.

This works out. Their stock-market competitor Pfizer is in big troubles because they forgot to invest in R&D but instead extended their sales force. Now they have an empty drug pipeline and their sales force will have nothing to sell.