Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Accused of Squandering Billions On R&D
Julie188 writes "Even as Microsoft celebrates its 10,000th patent, angry shareholders are starting to speak out against what they say is the squandering of billions of dollars on pointless R&D projects. The 10,000th patent covers a technology that allows a device to associate data with objects placed on its surface, and is likely eventually to become part of the Surface table PC. But shareholders are fed up with the $8 billion annually spent. Said one, 'I believe Bill Gates is a charlatan because what he has said, implied, promised to shareholders and stakeholders and all of these visionary things that he mumbles and jumbles about and doesn't make reality of. MS is spending billions of dollars on R&D. Where is the return on investment?' In contrast, Apple had almost the same revenue gains as Microsoft while spending one-tenth as much."
Why complain about what Bill Gates is saying? The last I saw he wasn't in charge any more. If you must complain about what the head of Microsoft is doing, complain about the chairs flying out of Steve Balmer's office.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, IBM's various research labs, 3M's research and others have all generated wonderful new things from their basic research.
And yet for all the raves these research groups generate, it very seldom turned into successful product launches for the parent company. Xerox is famous for inventing lots of cool technology that became successes for other companies. Bell Labs had a fearsome reputation, but much of its output never ended up in BellCorp products - otherwise we would still be talking about AT&T as a dominant Unix vendor.
3M is a better example, but most of their projects are closer to home - production engineers working on product ideas of their own, rather than basic research.
MS Research may do great things, but few companies are willing to take the schedule and financial risk that goes along with productizing a new technology. Making the jump for R to D is difficult for a company that wants to know a schedule, budget, ship date and ROI within plus/minus 10%.
C# and .NET were born out of the COOL project. COOL was a engineering response to Sun's lawsuit over Microsoft's attempts to extend Java in incompatible ways. Microsoft Research was never involved in the development of .NET.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Depending on how Microsoft classifies it's workforce, this may be a simple labeling issue, Many companies call future development work R&D for tax purposes. I believe you can deduct or amortize part of your R&D budget. So, Windows 8 may very well be "R&D".
A bunch of the .NET languages, runtimes, and compiler features originated in or were developed closely with Microsoft Research, and some parts (like F#) were almost wholly developed there.
Although it's not very much liked by Slashdotters, Songsmith has also been relatively successful. Kodu is also getting a reasonable amount of press, and helping to solidify XNA's lead in the education-via-games space.
More generally, they develop prototypes of a lot of ideas that get reimplemented by the "product" side of the company. For example, MSR has been experimenting with adding machine-learning and data-mining features to MS desktop products for years, something that the product group is now starting to do with Excel. Those sorts of things are harder to quantify of course--- did the MSR experiments in that area help the product team at all? Would they have done the same anyway? Hard to say, but in general I think the advantages of having an R&D division in your company are undercounted in these "soft gains" ways, which is one reason that once companies downside their R&D divisions, the product groups stop producing as many new things as well.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
As a [remaining -- for now] Microsoft employee, I can tell you that there is lots of stuff going on here that gets cancelled. Things do not always pan out.
There are probably projects and people that could be cut. MS could probably be more efficient.
Generally, I've seen good technology and near-finished products get killed for political reasons. That work tends not to be completely lost, however. Near-produts tend to have their interesting technologies teased apart, refactored, and re-incorporated into future MS offerings.
However, much as I malign them, I trust the various managers within MSFT to make R&D and strategy decisions over some dipshit that owns 200 shares of MSFT and is irate that he's not seeing '95->'99 era stock price appreciation.
The MSFT stock has been garbage for a long time -- and I am sure I own more of it than the average complainer. Microsoft has always spent money all over the place because real progress takes investment. The company continues to be highly profitable and doesn't appear to need micromanagement from people looking to get rich via stock speculation.
I haven't carefully analyzed the ramifications, but I am at least emotionally drawn towards the idea of MSFT rebuying _all_ of its public stock and telling the market to FOAD.
Last I checked our market cap was down in the $200B range, so I don't think that's a plausible option, given our cash position.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
- Parallel Extensions to .NET
- Surface
- Photosynth
- WorldWide Telescope
I don't know if Parallel Extensions is worth $8 billion, but it's a huge deal and the cornerstone of the ManyCore/Multicore work MS is doing. It's pretty freaking cool. (And the Mono folks have already implemented it...)
"The urge to fly from modern systems, instead of moving through them to even greater, fairer things is, I think, an indi
It's also not new, as static analysis has existed in various forms for quite a while (lint is a form of static analysis).
The work that the SDV is based off of is called SLAM, and it was as much an advance to the field of static analysis as anything people do today is.
Take a look at the publication list from the SLAM project. The research that has gone into it has seen publication in POPL twice (along with PLDI one of the two top-tier conferences in PL), CAV three times (also extremely good), and many other venues.
The BLAST project, which is in some sense a successor to SLAM (not at MSR work), has seen quite a bit of additional publications.
You quite clearly don't know what you're talking about; PL is my research area, so I somewhat do.
Microsoft Research is one of only a couple industry research labs that publishes research of similar quality and quantity to a good research university (another is IBM; Google definitely doesn't). I am much less opposed to MS than most people at /., but I will steadfastly defend MSR.
It may not be popular or known to common users, but Microsoft Research is actually fairly well known for its work and yields plenty contributions to scientific publications - so it isn't like they aren't doing anything. Here are some random pages from the site.
If anything, it's surprising that more of it doesn't bubble up into consumer products. Maybe it's simply mismanaged or mistrusted by the management?
-- Sig down
Xerox is a good example of this. However, the other two are less good. You mention that 3M doesn't have a particularly large research arm separate from their manufacturing R&D. As for Bell Labs, remember that at the time it was truly ferocious, it wasn't allowed to do much with their technology because of the company's regulated monopoly status. They could develop UNIX for internal use all they wanted (and transistors and routing algorithms and...), but they couldn't actually sell it outside the Bell System. And by the time they could sell it externally, it wasn't like they had anyone left who could have productized or sold it for them.
In reality, corporate R&D has been dying for the last thirty years, except in the military space. It's a shame because the investors are simply eating the seed corn from which new products could have sprung.
That is all.
Well, here's an anecdote.
6 or 7 years ago, when I was a low[er] level QA person at MSFT, I had a recurring meeting with someone from MSR because my division was using the new binary analysis and instrumentation tools that they had cooked up. I was one of the people implementing that toolchain in our production and testing process.
Now every product and every team at Microsoft uses that toolset.
Every year, MSR holds "Techfest", which is kind of like the science fair, except all of the experiments are awesome. MSR folks setup boothes/demos etc to show off what they've been up to. Normal MS employees attend this thing to allow for exactly the sort of informal, node-to-node idea exchange that ends up building the bridges from academia to engineering that you posit must not exist. And that is just one mechanism -- one that is accessible to low-level people in product groups for them to learn _what_ interesting things are happening, and who is doing them, and how to stay abreast of what's going on there.
I had an email conversation last month with someone at MSR who does visualization reseach about the publicly-downloadable visualization controls. I'm using them in one of my internal reporting tools and have some feature asks and was explaining some of the problems I'm having with the currently released bits. They've got new stuff they've been working on that will probably help me out when it's ready, and now they're aware of one more "real-world" use case for visualuzations of the type they're working on.
I'm a nobody, leaf-node QA engineer. And I've had interactions with MSR that have made my job better and easier, and the products I've worked on better.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
You honestly think that 360s are outselling Wiis here? As somebody who actually works in a store selling video game consoles, I assure you that is not the case. If we could keep Wiis in stock for more than a day or two at a time I'm sure they'd sell even better, but as it is I've probably seen as many Wiis sold as PS3s and 360s combined.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.