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."

Comments

Bill Gates?

[techno-vampire]

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.

Re:Bill Gates?

[mmkkbb]

He's still chairman of the board.

Re:They aren't investors

[AKAImBatman]

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.

Sometimes R&D isn't R&D

[swinefc]

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 lot of .NET development has been

[Trepidity]

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.

Re:Death march

[EvanED]

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.

Re:They aren't investors

[bmajik]

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.