Roundup of Microsoft Research At TechFest 2009

An anonymous reader writes "Ars Technica has a very thorough post of some of the technologies that Microsoft researchers showed off at TechFest last week. 'The exact number of projects that were demonstrated at TechFest 2009 is not clear, but here's a quick rundown of about 35 research projects that haven't received much coverage, accompanied by links that will let you further explore if your interest is piqued. Remember that these are concepts and prototypes, not finished products, and they may never end up becoming anything significant.'" While Microsoft has been criticized for squandering a fortune on R&D, there can be no doubt that they are showing off some cool tech here.

Comments

Good for them

[mc1138]

Some might say that some of what they do is a waste, but there aren't many companies that are able to do such large scale R&D. Yeah its microsoft, but of late it seems they are trying to release sound technology and I for one am all for them being able to continue to do so even in turbulent economic times.

Re:Good for them

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, Wall Street will say all of what they do is a waste, because it might take longer than next quarter's results.

Here's hoping that more of the R&D ends up in more of their products. I've seen some of their research stuff and their problem isn't a lack of ideas (yeah yeah yeah bear with me a moment) it's executing on those ideas and getting them in (and polished) into products.

Re:Good for them

[ub3r n3u7r4l1st]

"Well, Wall Street will say all of what they do is a waste, because it might take longer than next quarter's results."

And now you see why we have the Great Economic Tsunami of 2008.

Re:Good for them

[guruevi]

I believe that is because every single product they release commercially, they will try to use as a vehicle for their other stuff (for best or (usually) for worst). Windows 98 was a vehicle for their ad-based "channels" and the MSN network (a non-neutral internet of some sorts), .NET was initially a vehicle for VB and Visual Studio, later morphed being a vehicle for IIS (and subsequently Windows Server). The MSN portal instead of being informative has become a vehicle for all types of things including Microsoft Search, Messenger, Hotmail, MySpace and Facebook knockoffs, ...

Same goes for their desktop software (Office, CRM) and server systems (AD, Communications Server and Sharepoint), they all lead to some type of vendor lock-in or it won't work well. Good for us, bad for them these days others begin to see the need to be open and they missed the train.

Re:Good for them

[Xest]

You're right that they've made many fuckups but you've only taking a select set of their products that are fuckups and tried to infer from that that all their products are fuckups.

Visual Studio, .NET and most of their other development stuff is excellent and truly top notch arguably beating out everything else on the market that tries to achieve the same goal. You look at something like ASP.NET MVC which started out as a research project and is now nearly at release stage and it puts a lot of longer running open source web frameworks (such as CakePHP) to absolute shame.

A lot of people don't like the Office 2007 interface because it's different and people don't like different, but in terms of ease of use for beginners and the productivity increases it brings it's a major innovation. The previous style toolbars have been running since the 80s and absolutely were not perfect so they deserve some credit for finally doing something to improve the good old toolbar in a way that does produce real, measureable productivity increases. Some common tasks that used to take an hour can be done in 30 seconds now. Sure the OOXML thing was a farce but that doesn't make the whole product bad when the new UI offers real benefits and you can save in other file formats anyway.

Even their server products aren't that bad anymore since they figured out that stability and security were important. 2008 server is particularly decent and 2003 wasn't too bad.

Also, you include forcing silverlight on everybody as being something that makes it a bad product, now I'll admit I don't know what silverlight is really like but businesses practices aside is it really any worse than Flash for example? The Yahoo thing ended up in Microsofts favour, Yahoo reached a point where it wished it had accepted Microsoft's offer whilst Microsoft ended up thanking the gods it didn't pay what it was offering.

Microsoft has indeed produced some shit through the years- the Zune, IE6, ME, Vista, Sourcesafe etc. but to suggest all their products are fucked up at implementation is ignorant of their numerous successes. I do not believe a company even with a monopoly the size of Micrososft's could continue to survive if everything they did was fucked up at implementation. People say companies buy MS OS' because of the monopoly position which is pretty true, but they hold no monopoly on development tools, office software and so on, they don't bundle this software with the OS, they charge for it and yet people buy it primarily because it's really no worse than the other offerings out there and is in many ways, much better.

I do not see Microsoft any different to other companies in this regard- Apple has it's successes like the iPod, iTunes and so on but look how many flops it's had through the years too. Google has it's search engine, web office tools and so on but again look at the flops it's had and the projects it's scrapped. All companies have succeses as well as failures and Microsoft is really no different in this regard, even if it is popular to hate them for their monopoly. Perhaps the biggest difference with MS is that most it's successes are in the business world whilst most it's failures are often more prominent in the consumer world- the Zune, IE6, ME and as such they struggle more for hearts and minds than say Apple and Google whose successes are prominent more in the consumer world- I mean, everyone remembers Apple for the iPod and no one remembers them for the pile of steaming turd that is MacOS Server whilst everyone remembers Microsoft for the likes of the Zune and Windows ME and no one (apart from developers who work with it) remembers them for Visual Studio.

Here's hoping ...

[genmax]

... that some of this research actually helps Microsoft in turning in to a company that derives its revenues from the fruits of its innovations rather than monopoly-based marketing hacks, and lock-ins into poorly written code.

Say what you will about Microsoft's software, Steve Ballmer, etc. - Microsoft Research does some really cool work, and its track record of supporting fundamental math/cs research (and researchers) is quite commendable.

Re:Here's hoping ...

[artor3]

the research products almost never make it to real products that people can use

You could say the same for just about any real research. I'm still grateful that it's being done. Far too many companies are content to focus on the next quarter while leaving the research to academia.

Re:Here's hoping ...

[tsa]

I haven't seen a BSOD on my computer for many years, at work where I use Windows exclusively as well as at home, where my Mac is often tortured by running Windows on it for playing games. XP is very stable.