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Roundup of Microsoft Research At TechFest 2009

Posted by kdawson on from the thirty-five-cool-things dept.

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.

14 of 123 comments (clear)

  1. Good for them by mc1138 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    --
    The musings of just another geek and his junk.
    1. Re:Good for them by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:Good for them by ub3r+n3u7r4l1st · · Score: 5, Insightful

      "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.

      --
      New Economic Perspectives
    3. Re:Good for them by Ethanol-fueled · · Score: 5, Interesting

      it's executing on those ideas and getting them in (and polished) into products.

      I don't think so. I'll give them the X-Box, but everything else they've implemented since they started trying to eat everybody else's lunch.

      Their search efforts. The SCO fiasco. The desperate grab for yahoo and blatantly paying people off to force Silverlight on everybody. The shit-colored Zune. Vista.

      But what did it for me was the recent forcing of social networking horseshit onto Hotmail without a clear, easy, and permanent method to disable it. Say what you want about Hotmail being Microsoft and all, but I had that account for 10 years because Hotmail Just Worked(tm). I just cancelled a 10-year Hotmail account and left to Gmail a few days ago because Microsoft thought that it would be cute to splice their own(poorly-implemented, I might add) version of MySpace into my goddamn e-mail account.

      So no, I disagree with you. In fact I believe just about everything they do develop, no matter how ingenious, is always fucked up at the implementation stage.

    4. Re:Good for them by guruevi · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
    5. Re:Good for them by Jamie's+Nightmare · · Score: 4, Informative

      I just cancelled a 10-year Hotmail account and left to Gmail a few days ago because Microsoft thought that it would be cute to splice their own(poorly-implemented, I might add) version of MySpace into my goddamn e-mail account.

      You seem like the kind of hot-headed prick that makes rash (and ignorant) decisions out of anger. Case in point. Did you have to cancel your account? No. You could have done this:

      1. Upper right side of screen, click options.
      2. Select "More Options"
      3. Under "Customize your mail" select "Today page settings"
      4. Select "Skip the Today page and take me straight to my inbox" Done

      Blaming Microsoft for your own shortcomings. Classic.

      --
      "When you see a unixer brainwashed beyond saving, kick him out of the door." - Xah Lee
    6. Re:Good for them by Ethanol-fueled · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Skipping the today page does not change the fact that the nagging cruft is still there.

      And yes, I actually played around with it first. To "add" people requires you to type in your information to confirm that Microsoft permanently owns all content related to your social networking a la Facebook, but since they're polite enough to ask for that, then why not ask me if I wanted all that crap in the first place?!

      It's like going to the restroom and unexpectedly finding your longtime neighbor who asks if he can watch you shower and take a dump. Even if he leaves after you tell him no, he shouldn't have been there in the first place. And you're never going to trust him again.

      The death of my 10-year old Hotmail account is symbolic. The rebirth will be my gmail accounts accessed via Thunderbird installed on a Dell with pre-loaded Ubuntu that I'm going to buy next week. Hotmail always charged extra for SMTP. You know, I kinda like Microsoft. I like XP, and I want to see Surface succeed, But they're really digging their own grave and even the most diehard of Microsoft apologists know that.

    7. Re:Good for them by rampant+mac · · Score: 5, Interesting
      "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."

      Steve Ballmer, Feb 2009: Microsoft asked some of its employees to read various company annual reports from 1927 through 1938. The goal, he said, was to find out who had done a good job handling the Great Depression," Lane reports. "'RCA, god rest them in peace, RCA become our role model,' Ballmer said. 'They actually kept investing in R&D through the Depression period, and in the post-Depression they dominated TV technology because they were really the only guys who had invested.'" (http://www.cio-today.com/story.xhtml?story_id=12000B3128U0)

      Steve Jobs, March 2008: We've had one of these before, when the dot-com bubble burst. What I told our company was that we were just going to invest our way through the downturn, that we weren't going to lay off people, that we'd taken a tremendous amount of effort to get them into Apple in the first place -- the last thing we were going to do is lay them off. And we were going to keep funding. In fact we were going to up our R&D budget so that we would be ahead of our competitors when the downturn was over. And that's exactly what we did. And it worked. And that's exactly what we'll do this time. (http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2008/fortune/0803/gallery.jobsqna.fortune/15.html) R&D is HUGE. Without it, I'd doubt the iPod would have made such a big splash, or if we'd see any of the amazing processor iterations that we're currently seeing.

      --
      I like big butts and I cannot lie.
    8. Re:Good for them by Xest · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

  2. Missing by Divebus · · Score: 4, Funny

    I don't see bug fixes in that list.

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    Most of the stuff on /. won't survive first contact with facts.
  3. Here's hoping ... by genmax · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ... 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.

    1. Re:Here's hoping ... by artor3 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:Here's hoping ... by tsa · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      --

      -- Cheers!

  4. MSR's reputation by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    While MS gets heavily criticized, the same can't be said about MSR, which is a highly prestigious industrial research group that harkens to the culture brought about from the early days of Xerox PARC Research. When it comes to research, MSR publishes consistently in extremely competitive and top-rated conferences and journals (e.g., ACM Siggraph, SOSP, OSDI, etc). While these outcomes do not have a tangible "dollar" amount attached to them, they do allow MSR to attract and bring together a tremendous amount of talent coming out of top computer science schools. Increasingly, very few companies out there are willing to commit the resources to research like MS does or truly focus on "pure" research without being tied down to a product group. Some examples would be IBM, Intel, HP Labs, etc. The reality is: research that truly has an impact cannot be tied to product cycles.

    As a CS PhD student myself at a "competitive" CS graduate school, many of my peers who are considering academic positions also intend to apply to MSR after graduation. And it's not easy to get in. The interview process is nearly as rigorous as one would undergo if applying for assistant professorship at a top CS school. So, MSR only hires top-rate people, and I think MS's decision to fund MSR will and continue to pay off in the future.