Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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.

7 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 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
    2. 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.

    3. 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
    4. 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.
  2. 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.

  3. 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.