Slashdot Mirror
Inside the Labs At HP, Microsoft and IBM
alphadogg writes "At Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard and IBM, investment in research and development is a reflection of corporate culture. This three-part piece by the IDG News Service examines the different approaches taken by each of these influential tech companies. Hewlett-Packard prides itself on its pragmatism, while Microsoft holds the flag of basic research aloft — and IBM continues to file more patent applications, year after year, than any other tech company."
One other thing I think IBM does a good job of is assuring that not only does it obtain a lot of patents, but those patents are generally of high quality, in the sense that they're real innovations that have actual value. IBM provides some significant incentives to employees to encourage patent submission, but those submissions are then vetted by a fairly skeptical evaluation committee before they're turned over to legal. Some crap patents leak through, but they're a tiny minority.
I think one of the best evidences of IBM's success in creating good patents is that IBM earns substantial revenues annually for licensing its patents, and does it without trollish behavior like submarine patents, lots of patent lawsuits, etc. IBM's patent licensees are typically happy to pay the license fees because the patents offer real value, and aren't things that the licensee would likely have independently invented. The result is over a billion dollars annually in patent licensing, which helps to offset a portion of the R&D budget.
Disclosure: I work for IBM, but not in PR and not in research. I also know of plenty of really dumb stuff the company does, but I think this is one area that IBM handles very well.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Its been a long time since I studied the output of MS basic research labs, but I remember 12 years ago being given a summary and being quite impressed. Not all of their basic research is in the computer industry per se. They had some great solid state physics modeling going on. As to actual innovations, the one I remember best is the note that Clippy, when he was first put out, was the most advanced AI-like program commercially available, and was a direct result of their basic research into AI and natural language processing. Other than that I wasn't paying attention to boring shit about the computer industry, but the interesting physics stuff they were sponsoring.
And, what's your point? MS research is doing research. They regularly publish in top conferences in many fields. At least in systems, they're on par with the top US universities in terms of output. Though, unfortunately, they're quite unique in this sense, I believe -- can't think of any other company that does this.
weinersmith
Do you even know what you're talking about? Microsoft Research is pretty much the most respected non-academic research institution in CS (at least in systems). Xerox PARC and Intel research are pretty much the only ones on the same level (though that's less and less true of PARC).
weinersmith
Hewlett Packard-Bell has a research lab? What are they researching, how many customers they can tick off with unreliable garbage products before the company implodes?
DJ 9xx Series: 80+% failure rate in five years
DJ 5xxx Series: Still no published drivers that work correctly with a remote queue; design problems; 100% malfunction rate
OJ K550: 60% failure rate out of the box, 80% after five years
LJ 42xx/43xx: design flaw in swing gear: 100% failure rate in five years
Can anyone name one Microsoft Research project that has significantly affected the computer industry?
Yes.
Microsoft's natural language work resulted in the grammar checker in Word, which really is parsing sentences, not just looking for common errors. Microsoft Research used to give out a program you could plug into Word which let you see the sentence diagrams.
Microsoft has for years been doing serious work in automated proof of correctness for programs. "Spec#", the proof system for C#, was a research result. Another effort in that area involved automated verification of Windows drivers to determine if they could crash the rest of the OS. That paid off. In Windows 7, every driver has to pass the static verifier before it gets signed. Verified drivers may not drive the device correctly, but they don't crash the rest of the OS. (Yes, there's a formal undecidability problem. In practice, the system can either provide a proof or a counterexample for 97% of drivers submitted. The remaining 3% are typically flaky anyway; if your kernel driver has formally undecidable semantics, it needs a rewrite.)
There's more, but that's enough for now. Microsoft really does have one of the very few pure research groups left in computer science.
Yet IBM does still patent a shitload of actual discoveries. In fact IBM's research department(which is BTW is not the same as R&D) does research not only in IT related areas - basic applied physics, medical research, energy, etc...