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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."
If the goal is to create a marketable product, it is DEVELOPMENT, not research.
Research is trying to find basic things that you can use to identify areas to roll into development.
Research SHOULD fail regularly ("fail" in this sense being "did not lead to areas to develop."). If it isn't failing regularly you aren't trying hard enough.
This is the key that too many businesses now-a-days miss.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Buzzword advertising.
Ponticac: "we build excitement" (bad brakes, shitty steering)
Ford: "Quality is job 1" (their work's cut out for them)
Chevy: "Like a rock" (damned thing won't start)
Why should the computer industry be any different? If you want to know the worst qualities of any product, look at what they advertise and you'll find it.
Free Martian Whores!
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.
IBM's strategy for patents is not for tech discoveries.
Most of them are for business processes. Totally unenforceable.
So why do they do it? It is the ultimate non-competition agreement.
It really only binds the guys who are on the patent so they don't go to another company and take the business process with them.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
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
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.
One of them does research and generates patents, one of them pimps ink and Intel hardware, and one of them makes the Zune. Not sure why they tried to include them all in the same article.