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The Memo That Spawned Microsoft Research

Posted by timothy on from the good-ideas dept.

An anonymous reader writes "In 1991, Microsoft executive Nathan Myhrvold wrote a 21-page memo to Bill Gates, laying out a plan to create what would become Microsoft Research. Here is the previously unpublished memo and some analysis, along with the original slides that Myhrvold used to pitch the idea to Microsoft's top brass. With the future of Microsoft now in question, it's interesting to see how forward-thinking the company was 20 years ago. It even foresaw how pitfalls in tech transfer, organizational structure, and product R&D could make it fall behind future competitors---who would turn out to be Google, Apple, and Amazon in search, mobile devices, and cloud computing."

4 of 148 comments (clear)

  1. and then he became a patent troll by alen · · Score: 4, Informative

    he started intellectual ventures some years later

  2. Microsoft research by jbolden · · Score: 4, Informative

    Microsoft research is doing some amazing things. Also there is a lot of content from the research group on Channel 9. Microsoft's problem is that their userbase is conservative. But as a result of their research they could at will turn on the tap and have tremendous innovations pouring out.

    For example Microsoft people (its open source but the contributors are mainly Microsoft) developed C-- which is a portable assembly language which has tail recursion, accurate garbage collection or efficient exception handling. I don't think anyone could follow how much this group does but from innovations in compilers, new systems for concurrency, new algorithms, computation biology.... it is frankly amazing. I only wish Microsoft was more aggressive in pushing their products to adopt more from their research team. Much as the slides talk about the problem Xerox had with Parc, Microsoft has the same problem.

    1. Re:Microsoft research by Bengie · · Score: 3, Informative

      Microsoft Research is the good side of Microsoft. They have done a lot of things, like a lot of GPU related features that everyone benefits from are because MS Research worked with GPU manufactures, other PHDs, and Kernel designers to create better scalable GPUs that interface better with all OSes. Most of their research is open, which also includes work on custom built 256core SMP systems that used fiber-optic IO channels, and worked with Intel and others on how to design OS Kernels and hardware that work well together. Because this research is open, it has helped Linux, BSD, and others.

      MS Research has a lot of great minds and they help bring together Software and Hardware and work as middle-men to help manufacturers on both sides.

    2. Re:Microsoft research by EvanED · · Score: 3, Informative

      Can you show some examples of Microsoft research?

      Pick any top-tier CS conference. They'll probably have something there.

      For example, OSDI '12 (MSR personnel on 5 papers, 2 of which all coauthors worked at MSR), PLDI 2012 (MSR personnel on 6 papers), SIGGRAPH 2013 (harder to sort through, but I count 16 papers with at least one MSR co-author), VLDB 2011 (8 research papers as well as several other things like demos, a keynote, an industrial paper, and a 10-year-retrospective best paper award), STOC 2013 (16 papers if I counted right!), etc.

      Seriously, I was not being choosy with those conferences -- the only choosy things I did was pick years for which there was an obvious page that listed the institutions with the authors instead of just the authors (e.g. VLDB 2013) because I'm lazy. If you pick a conference that covers a topic of interest, MSR has had something there. :-)