Head of MS Research On Special Projects, Google X and Win 9

Velcroman1 (1667895) writes "Microsoft Research finally earned some long-overdue headlines last week, when ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley reported on a 'Special Projects' group that would tackle disruptive technology and ultimately Google X. Peter Lee, head of the division and its 1,100 researchers, told Digital Trends he's not frustrated by all of that glowing press for Google's researchers and the lack of attention for MSR. 'Frustrating is not quite the right word,' Lee said, in an interview ahead of the ribbon-cutting ceremony for MSR's New York City office. 'I like Google X. The people there are good friends of mine. Astro [Teller, "Captain of Moonshots" with Google X] took classes from me at Carnegie Mellon, he's a great guy doing great stuff. But the missions are different. We want to make things better and ship them. That will always be primary for us. It will be secondary for them.'"

Comments

Special Projects?

[TechyImmigrant]

Does the author know that "Special Projects" is corporate speak for "Taken off of primary responsibilities prior to being fired".

Is this the team that...

[oic0]

Is this the same team that killed the start button and moves all the options and settings around in a seemingly random manner for every version change of everything? At work users ask me "whats different in office 2013 vs the 2010 I was using?". They moved crap around so you have to find it again and they made it look a little different.

Re:Is this the team that...

[TheRaven64]

How on earth did this get moderated insightful? MSR is not the Microsoft UI group, it is a well respected research organisation. If you actually want to know what they're working on, pick up the proceedings of pretty much any top tier computer science conference and you'll see a couple of papers from them.

Re:Is this the team that...

[Richy_T]

Meh, it's not like Netscape/Firefox and Thunderbird haven't had their fair share of moving things around. And what's with Gimp splitting "Save As" out to "Save As" and "Export" so I have the extra step of having to cancel a useless dialog every time I want to save a png?

finally earned some long-overdue headlines???

[QuietLagoon]

And those headlines were about vaporware? Decades go by and Microsoft never changes, ~~trying to compare Microsoft vaporware against the shipping products of competitors.....~~

But they're going to put Office in the CLOUD!

[raymorris]

The article says they are working on innovative new things, like making your desktop rely on the cloud. That's amazing.

A bit condescending

[jgotts]

A bit condescending of an attitude for someone that is working at Microsoft, a company that is clearly on the wane. People don't go to Microsoft to create anything great. They go there for a stable income for their family and mortgage.

Re: A bit condescending

[maccodemonkey]

Microsoft has it's supporters. Smart people who are big fans of the company and want to see them win.

And I say that as an Apple supporter. Maybe that's how I know these people exist.

It's not necessarily the rule, but I know a lot of people raised during the tail end of the 90s who are huge Microsoft fans. In those days Apple was dying and Linux was non existent. Microsoft was helping create cell phones, computers, cars, pocket computers, and watches.

To quite a few in that generation, they remember Microsoft as the true innovator behind the PC revolution. To the rest of us? Not so much.

Re:A bit condescending

[squiggleslash]

I think Microsoft has done some great things, it's just by the time they get to market there are problems.

Windows 8 has a superb tablet UI. If it had been left at that, with the tablet UI version of the OS shipped on tablets, and an unbroken desktop version shipped for desktops; or a core MVC API been implemented making it easy for developers to target both desktops and tablets acknowledging the completely different UIs and expected workflows then they did, we'd all be using it and Apple would be back in decline. Unfortunately...

I feel like they're a much more inventive, innovative, company than they were 15 years ago. It's just they have some awful upper management that tends to cripple projects before they see the sunlight.

Re:A bit condescending

[cusco]

This. I've worked on the MS campus quite a few times over the years and there are a lot of brilliant, dedicated people who work there. We didn't have a dedicated area to work in so generally set up shop in the common areas, and ended up overhearing a **LOT** of complaints about incompetent and clueless management. Dilbert-level stupid shit, guys who would give the PHB and Catbert a run for their money. Not to mention Ballmer's insane annual review process, which had team members volunteering to rotate the 'failing' rating among them to keep the team from being destroyed.

Once again, the MBA Disease strikes deeply at US businesses.

Re:A bit condescending

[WheezyJoe]

Microsoft "technology" is actually pretty good. Their products largely do exactly what they promise, and the company hires and continues to hire out of the best and brightest tech talent pool.

It's their marketing that causes so much trouble, anger and teeth-gnashing. Their marketing people are infamously out of touch, habitually rely on (dubious) focus groups, but they're in charge and they consistently end up compromising their products with gimmicks and irritants intended to attract revenue for not-much-new. Most all of which fall flat, as consumers refuse the bait and stick with old releases that get the job done (e.g., Office 2003).

I, for one, would happily pay for a new release of Windows and Office (and I know plenty of businesses that would do the same) if they simply ran and looked better; not different, better. Faster, more reliable, easier deployment, bugs squashed, new capabilities reflecting changes in technology... perhaps some new "killer feature". Instead, they deliver "different": no new capabilities, but requires new training, and new pricing schemes. Who needs that?

I can't wait!

[paiute]

We want to make things better and ship them.

This is great! When did this new department start up?

Re:I can't wait!

[TheRaven64]

That sounded odd to me too. MSR is really great at making things better, and MS is really good at completely ignoring everything MSR does when it comes to actually shipping products. It's fairly common to see research from MSR show up in open source projects years before MS notices it and incorporates it into a product. Apparently they've been trying to improve this for the last few years, but it's quite difficult to get researchers involved in technology transfer to the rest of the organisation without damaging their ability to do independent blue-sky research. They have had a few successes (F# came from MSR and seems to be gaining popularity), but not a huge number.

Re:I can't wait!

[gtall]

I ride both side of that fence. The problem for researchers is that in order to solve a research problem, you need to knock it down to something quite small that you can get some mathematical modeling behind it and prove its properties. To solve an engineering problem, you need to corral several different technologies and get them all to work together. There are very few small engineering problems in the sense of generating new products.

You might think to model the engineering problems in mathematics. The problem: scale. These are large problems with many very different parts. To model something that big in mathematics is asking more than humans can deliver because it requires you make several different areas of math work together when you have little theory for their interconnections. And any one engineering problem has several different models depending upon which aspect you are concentrating upon.

Research problems might start as some aspect of an engineering problem, but you won't get much insight from the engineers who are not trained in abstract general methods. It frequently happens in mathematics that to solve a difficult problem, you need to enlarge its scope or generality even though it will still only cover a small slice of behavior. Engineers cannot even talk to you in your language because mathematics to them was done by long dead gods who brought the mathematics down from the mountain and none may change them.

Engineering problems also have many intricacies, enough that makes their mathematics expressions awkward at best. To learn what those are, you need to do engineering. Engineering cannot be taught in that sense, you cannot sit down with your books and crank out a design. It takes a lot of prior experience. And engineers must also produce a product that can be produced efficiently. It won't do to have just any solution because it has some internal beauty like mathematics. It needs to be capable of reproduction and efficient reproduction at that. This notion isn't something readily expressible in mathematics.

Stop killing promising projects then.

[andydread]

FTFS

a 'Special Projects' group that would tackle disruptive technology

"But the missions are different. We want to make things better and ship them. That will always be primary for us. It will be secondary for them."

Well you should have fixed and released the Courier dual-screen tablet instead of cancelling it if you wanted to introduce disruptive tech no?

Re:Stop killing promising projects then.

[ourlovecanlastforeve]

They did ship it, except it was called Surface Pro.

And it didn't have two screens, it had one double density screen.

I'm still confused about why they cannibalized their giant table-screen name for a new product, though.

Well, ship them then.

[the_other_chewey]

"We want to make things better and ship them." – That's an interesting quote.

Over the last decades, I've seen some really amazing demos of things being worked
on at MSR. Has any of it ever shipped? As a real product, I mean, not as some half
done and by now abandoned proof of concept?

Re:Well, ship them then.

[Anonymous Coward]

MSR have been responsible for a lot of advancements in graphics technologies (and not just in their own products). They have also done a heap around voice recognition and natural language. Then you have all the visual studio stuff they have contributed. I am sure if you go to the MSR website you will find a ton more, those are just the areas I am personally aware of.

Re:Well, ship them then.

[mrxak]

I've spent some time talking to guys who work at MSR. I believe they do want to make things better. I also believe they want to ship them. What I don't believe is MS management wants to make things better or ship anything that MSR comes up with.

Maybe with the new CEO, things will change. Maybe that's just wishful thinking on the part of the MSR guys.

Re:Well, ship them then.

[gtall]

The guy was saying "research" when he meant "development". I doubt much development gets done at MSR beyond proof of concept. MS appears to lack an internal structure to do development starting at the output of MSR. And that might be due to marketing being too big for MS.

If you think about it, marketing is naturally antagonistic to new ideas. They spend years developing markets for products. Being asked to downplay those markets and their sunk costs for something new which has no track record of producing bonuses for the serfs manning the marketing barricades is asking them to cut their own pay. Why would they do that? There is no incentive. It won't do for management to say, but this is going to be big and allow us to compete against Apple in this market.

Take fondleslabs. MS wants this new market. However, their marketing has just spent the last few decades selling customers on desk and laptops and their souls to Satan. Why should they get behind something that will eat their bonuses? So MS forces through something. The marketers probably figured that if fondleslabs were going to be promoted, then their interface had to look something like desk and laptops. No one would put desktop UI on a fondle, so they went the other way...and result was Windows 8.

Research had nothing to do with it.

Re:Question...

[vux984]

Yeah, because nobody's ever had a distro upgrade fail on them ever in the history of linux. Pinhead.

Microsoft Research wants to ship things?

[Namarrgon]

News to me.

Well..

[jon3k]

They have to figure out some way to convince you to buy the new one. That way they can say, well we deprecated the old version so you can't use that anymore (no patches or support) but hey! dont worry! we changed the graphics and moved some buttons around!

Microsoft knows they can't survive by trying to sell you a BETTER Office Suite. Their only option is to move it to the cloud and convince you to pay every month for access.

Re:Well..

[ourlovecanlastforeve]

Yes, the "cloud" is the best thing that ever happened to software companies. Adobe came up with the original concept of taking away software that you install on your own computer and making you run it on their servers instead. This prevents people from finding a version of their product that serves their needs and never upgrading. Now instead of trying to force you to upgrade by introducing critical bugs that interrupt your workflow (I've seen it done in person, not at Adobe but at other companies) they simply shut off access to your data if you stop paying them. "That's a nice rendering. Be a shame if you were to... lose access to it. Oh by the way, your monthly tithe is due."

Re:Well..

[spacepimp]

They actually could survive by selling a better office suite. The fact is the changes made to their software aren't widely regarded as better. They'd sell a better OS if it was genuinely and provably simpler, faster more secure : better. The problem is the licensing the ham fisted lock in attempts and newer closed formats top prevent departing: I am looking at you Sharepoint!

Transformative.

[Anonymous Coward]

You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means.

transform
verb [ with obj. ]
1: make a marked change in the form, nature, or appearance of

98, XP, and 7 were not transformative. Hell, they were all just minor changes from their prior releases:

98 = 95 with IE stuck on
XP = 2000 with Luna stuck on
7 = Vista with a haircut

If anything, the versions you're calling shit - even though I agree they were shit - were much more transformational:

95 = Transformational jump from 3.x.
(Me was shit and pointless, yes. Utterly a stopgap between 98 and XP, because 2000 was never pushed as a consumer release.)
Vista = Transformative, but a mess. By the time 7 was released, the UAC and signed driver mess has been cleaned up.

If anything, 2000 (which you didn't actually mention) took NT and made it consumer/mainstream compatible with plug and play, USB, et al. (As mentioned above, XP was just this with the grotesque Luna. Of course, mentioning 2000 breaks your 'every other version of Windows is good' statement.