Microsoft Exec Opens Up About Research Lab Closure, Layoffs

alphadogg writes It's been a bit over a month since Microsoft shuttered its Microsoft Research lab in Silicon Valley as part of the company's broader restructuring that will include 18,000 layoffs. This week, Harry Shum, Microsoft EVP of Technology & Research, posted what he termed an "open letter to the academic research community" on the company's research blog. In the post, Shum is suitably contrite about the painful job cut decisions that were made in closing the lab, which opened in 2001. He also stresses that Microsoft will continue to invest in and value "fundamental research".

Comments

Bull

[TWX]

He also stresses that Microsoft will continue to invest in and value "fundamental research".

That's a load of bull. Just about every company that's had significant research institutions and has closed them down has suffered long-term from that choice. Xerox, Bell, IBM, and several others in telecom/computing alone have done this and suffered the consequences.

Fundamental research is what drives long-term profit. Sure, it costs money. But it also produces patentable products that can revolutionize the market and allow the company to profit from patent licensing even when they aren't interested in the market that the patent would apply to. Get rid of the research and the company's products go stale over time, no new ideas, rehashing of existing ones to the point that someone with new innovation comes along and steals away all of the customers. Short-term it might make more profit, but long term it's like selling one's investments for cash.

This is a terrible mistake for Microsoft.

Re:Bull

[SeaFox]

Short-term it might make more profit, but long term it's like selling one's investments for cash.
This is a terrible mistake for Microsoft.

Yes, but not for the people running it.

By the time the brain drain has it's long term effects, the executives will have jumped away, in come cases into retirement, with their golden parachutes. It's only the long-term investors and loyal employees who will have to deal with how it ruins the company.

Re:Bull

[BarbaraHudson]

Microsoft got a $billion from Samsung last year in Android patents. Others are also paying royalties to Microsoft.

In other words, Microsoft is making more profit off Android than they are off their own phones.

Re:Bull

[timeOday]

It is very premature to excoriate Microsoft for discontinuing research. Yes they closed the Bay Area site, but Microsoft Research is headquartered in Redmond, along with Microsoft Corporate HQ. If anything, Microsoft has been knocked for pouring money into MS Research with little to show for it (although their patent portfolio may be the most profitable thing they have going in the mobile arena).

If Microsoft is flagging, I actually don't think it's lack of research, in their case. They are way out in front of every movement in industry (hence the patent fees), what they lack is the design and marketing to capitalize on it themselves.

Re:Bull

[steelfood]

Sorry, I do have to bring something up. One of Microsoft's most lucrative patents is for FAT32. One of the reasons they're making so much money off FAT32 patents is because some genius standardizing SD flash cards put in a requirement that all SD cards use FAT32 ("genius" may or may not be sarcastic). Thus anyone who wants to include a SD card reader, including microSD cards, must license the patents from Microsoft.

However, the tides may be changing after Alice vs. CLS. Those FAT32 patents may not be valid anymore. In which case, Microsoft is about to lose a fairly large revenue stream.

I don't disagree that they are still fairly research-heavy, and that it's a good thing. The problem I see is that their business side (marketing, sales, etc.) has a history killing all the cool stuff that's coming out of their engineering side (including research). This closure may be symptomatic of a continuance of that culture under the new CEO, or it may not. Without intricate knowledge of the internal politics at play (because it's Microsoft and there's always politics at play there), it's hard to say for certain either way.

I think a lot of the SVC people laid off...

[tlambert]

I think a lot of the SVC people laid off were people working on Microsoft Products for Apple. Mountain View, at the facility South of the I-101/I-85 interchange, near Moffett Field, were there to do work on Mac OS X products. I you look at the Microsoft job postings, you'll see that almost everyone in APEX is a continuing engineer, and that there are a small number of Objective-C and iOS openings that all appear to be concentrated on front-ending Office 365 on Mac OS X and iPhone, iPod, and iPad, rather than native applications.

I expect this is the non-announcement that Office 2014 for Apple products is going to be nothing more than a front-end wrapper for their subscription products. This somewhat makes sense, given that Apple has been pressuring them on productivity apps on their platforms, and that "good enough" is the enemy of "expensive". If you couple this with Mac OS X *never* having been a tier 1 platform for Office products (where's VB 5, VB.Net, Acces, etc. for Mac OS X?), it was never intended that Apple desktop systems be able to compete with Windows desktop systems in terms of being able to do the same vertical market development using ports from Windows vertical market development. It was an avoidance of cannibalizing the Windows market in that area.

Obviously, I could be wrong, but when working at Apple, I visited the Office developers there several times to deal with OS and kernel related issues; the only place they seem to be willing to hire Objective-C people seems to be Redmond or Bellevue, and it appears to be for things like Skype development, not office; the APEX jobs appear to be remaining in Mountain View at present, and greatly scaled back.