Microsoft Research is probably one of the most respected research organizations in the research/academic community. There is always a product focus in an industry lab and I am sure MS is looking very carefully at content distribution networks like bittorrent. But being a researcher myself (and not a MS researcher) I have seen that MSR is a relatively open organization - go to their website and you can download all their technical reports and snippets of code of the little and big projects these researchers indulge in.
Now lets be a little forthright here - go to the Google labs website and how much indepth knowledge about their search algorithms can you find there? Or for that matter Yahoo research labs.
After Bell labs downsized MSR has taken up a very important role in furthering research in the US, and the world (There is MSR Beijing, Cambridge and Bangalore).
So lets respect research as research - Avalanche is an idea. Presented at a research conference. Not a product. Not a protocol. Its an *IDEA*. 9 out of 10 research ideas never see the transformation into real products. But the 10th idea is more than enough to sustain research for ever and more.
Where did Google start? And who started it? At a stanford research lab, the idea of a couple of grad students living off a $15 per hour stipend.
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Microsoft Research is probably one of the most respected research organizations in the research/academic community. There is always a product focus in an industry lab and I am sure MS is looking very carefully at content distribution networks like bittorrent. But being a researcher myself (and not a MS researcher) I have seen that MSR is a relatively open organization - go to their website and you can download all their technical reports and snippets of code of the little and big projects these researchers indulge in. Now lets be a little forthright here - go to the Google labs website and how much indepth knowledge about their search algorithms can you find there? Or for that matter Yahoo research labs. After Bell labs downsized MSR has taken up a very important role in furthering research in the US, and the world (There is MSR Beijing, Cambridge and Bangalore). So lets respect research as research - Avalanche is an idea. Presented at a research conference. Not a product. Not a protocol. Its an *IDEA*. 9 out of 10 research ideas never see the transformation into real products. But the 10th idea is more than enough to sustain research for ever and more. Where did Google start? And who started it? At a stanford research lab, the idea of a couple of grad students living off a $15 per hour stipend.