I really don't want to turn this into a Microsoft praise fest but similar to IBM, they've been a net-zero since about Ballmer era, and a net-positive since Saty

I really don't want to turn this into a Microsoft praise fest but similar to IBM, they've been a net-zero since about Ballmer era, and a net-positive since Satya took over. All of that Microsoft Research papers which silently go unnoticed in Silicon Valley (or published under the MSR, INRIA // MSR, Cambridge name and people don't do the math) but here's a few things MS has been responsible for a: Asynchrony -- the async / await paradigm - if you use it in JavaScript it came from C#, which came from a MSR paper (or maybe a Microsoft Languages whitepaper.) A lot of the semantics took a very long time by very smart people to work out the execution logistics, and we get to reap the benefits. b: Haskell -- paying SPJ's salary so he can work on Haskell full-time as a MSR Cambridge employee and implement a whole bevy of things like STM[1], the popularization of pure functions (immutable.js users, as well as CLJS) c: Clojure -- if you use Clojure's STM, borrowed from work funded by Microsoft. For me, it's used every day in Datomic. d: Verifiability -- a mind-blowingly large amount of formal verification stuff - ranging from the first formally verified OS + integrated language, to things like F* e: Z3 -- no need to explain this if you're in any sort of reverse-engineering I'm sure your life has been made significantly easier since MS released this into the public domain f: CoreCLR + the JS engine + their crossplatform 100% free IDE + opening up VS Community (which is about as as VS Professional) g: Probably most importantly -- Well, just go here. http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/groups/rise/default.aspx http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/groups/rise/default.aspx. Basically 1 out of 4 things in there is already, or will be imminently, used by 'mainstream' languages after it moves out of the "only publishing grad students who eagerly wait for POPL every year" zone. [1] I know STM comes from that '88 paper. I've read it. SPJ did too and brought it into the mainstream, so I give him credit. IBM and Microsoft (and, presumably GoogleX but they havent been publishing) are one of the few corporations I'm aware of that dedicate more than a few resources to research-for-the-sake-of-research (n.b. MS has been doing this silently since 1991, and IIRC employ more than 100 staff just to produce work to the field of computer science further.)